On March 14

On this day in ...
... 1916, following years of lobbying not only by the city-based Women's Christian Temperance Union and the rural-based Women’s Grain Growers’ Association (founded by Violet McNaughton (right)), but also by the wife of the province's top official, Saskatchewan granted women the right to vote and to run for elected office. The move came a couple months after a similar grant in the neighboring Canadian province of Manitoba.
... 1728, a 15 year old named Jean-Jacques Rousseau fled his native city of Geneva for the Annecy, France, home of Françoise-Louise de Warens (left), 28, who herself had emigrated from Switzerland. The woman known as Mme de Warens already had ended her teenage marriage by annulment. She would become both the tutor and the lover of Rousseau, whose legacy of political philosophy remains evident in concepts such as the "social contract" and the "general will."

(Prior March 14 posts are here and here.)

On September 22, ...

... 1927 (80 years ago today), Britain's "colonial government declared the abolishment of slavery in Sierra Leone," where for a century the capital, Freetown, had been a hub for British anti-slave-trading activities. (For an analysis of how the recent, relatively trouble-free election and inauguration of Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma may augur a "splash of good news" about Africa, see here.)
... 1868, Louise Crummy McKinney (right) was born in Frankville, Ontario. Trained as a teacher, in 1903 she became a Canada-based organizer of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Elected to the Albert legislature in 1917, she became the 1st woman legislator in the British Empire. She took part in an appeal to the Privy Council through which women won the right to become Senators. McKinney died in Claresholm, Alberta, in 1931. "Her gravestone reads only 'Mother.'"