On March 9

On this day in ...
... 1951 (60 years ago today), Helen Zille (right) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to parents who'd fled Nazi Germany. Formerly mayor of Cape Town, since 2009 she's been the Premier of the Western Cape and leader of the Democratic Alliance political party. Before entering the political arena, Zille was a journalist and anti-apartheid activist, noted for exposing the apartheid regime's coverup of the death of Steve Biko in police custody.

(Prior March 9 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On February 28

On this day in ...
... 1879, Hortense Allart de Méritens (right) died in Montlhéry, France, 77 years after she'd been born in Milan, Italy. (image credit) Also known by her nom de plume, Prudence de Saman L'Esbatx, Allart was a French feminist writer who spoke out in favor of free love and women's rights and contributed to La Gazette des femmes, or Women's Daily, a periodical whose contributors also included a colleague of Allart, the Frenchwoman who wrote novels under the pseudonym George Sand. Philosophical inquiries by Allart -- the study of this 1998 biography by Helynne Hollstein Hansen -- included publication in 1857 of Novum organum ou sainteté philosophique, which contended that new scientific discoveries proved the existence of a higher power. Among Allart's many lovers was diplomat François-René de Chateaubriand, who inspired not only French Romantic literature, but also the beefy dish popular to this day.

(Prior February 28 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'I have never felt as at peace and as safe as I did during those days in Tahrir. There was a sense of coexistence that overcame all of the problems that usually happen - whether religious or gender based.'

-- Mona Seif (above left), a 24-year-old researcher who helped organize demonstrations in Cairo that led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts.) Seif was quoted in an Al Jazeera English article and video entitled "Women of the revolution" by Fatma Naib (right). The item appeared amid news of continuing political unrest -- and some violent crackdowns against same -- in countries including Algeria, Bahrain, Iran, Libya, Morocco, and Yemen.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Nearby were framed photos of her idols: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. These days, though, Karman is most inspired by her peers. 'Look at Egypt,' she said with pride. 'We will win.'

-- Reporter Sudarsan Raghavan, in yesterday's Washington Post profile of Tawakkol Karman (right). The head of an organization called Women Journalists Without Chains, she's using the internet to push for change in her native country of Yemen, site of unrest for the last several days. Karman's received death threats, been attacked by a mob, and detained by police for 38 hours. (photo credit)

North African women's power?

'How many women are there?'

The question, heard on my commuter train yesterday, spoke volumes.
The question referred to this week's anti-government protests in Egypt. But it applied to all the ferment throughout North Africa and the Middle East this young but remarkable new year.
Mass demonstrations in Egypt, which yesterday prompted 30-plus-year-President Hosni Mubarak to attempt an LBJ.
Mass demonstrations as well, as IntLawGrrl Karima Bennoune has posted, in Algeria and Tunisia. Still more in Yemen and Sudan. Plans are on for Syria this weekend.
Then too there was yesterday's trying-to-get-in-front-of-events dismissal of the Cabinet of Jordan, another site of demonstrations, by its king.
The gender dynamics in countries like these are fraught. For that reason, a marker of the true democratic potential of these events is inherent in the commuter's question quoted above. Rephrased, it is:

Are women taking part, and if so, to what extent?

As to the 1st part of the question, it seems the answer is "yes."
Although most photos shows seas of men, within can be found islands of women. Women, young and old, with and without head coverings. (In addition to photos accompanying this post, see, e.g., here and here.) Other women reporting on the scene, via all the channels of social networking about which Hope Lewis posted earlier this week. (Some are local women. Some -- like Sonia Verma, tweeting for Toronto's Globe and Mail (far right), and Harriet Sherwood, tweeting for London's Guardian (near right) -- are not.)
As to the 2d part of the question?

How extensive is women's participation, now and for the long term?

The answer awaits further events. In the meantime, IntLawGrrls welcome readers' realtime comments and reports.

(Clockwise from top left: Suhaib Salem/Reuters photo of women at demonstration in Egypt appeared in a photo array yesterday at The New York Times' site; credit for Reuters/Muhammad Hamed photo of Jan. 28 demonstration in Amman, Jordan; credit for Jan. 30 BBC image of Sudan protest; credit for Jan. 15 cover photo from the Paris daily Libération, depicting a protest in Tunisia; credit for Hani Mohammed/AP photo of students chanting at Jan. 29 Yemen protest)

On December 25

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), a daughter, Lila, was born into a Presbyterian cleric's family in Virden, Manitoba, Canada. The family moved to the midwestern United States, where she grew up. In 1917 she earned a degree from the University of Oregon and became a social worker. A few years later she married a book salesman, and together they founded the Reader's Digest. An active editor, Lila Bell Acheson Wallace (right) owned 48% of the magazine. The couple received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1972. She also served as a director of the New York Central Railroad from 1954 to 1959 -- the 1st woman to serve as a railway director in the United States. She won a 1992 National Medal for her arts patronage. When she died in New York in 1984, her estate was valued at half a billion dollars. (credit for portrait of Wallace by Marguerite Stuber Pearson)

(Prior December 25 posts are here, here, and here.)

On November 18

On this day in ....
... 1870 (140 years ago today), Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was born near Woodstock, a small town northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. (photo credit) She grew up without much schooling, married at 18, and lost her husband when mental illness required his hospitalization. The stress led her to a "nervous collapse"; while recovering she began writing, and became a noted journalist of her time. She wrote: for the New Orleans Daily Picayune under the pseudonym Dorothy Dix, where she wrote about women's issues; for the New York Journal, where she covered Carrie Nation's temperance movement and became active in women's suffrage campaigns; and as a syndicated advice columnist based in New Orleans. She died in that city in 1951. Among her more notable quotes:

Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel.

(Prior November 18 posts are here, here, and here.)

On November 10

On this day in ...

... 1991, Montserrat Roig (right) died, 45 years after she'd been born in Barcelona, Spain, to a father who was a writer and a mother who was a feminist activist. Roig herself became a writer and journalist, known for her support of Catalan culture and women's rights.

(Prior November 10 posts are here, here, and here.)

Khadr to settle?

Emanating from Guantánamo yesterday:
News stories reporting rumors that the military commissions case of United States of America v. Omar Ahmed Khadr is about to end with a plea bargain.
If not, trial is set to begin later this morning in a GTMO courtroom.
Confirming rumors reported by the Los Angeles Times' Carol J. Williams on Saturday, Reuters' Jane Sutton speculated on a reputed agreement by which Khadr, now 24 (above right), would serve "one more year at Guantanamo, followed by seven years in his native Canada." (image credit) Sutton added that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had talked Sunday with her counterpart in Canada, which would have to approve any such deal.
Later on Sunday, Michelle Shepard of the Toronto Star, author of a book on the case, acknowledged such speculation, but stressed the statement by "Khadr’s Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney" that "there was no deal, 'as of this moment.'" Shepard thus continued with a preview of the trial, should it occur.
The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg, meanwhile, led with concern that any Khadr deal might remain secret (as has that of another detainee). Such secrecy would challenge "[t]he Obama administration's quest to show that military commissions can be as transparent and fair as other U.S. courts," Rosenberg reported.
(Indeed, as posted in the update above, this morning Khadr did plead. The agreement was not released, but is believed to provide for the sentence described in this post.)
As blogreaders well know from our prior posts, Khadr was 15 (above, middle) when seized by U.S. military personnel during a firefight in Afghanistan. He has spent 1/3 of his life in American custody. As detailed in his Department of Defense case file, Khadr now faces trial on charges of, inter alia, throwing a grenade that killed a member of the U.S. special forces during the firefight.
At the preliminary hearing that I attended in December 2008, defense lawyers indicated that proof of the charges at trial may prove difficult. From the beginning, however, proceedings have focused on 2 other aspects of the case:
► 1st, what Khadr suffered, including treatment as a "human mop."
► 2d, that if the acts alleged in fact occurred, Khadr was a child soldier. That fact alone ought to preclude prosecution and punishment, many have argued -- among them our colleague David M. Crane, former Chief Prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The plea agreement bruited in yesterday's media would seem to take neither aspect into account.
Assuming speculation is correct, Khadr would not see release until after having served 16 years in custody -- a sentence scarcely seeming to incorporate much mitigation on account of detention conditions or any other reason.
The reputed deal departs markedly from international law with regard to child soldiers.
Consider the 2000 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. In Article 6(3) states parties agree to

take all feasible measures to ensure that persons within their jurisdiction recruited or used in hostilities contrary to the present Protocol are demobilized or otherwise released from service. States Parties shall, when necessary, accord to such persons all appropriate assistance for their physical and psychological recovery and their social reintegration.

Article 7(1) continues in like vein:

States Parties shall cooperate in the implementation of the present Protocol, including in the prevention of any activity contrary thereto and in the rehabilitation and social reintegration of persons who are victims of acts contrary thereto, including through technical cooperation and financial assistance. Such assistance and cooperation will be undertaken in consultation with the States Parties concerned and the relevant international organizations.

The treaty's view that the children are "victims" and deserving of "rehabilitation and social reintegration," as well as "physical and psychological recovery," is obviously at odds with a prosecution and punishment strategy with regard to these same children.
It is at odds, then, with the reported disposition of Khadr.
Canada became a full state party to the protocol in July 2000; the United States, in December 2002. The countries' statements at ratification said nothing to undercut the force of the articles quoted -- which, as indicated in this report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, jibe with other treaties.
Wonder whether either state will address this discrepancy.

On October 11

On this day in ...
... 1915 (95 years ago today), "the pioneer Woman Suffragist of the great Northwest," Abigail Scott Duniway (left) died in Oregon 80 years after her birth on a farm in central Illinois. Her family moved West when she was a teenager; her mother and a brother died on the wagon trail journey. (photo credit) She married; when her husband became disabled, she began supporting the family, 1st through schoolteaching, then as a storekeeper. Eventually she moved to Portland and founded a weekly newspaper devoted to women's rights. She also published books, and was a vice president of the National Women's Suffrage Association. In part because of her efforts, in 1912 Oregon became the 7th state in the Union to extend suffrage to women; she became the 1st to register to vote in her county.

(Prior October 11 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 15

On this day in ...
... 2009, Natalya Estemirova (right), a 51-year-old journalist and human rights advocate whose documentation had made her "a central source of information on abuses in Chechnya," was found dead of gunshot wounds near a highway in Ingushetia, 50 miles from her home in the Chechen capital city of Grozny, from which she'd been kidnapped hours earlier. Estemirova had worked since 1999 for the human rights group Memorial. She was a co-recipient of the 2005 Robert Schuman Medal, awarded on account of her human rights work by a group within the European Parliament. In the years leading up to the incident, reported The New York Times,

Estemirova focused on kidnappings that she believed had been carried out under the authority of the Chechen president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, who has enjoyed unwavering public support from the Kremlin.

The Times said this past February that investigators believed they knew the shooter, "but have been unable to arrest the suspect."

(Prior July 15 posts are here, here, and here.)

On May 16

On this day in ...
... 1882 (or, perhaps, 1880), a daughter, Elizabeth Anne, was born in England to American parents. Educated in Ohio, she married an engineer/importer, whom she accompanied on many overseas trips. Eventually she "timidly" asked a New York Times editor whether she might send dispatches during a 1921 trip; her consequent reports got Anne O'Hare McCormick a job:

She ... impressed him, particularly with her judgment of Mussolini, when she wrote: 'Italy is hearing the master's voice.' Other correspondents were then giving him the brush-off as a posturing lout. She was hired.

(A 1921 dispatch on Italy by her is here.) Thus was launched a journalism career in which O'Hare McCormick (above right) (credit) wrote about leading world events and became, in 1936, the 1st woman on The Times' editorial board. She was a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and a U.S. delegate to the 1946 and 1948 UNESCO conferences. O'Hare McCormick died in New York in 1954, at age 72.

(Prior May 16 posts are here, here, and here)

On April 16

On this day in ...

... 1912, Harriet Quimby became the 1st woman to fly solo across the English Channel. Just a year earlier, she'd become the 1st woman to take flying lessons and obtain a pilot's license, having taken a fancy to aviation while a New York-based reporter for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly. Clad in the signature plum-colored costume at right, she took to the exhibition circuit, and continued to write of her airborne adventures. On this morning, inclement weather led Quimby to land on a beach rather than in a field as planned. She wrote of the children, women, and men who gathered 'round her on this day:

'They were chattering in French, of which I comprehended sufficient to discover that they knew I had crossed the channel. These humble fisherfolk knew what had happened. They were congratulating themselves that the first woman to cross in an aeroplane bad landed on their fishing beach.'

Quimby would die in a crash landing in Boston Harbor on July 1 of this same year.

(Prior April 16 posts are here, here, and here)

On April 5

On this day in ...
... 1904, Frances Power Cobbe (right) died in Hengwrt, Wales, 81 years after her birth at Newbridge House, the County Dublin estate of her "prominent" Anglo-Irish family, which "included no fewer than five archbishops" of the Anglican church. She herself became "one of the most influential figures in the British Unitarian movement of her day." In her mid-30s Cobbe began a 3-1/2-decade career as a teacher at a Bristol, England, school, founded by Mary Carpenter to educated "girls released from prison, inmates of work houses, prostitutes, and other unfortunates." An important feminist writer and suffragist, Cobbe is perhaps best known today for her campaigns against animal cruelty. Among the groups she founded was the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, still in operation via the acronym BUAV, 111 years later.

(Prior April 5 posts are here, here, and here)

On March 4

On this day in ...
... 1903, a daughter, Carrie, was born to James and Georgina Ashe Prevoe in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Nineteen years after her wedding, Carrie M. Best (left) founded the 1st black-owned newspaper in the province, called The Clarion -- about the same time, in the 1940s, that she and her son were arrested for sitting in at a whites-only section of a movie theater. Soon after she founded a radio show which ran for a dozen years; thereafter, she wrote a column entitled "Human Rights." Her "efforts as a writer and human rights activist" included: one tribute to Harriet Tubman, foremother of IntLawGrrl Rebecca Bratspies; another to Sojourner Truth; and testimony to a commission of inquiry into a wrongful conviction. Best died in 2001, a few years shy of her 100th birthday.

(Prior March 4 posts are here, here, and here)

On January 25

On this day in ...
... 1890 (120 years ago today), Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who as a journalist used the name Nellie Bly, "returned to New York in triumph," 72 days after beginning a global journey inspired by Jules Verne's book Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). She'd begun her trek in New Jersey, then went to Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East, all the while cabling her adventures to New York World readers back in the United States. (image credit) Bly's news writing career went beyond this famous feat, however; among other things, she was an "outspoken critic of the death penalty."

(Prior January 25 posts are here and here.)

On January 2

On this day in...
... 2000 (5 years ago today), Ana María Martínez Sagi died. Born in 1907 in Barcelona, Spain, she was one of the most important journalists and poets of Spain's Republican period, writing not only about politicians but also beggars and prostituted women. (credit for photo of cover of new French book about her) Martínez Sagi established a program to help Barcelona's working women learn to read and write, and she wrote frequently on the issue of women's suffrage, then controversial given that

many progressives, including some feminists, feared that women would vote according to the orders of their husbands or of the church.

She also was an athlete, accomplished in the javelin, tennis, and skiing, and was the 1st woman director of a Spanish fútbol club. Exiled during and after Spain's Civil War, she took part in the resistance while living in France, and taught university French while living in the United States. After the 1975 death of Gen. Francisco Franco, she returned home, where she lived quietly until her own passing.

(Prior January 2 posts are here and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

The early 1970s was a limiting time for women, but it was also, perhaps, a hopeful time. There was definitely a feeling in the air that women’s lives were changing in a positive way. There was a sense that everything was possible, that life for women was getting better, that if things hadn’t yet come together as well as they should have, they inevitably would. Down the line. Like, today.
Life for women has not come together.

-- The New York Times' Judith Warner (above left), in "When We’re Equal, We’ll Be Happy," an excellent consideration of the "unhappy" state of the modern American woman and an entrée to related works of interest, including A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, a just-released report by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, edited by Heather Boushey and Ann O'Leary. (Also promising, though not mentioned by Warner: Gail Collins' new book When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women From 1960 to the Present, reviewed here. And see a related op-ed, in today's NYT, here.)

(credit for photo by Jean-Louis Atlan; hat tip to Evelyn A. Lewis)

Molly Ivins, foremother

(Thanks to guest blogger Susan A. Bandes for her guest post and this this tribute to our newest foremother)

I would like to dedicate my guest contribution to the newspaper columnist Molly Ivins (right), who, as IntLawGrrls earlier posted, died from breast cancer in January 2007 at the age of 62. Ivins grew up in Houston. She earned a master’s degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her first newspaper jobs were at The Houston Chronicle and The Minneapolis Tribune, now The Star Tribune. In 1970, she became co-editor of The Texas Observer. In 1976, her writing landed her a job at The New York Times. In The Times' newsroom she wore blue jeans, went barefoot,and brought her expletive-named dog. Ivins' syndicated column, published in about 350 newspapers, derided those whom she thought acted too big for their britches. Her New York Times obituary said:

She was rowdy and profane, but she could filet her opponents with droll precision.

She herself said to People magazine:

'There are two kinds of humor. One kind that makes us chuckle about our foibles and our shared humanity -- like what Garrison Keillor does. The other kind holds people up to public contempt and ridicule -- that's what I do. Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.'

Her focus was Texas, a state she labeled “reactionary, cantankerous and hilarious,” run by legislatures who were “reporter heaven.”
Ivins wrote much about one of Texas' most famous political families, the Bushes. She and journalist Lou Dubose wrote two best-selling books: Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (2000) and Bushwhacked: Life in George Bush's America (2003). When she died, her subject issued a statement that said he “respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase.” The then-President added:

'Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed.'

On September 18

On this day in ...
... 1861, Ella Cora Hind (right) was born in Toronto, Canada. She eventually moved to Winnipeg, where she tried to get a job at the Free Press; turned away, she worked as a stenographer and continued to submit articles for publication. In 1901 she became the newspaper's agricultural editor "and an expert on the western Canadian wheat crop yield." Canada's "first western female journalist," she was elected President of the Canadian Women's Press Club in 1904. She was a women's suffragist and temperance advocate, and took part in a famous Mock Parliament in 1914 in Winnipeg, during which delegates "defeated a motion to give the vote to men." Hind published Seeing for Myself (1937), a memoir of her round-the-world study of agriculture. A Time magazine obituary when she died in 1942, at ag 81:

Those who saw Cora Hind on her tours through the wheat never forgot her. A sturdy, schoolmarmish spinster, she wore high leather boots, a cowgirl skirt, flat-crowned sombrero, and a beaded buckskin coat which hung to her knees. This getup was discarded in her later years in favor of ill-fitting riding breeches, shirt and high boots. She carried rubber hip boots in case of rain.

(Prior September 18 posts are here and here.)