March is Women's History Month!!!!

[Kobi]

1. Wyoming Territory is first to grant women the vote, 1869

In 1869, Wyoming’s territorial legislature declared that “every woman of the age of twenty-one years, residing in this territory, may at every election…cast her vote.” Though Congress lobbied hard against it, Wyoming’s women kept their right to vote when the territory became a state in 1890. In 1924, the state’s voters elected the nation’s first female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross.

2. Californian Julia Morgan is first woman admitted to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, 1898

The 26-year-old Morgan had already earned a degree in civil engineering from Berkeley, where she was one of just 100 female students in the entire university (and the only female engineer). After she received her certification in architecture from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, the best architecture school in the world, Morgan returned to California. There, she became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in the state and an influential champion of the Arts and Crafts movement. Though she is most famous for building the “Hearst Castle,” a massive compound for the publisher William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, California, Morgan designed more than 700 buildings in her long career. She died in 1957.

3. Margaret Sanger opens first birth-control clinic in the United States, 1916

In October 1916, the nurse and women’s-rights activist Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth-control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Since state “Comstock Laws” banned contraceptives and the dissemination of information about them, Sanger’s clinic was illegal; as a result, on October 26, the city vice squad raided the clinic, arresting its staff and seizing its stock of diaphragms and condoms. Sanger tried to reopen the clinic twice more, but police forced her landlord to evict her the next month, closing it for good. In 1921, Sanger formed the American Birth Control League, the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood.

4. Edith Wharton is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, 1921

Wharton won the prize for her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Like many of Wharton’s books, The Age of Innocence was a critique of the insularity and hypocrisy of the upper class in turn-of-the-century New York. The book has inspired several stage and screen adaptations, and the writer Cecily Von Ziegesar has said that it was the model for her popular Gossip Girl series of books.

5. Activist Alice Paul proposes the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time, 1923

For almost 50 years, women’s-rights advocates like Alice Paul tried to get Congress to approve the amendment; finally, in 1972, they succeeded. In March of that year, Congress sent the proposed amendment--“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”--to the states for ratification. Twenty-two of the required 38 states ratified it right away, but then conservative activists mobilized against it. (The ERA’s straightforward language hid all kinds of sinister threats, they claimed: It would force wives to support their husbands, send women into combat and validate gay marriages.) This anti-ratification campaign was a success: In 1977, Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the ERA. In June 1982, the ratification deadline expired. The amendment has never been passed.

6. Frances Perkins becomes the first female member of a Presidential cabinet, 1933

Perkins, a sociologist and Progressive reformer in New York, served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. She kept her job until 1945.

7. Janet Guthrie is the first woman to drive in the Indy 500, 1977

Guthrie was an aerospace engineer, training to be an astronaut, when she was cut from the space program because she didn’t have her PhD. She turned to car racing instead and became the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500. Mechanical difficulties forced her out of the 1977 Indy race, but the next year she finished in ninth place (with a broken wrist!). The helmet and suit that Guthrie wore in her first Indy race are on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

8. President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, 1981

O’Connor was confirmed that September. She did not have much judicial experience when she began her Supreme Court term—she had only been a judge for a few years and had never served on a federal court—but she soon made a name for herself as one of the Court’s most thoughtful centrists. O’Connor retired in 2006.

9. Joan Benoit wins the first women's Olympic Marathon, 1984

At the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Joan Benoit (today known as Joan Benoit Samuelson) finished the first-ever women’s marathon in 2:24.52. She finished 400 meters ahead of the silver medalist, Norway’s Grete Waitz.

10. Manon Rheaume is the first woman to play in an NHL game, 1992

Manon Rheaume, a goalie from Quebec City, Canada, was no stranger to firsts: She was well-known for being the first female player to take the ice in a major boys’ junior hockey game. In 1992, Rheaume was the starting goalie for the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lighting in a preseason exhibition game, making her the first woman to play in any of the major men’s sports leagues in the U.S. In that game, she deflected seven of nine shots; however, she was taken out of the game early and never played in a regular-season game. Rheaume led the Canadian women’s national team to victory in the 1992 and 1994 World Hockey Championships. The team also won silver at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

11. Madeleine Albright becomes the first female Secretary of State, 1997

In January 1997, the international-relations expert Madeleine K. Albright was sworn in as the United States’ 64th Secretary of State. She was the first woman to hold that job, which made her the highest-ranking woman in the federal government’s history. Before President Bill Clinton asked her to be part of his Cabinet, Albright had served as the country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. In 2004, Condoleezza Rice became the second woman--and first African-American woman to hold the job. Five years later, in January 2009, the former Senator (and First Lady) Hillary Rodham Clinton became the third female Secretary of State.

12. Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, 2010

The American film director Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film "The Hurt Locker" garnered six Oscars on March 7, 2010, including the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Written by Mark Boal, a former journalist who covered the war in Iraq, the movie follows an Army bomb squad unit as they conduct dangerous missions and battle personal demons in war-torn Baghdad. Bigelow, whose previous films include "Strange Days" and "Point Break," was the first woman to take home the Best Director distinction. She triumphed over her former husband, James Cameron, whose science fiction epic "Avatar" was another presumed front-runner.

[The_Lady_Snow]

[StrongButch]

Wilma Mankiller-Was the first woman elected principal chief of Cherokee Nation she worked to improve the lives of Native Americans by helping them recieve better education and health care and urged them to preserve and take pride in their traditions.

[pinkgeek]

25 April 1981 -
ANZAC Day. Women arrested while marching to remember women raped in war. In the early '80s, a number of Australian women attempted to join official ANZAC Day marches because they wanted to commemorate all women who had been raped in wars.

In 1980, fourteen women who tried to do this in Canberra were arrested. The following year, again in Canberra, around 250 women attempted to join the tail of the official ANZAC Day march but were stopped by police and directed not to march. The police were acting under a Section 23A of the Traffic Ordinance, a section that had only been gazetted the day before the march. As a result about 64 people, mainly women, were arrrested and charged with failing to obey the police directive.

The special legislation, march and arrests that took place aroundthat Anzac Day in 1981 gave rise to a great deal of debate in the Canberra Times.

[pinkgeek]

I, Lili'uokalani, by the Grace of God and under the constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Queen, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a Provisional Government of and for this Kingdom. That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose Minister Plenipotentiary, His Excellency John L Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the said Provisional Government. Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps loss of life, I do, under this protest, and impelled by said forces, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands.
— Queen Liliʻuokalani, Jan 17, 1893

[Soon]

The Famous Five or The Valiant Five were five Canadian women who asked the Supreme Court of Canada to answer the question, "Does the word 'Persons' in Section 24 of the British North America Act, 1867, include female persons?" in the case Edwards v. Canada (Attorney General).[1] The five women created a petition to ask this question. They sought to have women legally considered persons so that women could be appointed to the Senate.

The petition was filed on August 27, 1927,[2] and on 24 April 1928, Canada's Supreme Court summarized its unanimous decision that women are not such "persons".[1] The last line of the judgement reads, "Understood to mean 'Are women eligible for appointment to the Senate of Canada,' the question is answered in the negative." This judgement was overturned by the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. This case, which came to be known as the Persons Case, had important ramifications not just for women's rights but also because in overturning the case, the Privy Council engendered a radical change in the Canadian judicial approach to the Canadian constitution, an approach that has come to be known as the "living tree doctrine".

The five women were:

Emily Murphy (1868-1933) (the British Empire's first female judge);

Irene Marryat Parlby (1868-1965) (farm women's leader, activist and first female Cabinet minister in Alberta);

Nellie Mooney McClung (1873-1951) (a suffragist and member of the Alberta legislature);

Louise Crummy McKinney (1868-1931) (the first woman elected to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, or any legislature in Canada or the rest of the British Empire);

Henrietta Muir Edwards (1849-1931) (an advocate for working women and a founding member of the Victorian Order of Nurses).

[The_Lady_Snow]