March is Women's History Month!!!!

[girl_dee]

[Kobi]

Fannie Lou Hamer was a Mississippi sharecropper in 1962 when she volunteered to register to vote, even though putting her life in danger. She endured harassment, eviction, arrest, & beatings to become a key organizer in Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964."I guess if I'd had any sense, I'd have been a little scared - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember."



Nellie Bly (real name Elizabeth Jane Cochran, above) was a 23-year-old journalist without a job when she walked into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in 1887 and was given the daunting assignment of exposing the horrors of the Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. She rehearsed feverishly. She played mad. “Undoubtedly demented… a hopeless case,” said one of the doctors who admitted her. But inside the asylum she chronicled the awful food and awful conditions that spurred reform.

[girl_dee]

Kobi, thank you for posting about "Nelly Bly"

HEre is here ordeal :

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/wom.../madhouse.html

[Kobi]

Mary Louise Guinan—better known as "Texas" Guinan (1884-1933). Getting her big start in Vaudeville in 1909, Mary drifted into film by 1917. First cast as a vamp, she quickly found her niche as a Western heroine and movie star, cranking out westerns for 6 years. In 1922, tiring of the movies, she made her way to New York where she became an icon of the night club scene, intimate with movie stars, partnering with gangsters, she became so notorious as to be barred from entering England or France.




1935 - Only black lawyer in the "twenty against the underworld team," Eunice Hunton Carter led the way for prostitution reform in New York. The underworld took in $12 million a year on prostitution alone during the Depression years, with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, New York's Mafia leader, in charge. The subsequent trial brought Luciano's conviction.It also brought Eunice Hunton Carter an appointment as chief of Dewey's Special Sessions Bureau, supervising more than 14,000 criminal cases each year.

[girl_dee]

i ran across this ad from the 1800's:


WHY ARE
THE MADAME MORA'S CORSETS

A MARVEL OF COMFORT AND ELEGANCE!





Try them and you will Find

WHY they need no breaking in, but feel easy at once.
WHY they are liked by Ladies of full figure.
WHY they do not break down over the hips, and
WHY the celebrated French curved band prevents any wrinkling or stretching at the sides.
WHY dressmakers delight in fitting dresses over them.
WHY merchants say they give better satisfaction than any others.
WHY they take pains to recommend them.

Their popularity has induced many imitations, which are frauds, high at any price. Buy only the genuine, stamped Madame Mora's. Sold by all leading dealers with this
GUARANTEE:
that if not perfectly satisfactory upon trial the money will be refunded.
L. KRAUS & CO., Manufacturers, Birmingham, Conn.

[The_Lady_Snow]

[Kobi]

Jewel S. LaFontant-MANkarious (1922-1997), A.B. Oberlin 1943, '79 hon., trustee 1981-86. She was the first African American woman to serve as assistant U.S. attorney and the first African American woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.





From October 1943 onward, Marianne Cohen, (a member of the French Resistance), smuggled groups of children to Switzerland until she was arrested with a group of 28 of them in May 1944. The Jewish members of the underground planned to rescue her, but she refused, fearing her escape would endanger the children. The children were rescued, but Marianne was kidnapped by members of the special services from Lyon on July 3, 1944, severely tortured and murdered in Ville la Grand, near Annemasse.

[Nadeest]

Thank you for posting that link, girl dee. It was most interesting, reading about what was happening there.

[Kobi]

Joyce Hilda Banda née Mtila (born 12 April 1950) is a Malawian politician who has been the president of Malawi since 7 April 2012. She is the founder and leader of the People's Party, created in 2011.

An educator and grassroots women's rights activist, she was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2006 to 2009 and vice-president of Malawi from May 2009 to April 2012.

Banda took office as president following the sudden death of President Bingu wa Mutharika. She is Malawi's fourth president and its first female president. Before becoming president, she served as the country's first female vice president.

She was a Member of Parliament and Minister for Gender, Children's Affairs and Community Services. Before her active career in politics she was the founder of the Joyce Banda Foundation, founder of the National Association of Business Women (NABW), Young Women Leaders Network and the Hunger Project.

Forbes named President Banda as the 71st most powerful woman in the world and the most powerful woman in Africa.

[Kobi]

Madam C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867, the first child in her family born into freedom after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Her parents and five older siblings were slaves on a plantation in Louisiana. By the time of her death in 1919, Madam Walker was the wealthiest black woman in America and the first self-made female American millionaire. She made her fortune by developing and marketing a successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company.




Ann E. Dunwoody is the first female four-star general in U.S. history. She received her fourth star Nov. 14, 2008. She retired from the Army August 15, 2012.

[Kobi]

Congress Woman Patsy Mink served for a total of 12 terms, representing Hawaii's 1st &2nd congressional districts. While in Congress she was noted for authoring the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act. Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress and became the first Asian American to seek the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the 1972 election, where she stood in the Oregon primary as an anti-war candidate.



Aphra Behn was prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, the first English professional female writer. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.

She now dominates much cultural-studies discourse as both a topic and a set of texts. Much early criticism emphasized her unusual status as a female writer in a male-dominated literary world; more recent criticism has offered more thorough discussions of her works.

Today, the affinities between Behn's work and that of Romantic writers seem more pronounced than the publicly acceptable discussion of sexuality. According to scholars, Behn's writings unveil the homosocial role of male rivalry in stimulating heterosexual desire for women and explores the ways in which cross dressing and masquerade complicate and destabilize gender relations. Behn also analyzes female friendships.

In several volumes of writings by author Janet Todd, Behn's explorations of some of the key issues in Romantic studies, such as the role of incestuous and homosocial bonding in romance, the correlations between racial and gender oppression, female subjectivity, and, more specifically, female political and sexual agency are detailed.

She is credited with saying one of my favorite quotes of all time: "Women have two choices in life, marriage or prostitution. I consider prostitution the nobler of the two."

Aphra Behn died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as once stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."



Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 19th century, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards graduated from Westford Academy (2nd oldest secondary school in Massachusetts). She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.

Richards was a pragmatic feminist, as well as a founding ecofeminist who believed that women's work within the home was a vital aspect of the economy.