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 October 28

On this day in ...
... 1919 (90 years ago today), Congress paved the way for Prohibition by passing the Volstead Act. The statute authorized enforcement of the 18th Amendment, which would take effect in 9 months and ban the U.S. sale, manufacture, or transport of alcoholic beverages -- that is, until its repeal in 1933. This Library of Congress site notes linkages between temperance and suffrage movements. The 1919 sheet music illustration at right (credit) depicts a reason for that linkage: drinking was condemned as a scourge on family life.

(Prior October 28 posts are here and here.)

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.)

On June 7

On this day in ...

... 1892, Wyoming alternate delegates Theresa A. Jenkins and Cora Carleton attended the GOP National Convention, marking the 1st time women held an official position at the convention of either major political party. The convention also featured a speech by attorney and temperance advocate J. Ellen Foster (right), President of the Women's National Republican Association, an Iowa-born political operative who "masterminded the Republican vote-getting operation in parts of New York City." (photo credit) Two years earlier, Foster and her contemporaries had been featured in Women Lawyers in the United States, an article published by attorney Lelia J. Robinson in the 1st iteration of The Green Bag, a U.S. law journal that was revived several years ago.

... 1905, Sweden's Parliament unanimously declared the dissolution of the union with Norway that had been in effect since the conclusion in 1814 of the Convention of Moss. The dissolution would become mutual in October, when each country became an independent kingdom. (credit for image of diplomatic flag of Sweden-Norway union)

(Prior June 7 posts are here and here.)

On March 21

On this day in ...
... 1857, Alice Henry (left) was born in Melbourne, Australia, to parents who had emigrated from Scotland. Following a brief stint as a schoolteacher she began writing features for the Melbourne Argus and its magazine, the Australian, a job she held for neatly 20 years. Henry became active in politics, opposing imperialism and lecturing on women's rights, temperance, and labor rights. She went to England in 1905 and the United States in 1906. In Chicago she became the office secretary of the local Women's Trade Union League and was active in Progressive movement. She wrote, edited, or published a number of journals and books, all relating to women and the labor movement. Henry died in 1943 in Melbourne, having returned to her birthplace a decade earlier.

... 1960, the BBC reported, "More than 50 black people were killed when police opened fire on a 'peaceful' protest in the South African township of Sharpeville." The report continued: "Eye-witnesses said men, women and children fled 'like rabbits' as up to 300 officers began randomly shooting into a 5,000-strong crowd outside the municipal offices in Sharpeville," located southest of Johannesburg. In all, 69 persons were killed and 180 wounded. Soon after the apartheid government: banned many public meetings; banned the opposition Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress; and declared a state of emergency. "No police officer involved in the massacre was ever convicted." Today IntLawGrrl Amy Senier considers Sharpeville's legacy in her post above.

(Prior March 21 posts are here and here.)

On February 19

On this day in ...
... 1881, to give effect to an amendment to the state constitution the previous year, legislators made Kansas the 1st state in the Union to outlaw alcoholic beverages. Among those at the forefront of this Kansas temperance movement was the hatchet-wielding activist Carrie Nation (left).
... 1897, in Stoney Creek, Ontario, a 40-year-old woman whose infant son had died after drinking impure milk, Adelaide Hunter Hoodless (below right), founded the Federation of Women's Institutes of Canada -- motto, "For Home and Country" -- for which a primary goal was the pasteurization of milk. A onetime student at the Ladies College not far from the farm where she grew up, Hoodless wrote a textbook entitled Public School Domestic Science. She also would help found the National Council of Women, the Victorian Order of Nurses, and the YWCA in Canada. She died in 1910.

(Prior February 19 posts here and here.)

On August 7

On this day in ...

... 1998 (10 years ago today) , near-simultaneous explosions at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, took the lives of more than 200 people and injured another 4,000. In May 2001, a federal jury in New York convicted 4 men for their role in the bombing, which they were alleged to have taken in concert with Osama bin Laden. At a sentencing hearing today, members of a military commission jury at Guantánamo are listening to evidence about Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Bin Laden's driver, whom yesterday they convicted of material support for terrorism but acquitted of more serious charges of conspiracy. (credit for photo of Nairobi embassy after bombing)

... 1813 (195 years ago today), Paulina Kellogg was born in Bloomfield, New York. After her parents' death in 1820 she moved in with a religious aunt and herself became religious; her early career interest was squelched by the church's ban on single women missionaries. Her marriage to a merchant coincided with growing activism in "women’s rights, anti-slavery and temperance causes." Widowed in 1845, she "was left an independent and wealthy woman," who studied and lectured "on female physiology and anatomy, unprecedented in her time, which is said to have encouraged some of her listeners to join the first generation of women physicians." Paulina Wright Kellogg Davis (right), following her marriage in 1849 to a member of Congress from Rhode Island: organized the 1st 2 national women's rights conventions; ran "Una, the 1st feminist periodical that was owned, written, and edited entirely by women"; co-founded the New England Woman Suffrage Association; and published A History of the National Woman’s Rights Movement (1871).

On July 31

On this day in ...

... 1998 (10 years ago today), Britain announced that it would ban the use of landmines unconditionally. Legislation passed a month earlier "after public pressure to do so" -- would have permitted "British troops to deploy mines in 'exceptional circumstances.'" On this day, however, that exception was removed. This paved the way for British ratification, on this same day, of the 1997 treaty banning landmines; that is, the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer or Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction. Britain's action came a month before the 1st anniversary of the death of Princess Diana, a vocal advocate of the treaty.

... 1811, Janie Currie Blaikie Hoge was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A welfare worker, fundraiser, and wartime nurse, she worked to recruit other nurses to care for wounded Union troops during the Civil War. Hoge wrote of her work in The Boys in Blue (1867) (left). Following the war, she helped to establish the Evanston College for Ladies. Among the leaders of the college was temperance advocate and suffragist Frances E.C. Willard; when the institution merged with Northwestern University, Willard became dean of the university's Women's College.

On July 27

On this day in ...
... 1857, in Mount Pleasant, Ontario, Canada, a daughter, Ann Augusta, was born to suffragist physician Emily Howard Stowe and her carpenter husband, John Stowe. In 1883 the daughter married Dr. John Benjamin Gullen and, moreover, earned her M.D. from the Faculty of Medicine at Victoria University, Toronto. Augusta Stowe-Gullen was the 1st woman to graduate from a Canadian medical school (left). Stowe-Gullen was active in suffrage, temperance, and other social movements, "and she succeeded her mother as President of the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association in 1903." She was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1935, 8 years before her death in Toronto. A medical professor and practitioner at numerous hospitals in Canada, she was a founding member, in 1909, of the Women's College Hospital in Toronto, site of this anecdote:

One day, a visitor remarked upon the hospital's extensive female staff and asked whether everyone in the hospital was female. 'Of course not,' Gullen replied. 'Half the babies born are male.'

... 1953 (55 years ago today), in a purpose-built hall at Panmunjom, a village on the de facto border dividing the northern and southern portions of the Korean peninsula, representatives of 16 U.N. member states signed an armistice "ending hostilities in the three-year-old Korean war." The truce document was not a final peace accord:

... [T]hough the shooting would cease within twelve hours after the signing, only an uneasy armed truce and political difficulties, perhaps even greater than those of the armistice negotiations, were ahead.

The agreement remains to this day the lone basis for cessation of the conflict.

On February 9, ...

... 1819, Lydia Estes was born into a Quaker family in Lynn, Massachusetts. In her early adulthood she worked as a midwife, nurse, and schoolteacher. She was active in the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society and the temperance movement, and the pseudoscience phrenology She married real estate tycoon Isaac Pinkham in 1843; 30 years later, under the name Lydia Pinkham (right), she started a business making and selling tonics for women. Made

of black cohosh, life root, unicorn root, pleurisy root, fenugreek seed and a substantial amount of alcohol, Lydia's Vegetable Compound claimed to bring relief to women during the menstrual cycle by alleviating menstrual cramps, and also during menopause by counteracting depression, hot flashes, and other symptoms.

Likewise noting the high (20%) alcohol content in her tonic -- at 1st blush odd considering Pinkham's professed affinity for temperance -- the website of the Museum of Menstruation & Women's Health notes that at the time such nostrums were

often the only way respectable women were able to enjoy the intoxicant. And during the banning of alcoholic beverages in America, especially in the 1920s, the Pinkham 'medicine' enjoyed its greatest success.

Thanks to her good timing and her skill in marketing directly to women in an positive and information manner, as in the pamphlet at left, Pinkham became one of the top businesswomen of the 19th century.

... 1964, on the "Ed Sullivan Show," in what's been voted rock's greatest TV moment, a quartet of mop-headed Liverpudlians, The Beatles, made their U.S. debut. They strum and sing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" to the screams of what sounds to be an all-screams-all-the-time, all-female, studio audience, in the video below. Another 70-million-plus watched at home. The rest, as they say, is history.

On January 16, ...

... 1919, the 18th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Prohibiting within 1 year "the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes," the amendment marked the culmination of a temperance movement that had been waged, often as a "Women's Crusade," for decades. The measure would be repealed in the early 1930s, thus bringing to a close a Prohibition Era notable for spurring gangsterism and flouting of laws and, conversely, the rise for the 1st time of federal law enforcement agencies engaged in transnational pursuit of offenders.
... 1981, as she went to awaken 1 of her 3 children at their home in Coalisland, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, rights activist and former Member of Parliament Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was shot in the chest, arm and thigh by armed gunmen. Depicted at right on a mural in Derry, the city in the North's northwest corner, Devlin had been the youngest-ever woman MP when elected in 1969. (image credit)

On January 3, ...

... 1793 (215 years ago today), a daughter was born to the Mott family of Nantucket, Massachusetts. The family moved to Boston when the daughter was 11; she finished her education at a boarding school in New York and became a teacher at age 15. In 1811 she married James Mott of Philadelphia. Upon her death in 1880, the New York Times wrote that the name of Lucretia Mott "was probably as widely known as that of any other public woman in this or the preceding generation." Her activism took her throughout New England and the Eastern Seaboard, "advocating Quaker principles and waging at the same time a vigorous warfare against the evils of intemperance and slavery." Though a prominent abolitionist, Mott (left) was denied admission to the 1840 World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London on account of her sex. Eight years later she and her husband were "prominent in the original Woman's Rights Convention held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848." Other causes included school and prison reform, as detailed in the Mott Papers at Pomona College.

... 1992, "due to changing tastes and politics," the Miss Canada Pageant ended after 45 years. Nicole Dunsdon (right), from the Interior of British Columbia, who'd been chosen a few months earlier, was the last woman ever to hold the title of Miss Canada.