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March 3

03-03 TABLE of CONTENTS: 1913: Women Beaten When They Dare Ask For The Right to Vote Old U.S. Laws Said A Girl of Seven Could Consent To Sex DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTES by Carrie Chapman Catt and the Connecticut Women's Commission. 1913: Women Beaten When They Dare Ask For The Right to Vote       "Eight thousand women with suffrage banners flying paraded along Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, to make the incoming president and congress aware of their cause.       "It was a parade that turned into a confrontation and near riot. Police had given a permit for it, but they did little to protect the women when angry men began attacking the marchers.       "Women were slapped, tripped, spat upon, pelted with burning cigar stubs, had banners torn from their hands. Their hats were pulled off, their clothing was ripped, and some were knocked to the ground and trampled.       "Federal troops had to be called in from nearby Fort Meyer. The soldiers cleared the streets, controlled the mob, and finally restored order, and the somewhat disheveled women carried on with the parade that got them a lot more front-page attention than they had expected."             -- Excerpted from Bill Severn's The Right To Vote, New York: Ives Washburn, 1972.       The 1913 parade, although credited to Alice Paul, was actually organized and directed by Lucy Burns who was the organizational "brains" of many actions/works credited to Paul.       The 1913 parade was copied from the first American women's suffrage protest parade held in 1910 in New York City that was organized and led by Harriet Stanton Blatch, daughter of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton.       Blatch had organized the Women's Political Union in 1908, and merged the group with Paul's Congressional Union in 1915. Blatch soon broke with Paul - in spite of her pacifism - in order to assist the U.S. in World War I. Paula refused to help the war effort.       A protest parade that was held in Philadelphia before the Civil War by women involved in the abolitionist movement is believed to have inspired Blatch. Her mother probably spoke of it.       Blatch, after traveling to England to witness the British suffrage movement, returned to the U.S. and melded her organization with that of Paul and Burns and thus the Paul organization took over the idea for the 1913 parade.       The larger - and later the most influential organization for women's suffrage, the National American Women's Suffrage, Association was in a moribund state in 1913 as Rev. Anna Shaw - one of the great women suffragists - proved to be an ineffectual leader. The NAWSA would soon reelect the organizational genius Carrie Chapman Catt as president and the Winning Plan that changed emphasis from protest to political influence would talk shape. Catt and her lieutenants organized women county by county throughout the nation and aided them in influencing state legislatures and men voters who would decide if women voted. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | Old U.S. Laws Said A Girl of Seven Could Consent To Sex Texas raised the age of consent for a woman from 7 to 10 in 1890. If you think that's preposterous, you might be surprised at the history of a girl's consent in your state.       Call your local bar association and ask... betcha they won't knowthe answer or... if they claim they do, ask them to give you a date when the laws were changed (and changed and changed) and get them to give you the numbers of the bills that changed the laws.)       Until June 26, 1918, all Texans could vote except "idiots, imbeciles,aliens, the insane, and women."       Texas women were not permitted to serve on juries until 1954. As late as 1969, married women did not have full property rights. (Do you know when or even IF married women have full property rights in your state? In Florida, as late at 1966, a woman who had been married needed her husband or ex-husband's permission to buy real estate - and barring that, her father's or that or a judge who decided that she was competent to make such decisions.)       And until 1972, under Article 1220 of the Texas Penal Code, a man could murder hiswife and her lover if he found them "in a compromising position" and getaway with it as "justifiable homicide."       ("Women, you understand, did not have equal shooting rights," commented Molly Ivins.) Texas was one of thefirst states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, which has been part ofthe Texas Constitution since 1972.             [The stats on Texas were taken from Molly Ivins's book, Molly Ivins Can't SayThat, Can She? An absolute treasure!] | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 03-03 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS Event 03-03-1798: The Battle of Frauenbriin resulted in a victory for the French over the Swiss. The outnumbered Swiss included 280 women under the leadership of Martha Glar, 64, who is killed along with, her two daughters, three granddaughters (the youngest is only 10), and 154 other women. The men in Glar's family also die. Event 03-03-1879, Belva Lockwood becomes the first female attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. B. 03-03-1890, Chase Going Woodhouse - U.S. and state official. Throughout her lengthy and accomplished career, Chase Woodhouse moved easily between the worlds of public service and academics. In addition to her two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, she was also the first woman to serve as Secretary of State of the State of Connecticut.       She served as an economic adviser and elected official in various governmental positions in between her several appointments as a college professor. In her congressional career she attempted to implement the same kind of economic policies that she recommended as a governmental adviser.       She was professor of economics at Connecticut College in New London, Conn., 1934-1946; Managing Director, Institute of Women's Professional Relations at Connecticut College, 1929-1946; Personnel Director, Woman's College, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1929-1934; Senior Economist, Bureau of Home Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, 1926-1928; Consultant, National Roster of Scientific and Specialized Personnel, War Manpower Commission, 1942-1944; Chairman of New London Democratic Town Committee in 1942 and 1943; Secretary of State of Connecticut in 1941 and 1942; President of the Connecticut Federation of Democratic Women's Clubs 1943-1948; elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-ninth Congress (January 3, 1945-January 3, 1947); unsucessful candidate for reelection in 1946 to the Eightieth Congress; Executive Director, Women's Division, Democratic National Committee, Washington, D.C., from February 1947 to April 1948; and visiting expert on the staff of Gen. Lucius Clay, Allied Military Governor of Germany, in 1948.       She was elected to the Eighty-first Congress where as a freshman member, Woodhouse was assigned to the Committee on Banking and Currency where she ardently worked for implementation of the Bretton Woods agreement to establish an international monetary fund and a world bank for redevelopment in the post-war era. She also fought for the maintenance of war-time price controls as a protection for consumers and for more affordable housing for returning veterans.       In one of the controversial votes of the Seventy-ninth Congress, Woodhouse opposed making the Committee on Un-American Activities a standing committee. B. 03-03-1893, Beatrice Wood - U.S. avant-garde artist. BW exhibited with the Dada movement but is best known for her ceramics. She had painted oils for years in the Dada style before turning to ceramics in order to match a missing teapot. In addition to pottery, she sculpted in ceramic clay. Her ceramic sculptures were in a whimsical, sensual style. She developed her own distinctive colors and color schemes. She lived to 105 working and painting her pottery daily past 100.       Her home west of Los Angeles became a museum-like during his lifetime as hundreds visited daily to view her art. Wood's ceramics are displayed in the permanent collections of major U.S. museums, including the Smithsonian and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as museums worldwide. Part of her very unconventional love life became the inspiration for the fiction novel (and movie) Jules et Jim written by Henri-Pierre Roche. B. 03-03-1902, Isabel Bishop -U.S. artist known for her paintings of New York City women working as well as colorful paintings of the city itself. A mistress of "how to catch the fleeting moment without freezing its flight," her paintings are in many museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art. B. 03-03-1910, Gertrude Shilling - U.K. blue blood who made a career of outrageous hats she wore at the Royal Enclosure at the Ascot race meet.       After wearing a confection created by her 12-year-old son that gained her front page notoriety, GS's hats became more and more elaborate and theatrical. They ranged from a huge apple pierced by an arrow to a five-foot high hutch with a pair of rabbit ears protuding from the top. Some of her other hats were a TV set complete with cigarettes and a rolled newspaper, a dart board, a huge daisy, a giraffe, as well as confections of lace and feathers.       She was diagnosed with cancer when she was 59 and for 30 years she "carried on" with her elaborate head pieces that, she said, helped her through B. 03-03-1911, Jean Harlow - U.S. film actor. JH was Hollywood's first blonde sexpot. Although her film roles always posed her as being able to hold her own with men in a worldly-wise manner, in reality she was a dependent person who was abused. Her fatal liver ailment at age 26 resulted from an earlier beating by a lover. Her striking, frankly sexual beauty radiated on the screen and directors lit her with high spots to emphasize her platinum blond hair. B. 03-03-1938, Patricia MacLachlan, - U.K. children's author. B. 03-03-1949, Bonnie Dunbar - U.S. astronaut. BD with a doctorate in biomedical engineering spent 41.5 days in space in four space flights.       BD was a mission specialist with the first American space crew to dock with the Russian space station Mir, which involved an exchange of crews.       Dr. Dunbar was responsible for operating Spacelab and its subsystems during one of her missions and was payload commander in another. In February 1994, she traveled to Star City, Russia, where she spent 13-months training as a back-up crew member for a 3-month flight on the Russian Space Station, Mir.       Her mission training for operating Spacelab and its subsystems included six months of experiment training in Germany, France, Switzerland, and The Netherlands.       In 1993 she made a very generous one-time contribution to Washington space grant scholarship program to support a promising Space Grant scholar. Event 03-03-1955: Clare Boothe Luce, former U.S. Senator and Congressional Representative becomes the first women in U.S. history to be named ambassador to a "major" country. A Republican and wife of Time, Inc., owner, she is appointed ambassador to Italy by Dwight Eisenhower. B. 03-03-1962, Jacqueline Kennedy Joyner-Kersee - U.S. athlete. JKJK is the first athlete to win back-to-back gold medals in the Olympic Heptathlons (seven events-the 200-meter dash, 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, long jump, javelin throw, and 800-meter run- held over a two-day period).       In 1988 she set a new world record in the Heptathlon and earned the title "World's Greatest Female Athlete."       She won three gold, one silver and two bronze medals over four consecutive Olympic Games. By 1996, past her prime and injured with a bad hamstring, JKJK was still able to reach down inside herself for one last attempt at Olympics glory, saying, "I had the rest of my life to recover." She ignored the pain to make the third longest long jump in the competition and add a Bronze as her sixth Olympic medal. B. 03-03-1968, Diann Roffe-Steinrotter - U.S. athlete. DRS won 1 gold medal and 1 silver in alpine skiing at the 1992 and the 1994 Olympics.       At 17 she was the youngest skier to win a world alpine championship. Then she was badly injured and was retiring from the sport. Urged by Debbie Armstrong, the 1984 giant slalom gold medalist, she gradually regained her strength after her marriage and "stormed back to win a silver medal in the giant slalom at the 1992 Albertville Games and a gold medal in the super giant slalomat the 1994 Lillehammer Games, becoming the first American women to take home a gold in the event."       U.S. Ski Coach, Paul Major said of her championship performance in Norway, "It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in sports." B. 03-03-1973, Tisha Venturini - U.S. athlete. TV scored two goals, including the game-winner at the 96 Olympic games, and her U.S. women's national soccer team went on to win the gold. Tisha Venturini Event 03-03-1987: Sandy Freedman is elected the first woman mayor of Tampa, Florida. She won 177 of the city's 178 precincts | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR CATT, CARRIE CHAPMAN:       "The whole aim of the woman's movement has been to destroy the idea that obedience is necessary to women; to train women to such self-respect that they would not grant obedience and to train men to such a comprehension of equity that they would not exact it."             -- Carrie Chapman Catt, speech to the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1902.       "The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men, and when to gain it she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain."             -- Carrie Chapman Catt, 1902. Connecticut Women's Commission:       "Work, for the colonial women, was from sunup to sundown. Along with child care responsibilities, colonial women also took charge of all food and clothing preparation. In the late Colonial and early Federal periods, this was a particularly difficult task for a woman with a large family. Worn out, many colonial women died young, survived by their husbands who often remarried only to have their second or even third wives meet with a similar end."             -- Great Women in Connecticut History by the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, March 1, 1986.       (Women were expected to die from too many pregnancies right after another rather than requiring the husband to practice any type of birth or self control. A trip to old cemeteries is an eye-opener. Many women were buried in unmarked graves without expensive stone markers which were usually reserved for the men of the family. Their graves and their very existence have disappeared. In a tour of old cemeteries, note how many men's graves appear to have more than an ordinary space between them and other grave markers - and most of them appear to be bachelors with no mention of any wives. There's a good chance a wife or two is buried in that "empty" space around the man's marker. Other times a inscription "and wife" is marked on the back of the husband's headstone. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |