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May 1
WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT AND HERSTORY


Quimby stamp - First Day Issue

Compiled and Written by Irene Stuber
who is solely responsible for its content.

05-01 TABLE of CONTENTS:

The celebration Bona DeaBona Dea (Latin: "Good Goddess")

America's Most Dangerous Woman; a Hell-Raiser

Women and Elderly are STILL Not Properly Represented in Heart-Related Medical Studies

For 268 Years Yale University Refused Entrance to Women

Cockrell First Women to Govern One of the Nation s Largest Cities

DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS

QUOTES by Mother Jones. Ethel Payne, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.


Celebration of the Good Goddess

The celebration Bona DeaBona Dea (Latin: "Good Goddess") was held each May 1 in Roman Empire. It is not certain if it was a precoursor of the later May Day celebration or was adopted from Germanic and Britannica celebrations of the same kind and there was also a strong Greek influence from the cult of Damia.
      Actually, celebrations of "May Day" were almost universal as a celebration of fund
      Bona was to celebrate fruitfulness, both in the earth and in women and was, in some respects, a joining of various goddesses who symbolized both animal and floral fecundity.
      She was identified with various goddesses who had similar functions. The dedication day of her temple on the Aventine was May 1.
      Her temple was cared for and attended by women only, as was the second celebration at the beginning of December. According to some sources, her priestesses were called damiatrix(es).
      The month of May is named for Maia, the Roman goddess of spring and growth.

May is usually celebrated as Heritage Month.

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America's Most Dangerous Woman; a Hell-Raiser for Human Rights and Conditions for America's Labor Force

B. 05-01-1830, Mary Harris (Mother) Jones, Irish-born, American developed into America's foremost labor organizers from a valley of great sadness.
      Her husband and children died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1867 and just four years later her dressmaking business and all her possessions were destroyed in the great Chicago fire.
      Yet, through a tortuous journey, she found more great courage within herself to become involved in the labor movement, devoting the next 60 years of her life to bettering working conditions for her fellow workers - and all but abandoning any private social life.
      An impassioned speaker, she was also an activist and was in the forefront of major labor disputes which included organizing the pitiable children's 1903 march to President Theodore Roosevelt's palatial home to dramatize the plight of child labor; the 1886 Haymarket riots in Chicago; coal mine strikes beginning in 1900 and extending to 1923 when she was 93; led the famous coal miner's housewife brigade which beat back strikebreakers with mops and brooms in 1902.
      At age 100 she was filmed gving an fervent speech for the labor movement that gives some indication of the power she was able to exert during her remarkable life.
      Much feared by authorities, she was often arrested and once was even convicted of a faked charge of conspiracy to commit murder that was quickly set aside. She defied thugs and at age 89 fought in the thick of the 1919 steel strike. She was arrested for her labor activities many times and even organized protests within the jails.
      In the book American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider wrote:

"... Jones said that every strike she had been in had been won by WOMEN... If arrested, the women took their babies to jail with them and kept them awake and crying all night by singing, until the guards could stand the racket no longer. (In 1907, Greensburg, Pa., Mother Jones tells imprisoned wives of striking miners to 'sing to the babies all night long.') Women (often) persuaded their striking husbands to stay home while they themselves walked the picket lines on the shaky and often- disproved theory that scabs and police would not assault women. They did (assault them); sometimes they killed them."

      For more than half a century Mother Jones appeared wherever there were labor troubles: in Pittsburgh during the great railroad strike in 1877, in Chicago at the time of the Haymarket riot of 1886, in Birmingham in 1894, among the anthracite coal miners of Pennsylvania in 1900 1902, in the Colorado coalfields in 1903-1906, in Idaho in 1906, where she was involved in a copper mine strike, in Colorado again in 1913 and 1914, in New York City in 1915-1916, where she was active in the garment- and streetcar- workers' strikes, and throughout the country in 1919 in the nationwide steel strike of that year.

      "In 1923, at the age of ninety-three, she was still working among striking coal miners in West Virginia. A passionate organizer, she counted among her more spectacular achievements the leading of a march of miners wives who routed strikebreakers with brooms and mops in the Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902, and the leading of a march of striking child textile workers from Kensington, Pennsylvania, to President Theodore Roosevelt s Long Island home in 1903 to dramatize the case for abolition of child labor. In 1905 she helped found the Industrial Workers of the World."

      In a new biography, Elliott Corn brings out some "unsavory" elements of Mother Jones' life, including the rumor that she was a madam in a house of prostitution in Denver.

[Ed. note: Prostitution at the time was almost legal in Denver and most of the United States and was openly patronized by the best men of the area, industrialists, politicians, etc. - as well as most other men. Chicago, for example, had more than 3,000 listed houses of prostitution at the time. Today, forced underground, prostitutes are under the complete control of male pimps instead of the sometimes more begnign "houses" run by women. Jobs for women were so scarce and poorly paid that prostitution was often the only opportunity a woman alone had to earn money to live on.]

      Following her alleged stay in Denver, she evidently moved back to Chicago where "her political consciousness developed in Gilded Age Chicago, where industrialists grew rich off immigrant children and where Jones grew old as an underpaid seamstress," according to Corn although he does quote her as saying to a rival labor leader who was trying to ruin her with the rumor, "Don't you think whatever my past might have been that I have more than made up for it"
      New biographies or not, she was a vibrant, hell-raising speaker who during her lifetime became not only one of the great spellbinders of the era, but one of the most active for decent, living conditions for workers. And she used everything in her arsenal to influence laborers to fight for their human rights.
      According to Corn,

"one moment, she was the classic Victorian mother - soft, gentle, and loving as she cared for miners children in strike camps. The next, she was a stern matriarch whose word was law.
      "Jones also highlighted the religious aspects of her motherhood. Borrowing liberally from biblical prose for her speeches, she played the part of a secular Mother Mary before audiences of Catholic immigrant workers."

      She drank, she swore, she told risque jokes... she was typical of her time as a "blue collar worker." What else would anyone expect her to be but what she was? And to bond with those she would influence, namely blue collar workers.
      What Corn forgets - as most men biographers never take into consideration - is that life for women was very different than it is or was for men, that women are/were forced to use different tactics and different words than men would use in the same circumstances.
      Corn's greatest condemnation of Jones is her womanliness in an era when man was complete dictator and judge. As with many men biographers, he just doesn't understand the compromises and evasions a woman must make.
      Mother Jones was NOT a feminist in today's use of the term since she felt that class warfare was the primary concern of the time. She was for strong families with the male wage earner earning enough money to support his family.
      Unlike her critics, Mother Jones knew that anyone to be effect has to focus their message and work. Her focus was on the deplorable working conditions and pay of the working class - conditions that today's workers' because of the work of Mother Jones fortunately have no conception of in the days before workers compensation, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, 50-hour week, safety and health requirements, and no pension or social security.
      If the need for labor unions had not been there, they would never have developed.

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Women and Elderly are STILL Not Properly Represented in Heart-Related Medical Studies - 250,000 Die Each Year

Women are still seriously under-represented in heart-related studies even though heart disease is the number one killer of women according to a 2001 study published in the American Journal of Medicne.
      Women's enrollment in heart-related studies are only 25%, only a rise of 5% in ten years in spite of pledges of drug companies.
      In an Associated Press article, Dr. Eric Peterson, one of the authors of the study from Duke University said the problem seriously hampers cardiologists trying to decide what treatments are best for their patients.
      AP reported the study reviewed 593 studies published from 1966 through March of last year and found only slight gains in female and elderly representation during the past decade. Women's enrollment only rose from 20 to 25% in the 1990-200 decade in spite of efforts of the National Institute of Health while women remain at least 43% of patients suffering heart attacks.
      The study of patients 75 or older (a group often includes more women because they live longer) had the terrible record of rising from 1 to 9 percent to cover the 37% of all heart attacks that occur to this age group.
      The AP article goes on,

      "The numbers in the study were 'very sobering,' since heart disease is the top killer of women as well as men, resulting in more than 250,000 deaths among women alone each year, said Dr. Lynne Perry-Bottinger, a cardiologist at New York Hospital Medical Center who was not involved in the re search.
      "It would behoove all of us to include more elderly and women because basically these are us in 30 to 40 years,' she said.
      "It appears the drug companies do not feel they will get a return on their investments when dealing with eldedrly or women studies according to Peterson, and the companies also feel the elderly have a variety of ailments and drug testing might exacerbate them."

      The Food and Drug Administration published guidelines in 1989 recommending that studies of drugs likely to be used by the elderly should adequately reflect the population to be treated. The National Institutes of Health sought to close the gap in research in women with similar guidelines in the early 1990s.
      For example, there's virtually no information on how cholesterol-lowering drugs affect people 75 and older, he said. [WOAH Note: my personal physician says there are no studies to show how cholesterol-lowering drugs affect women in general and there are no definitive figures on what a woman's cholesteral levels should be.]
      While drugs such as Latins have been shown to be remarkably effective in younger patients, Peterson laid doctors might be reluctant to prescribe untested medication in older patients who might also benefit.

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For 268 Years Yale University Refused Entrance to Women

When Yale University denied admission to would-be freshman Lucinda Foote, 16, in the 1920s, it noted that she was qualified in all respects "except for her sex."
      Yale University had denied admission to thousands of women from its frounding in 1701 through 1969 when the women's movement forced the college (in face of threatened lawsuits and bad publicity) to finally accept them.
      Maya Linn, best known for her Viet Nam Memorial, also designed Yale University's Woman's Table that is literally a large table of green granite incised on the surface with a spiraling design of the years being counted off from the university's founding in 1701 through 1991 (the year of the monument's dedication).
      Next to each year is the number of women enrolled at Yale for that year. The stark march of 268 zeroes calls attention to the 268 years there was no room at Yale's educational table for women. It is a devastating revelation of men's disdain for women's rights. The table is set at a 69-degree angle to its base to commemorate the date of 1969 when the first women were admitted to Yale.
      Maya Linn attended Yale University.

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Cockrell First Women to Govern One of the Nation's Largest Cities

On May 1, 1975, Lila Cockrell defeated nine male oppoents to become mayor of San Antonio, Texas, the the nation's 10th largest city with a population of 750,000.
      LC was empowered to run for the mayoralty post following Janet Gray Hayes's amazing victory in San Jose, California that in those pre Silicon Valley days was far from the size of San Antonio, but her victory convinced LC that a woman could be elected to head a big city.
      Women had served as mayors of small towns since the late 19th century but none of a major metropolis.
      After serving on the city council for seven years, she was told she would have made an excellent mayor were she not a woman!
      Mayor Cockrell was 53 years old when elected, married with two daughters. Her political life began with the League of Women Voters.
      As usual, the male opponents were able to raise considerably more money than the woman candidate and in the San Antonio race outspent her three to one.

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05-01 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS

Died 05-01-1228: Isabella II - inherited the throne of Latin Jerusalem from her mother who died at her birth. She was married off to the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II by her male relatives. Frederick then demanded title to her Jerusalem throne and then he then held it after her death (in childbirth as had her mother). at the age of 16.
      Born in 1212, Isabella was married at age 13.
      Thus is the true story of the fate of most royal princesses, seldom happy or happily ever after.

B. 05-01-1751, Judith Sargent Stevens Murray - U.S. writer.
      JSSM is best remembered for her essays and journalistic comment on contemporary public issues, especially women's rights during the early days of the U.S. republic,
      She wrote a regular column in a Massachusets publication that featured a call for woman's education, something that did not exist at the times except in rare instances at home. Ironically, while the forefathers of U.S. democracy were calling for men's rights they continued to forbid the same rights to women.
      One of her best known essays is "Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms."
      In 1795 her play The Medium, or A Happy Tea-Party became one of the first plays produced in the U.S. written by an American author.

B. 05-01-1816, Fidelia Fiske - U.S. educator and missionary to Persia.
      FF developed the Urmia Seminary (school) for girls in Persia (today's Iran) where under Islamic rule at the time girls were considered less than human and only fit for pleasing husbands and bearing children. FF worked under terrible hardships that destroyed her health but her work gained the respect of the native men and had a profound effect on raising the standard of living for Persian women in general.
      Some historians hold FF up as a prime example of the new woman that was produced in the U.S. through education at Mount Holyoke from which she graduated in 1842.

B. 05-01-1852, Martha Jane (Calamity Jane) Canary - U.S. frontierswoman and stagecoach driver.
      CJ joined Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and has been romanticized in movies, fiction stories, and legends so much that the real CJ is almost impossible to describe.
      She was rough mannered (as well most people of the place and era) and as was also common in those days for women without the protection of one man, was a prostitute of sorts.
      She frequented bars, was rumored (mostly disproved) to have driven stagecoaches, but she was a crack shot.
      It is believed that she began roaming the mining areas after she was orphaned at 15. Known as a companion of Wild Bill Hickock, she is buried next to him - more as a tourist attraction since he died many years before she did and their relationship was questionable at best.
      She toured with several Wild West shows including Buffalo Bill's.
      She often dressed in men's clothing (also not a particularly unusual thing in the pioneer west for active and poor women).
      According to some legends (told mostly by herself), she scouted for the army including Col. George Custer. She went to the Black Hills of South Dakota with a geological expedition and stayed in Deadwood after the gold strike there.
      There she became a companion to Wild Bill Hickock although a rumored marriage probably never took place.
      The name "Calamity" has been variously explained as being derived from her care of patients during a smallpox epidemic or warnings to men who felt a single woman alone was a plaything to be used as they would.
      She eventually moved to El Paso and married (maybe). She had a habit of referring to her male companions as husbands.
      She exhibited herself in some shows following depictions of her as a romantic character in the dime novels of the day. Living in abject poverty for many years, she eventually traveled back to South Dakota where she died in 1903 and was buried next to Wild Bill Hickock.
      One historian writes: " the celebrated figure of Western legend, poses a problem for biographers. Was she a frontier Florence Nightingale, Indian fighter, army scout, gold miner, pony express rider, bull-whacker, and stagecoach driver? Or merely a camp follower, prostitute, and alcoholic?"
      Most HIStorians come down on the side of disrepute without once examining the situations of women in that time and place.
      Was she at one time beautiful or always thick and dumpy, a face swollen by dissipation? Was she ever truly married or was her habit of calling any man she lived with a husband the true story?
      Depending on the teller... But then the legends of Hickock, known to shoot men in the back, have been brushed up for posterity as have the histories of most men of popular legend.

B. 05-01-1855, Cecilia Beaux - artist, generally recognized as the leading U.S. portrait painter of her day. Her first paintings, those of her family, won prizes in the U.S. and Paris.
      She was elected to the Socieacture; Nationale des Beaux-Arts (Paris) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1933). Her paintings are in major museums throughout the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An injury cut short her career.
      One historian wrote:

"In 1895 she became the first woman instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1896, on the strength of her showing at the Paris Salon, she was elected to membership in the Soci6t6 Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Cecilia Beaux moved to New York City in 1900. Later major works included commissioned portraits of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and her daughter Ethel, Mary Adelaide Nutting (for the Johns Hopkins Hospital), Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Richard Watson Gilder, and, for the National Art Committee's project on World War I leaders, Adm. Lord David Beatty, Georges Clemenceau, and Cardinal Mercier.
      "Her paintings were placed in such major collections as the National Collection of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Luxembourg Museum of Paris, and the Uffizi Gallery of Florence. Cecilia Beaux was acknowledged as one of the leading portraitists of her day. Her work, while it suggested at times the influence of some of her French Impressionist teachers, and at other times was compared to that of John Singer Sargent, was not imitative of any master."

      Some of her work is also exhibited at the Women's Museum of Art in Washington, D.C.

B. 05-01-1864, Anna M. Jarvis - U.S. mother of Mother's Day.
      After many women had attempted to have a special day set aside to honor mothers after the U.S. Civil War, Jarvis was successful in having the second Sunday of May set aside to honor mothers. By 1913 every state in the union established the observance and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution of Congress to officially recognize the day.
      She was unalterably opposed the commercialization of the observance wanting to keep it a pure and simple remembrance. A number of other women, including Julia Ward Howe had suggested Mother's Day, but none were successful until Jarvis's campaign, which started in Philadelphia, May 1908 with the pink carnation being worn if the mother was alive and white in memorial.
      The observance was originally to be a renunciation of war, militarism, and the patriarchy that cost women their husbands and sons in the Civil War.
      Jarvis spent most of her declining years in attempt to keep the holiday pure from the inroads of florists, jewelers, and the like who made it a marketing circus.
      Here is the original, pre-Hallmark, Mother's Day Proclamation, penned in Boston by Julia Ward Howe in 1870:

    "Arise, then, women of this day!
    Arise all women who have hearts,
    Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
    Say firmly: '
    We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
    Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
    For caresses and applause.
    Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
    All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
    We women of one country
    Will be too tender of those of another country
    To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs'

    From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says,
    'Disarm, Disarm!'
    The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
    Blood does not wipe out dishonor
    Nor violence indicate possession.
    As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
    Let women now leave all that may be left of home
    For a great and earnest day of counsel.
    Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
    Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
    Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
    Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
    But of God.
    In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
    That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
    May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
    And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
    To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
    The amicable settlement of international questions.
    The great and general interests of peace."

B. 05-01-1865, Florence Clinton Sutro - first woman in the U.S. to receive a Ph.D., in music. FCS was the first woman to enroll in the Woman's Law Class of New York University, and the founder of the National Federation of Music Clubs.

B. 05-01-1871, Gertrude M. Foran Handrick - U.S. attorney.
      As the only woman graduate in her class of 1911, GFH was the first woman lawyer to be "allowed" to join the Cleveland, Ohio, Bar Association. She had worked as a secretary in her father's law office and secretly studied law before, over her father's objections, entered law school after she was widowed and lost her daughter. She primarily practiced real estate and banking law. She was an strong advocate for women's rights and voting.

0501brooksromaineselfportrait1923.jpgleft, self-portrait of Romaine Brooks
click on image to see full-size

B. 05-01-1874, Romaine Brooks - U.S. artist whose palette of primary black, grey and brown produced amazingly insightful portraits.
      The daughter of an unstable mother and brother who became dangerously paranoid, she was sent away to various schools. Following their deaths she inherited a fortune.
      She married for form's sake but lived openly as a lesbian, maintaining am on\off liaison for 40-years with the wandering Natalie Clifford Barney, noted U.S. expatriate writer.
      She continued to paint until her late 80s. The largest collection of her works are to be viewed at the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC.

above, right: Amazons in the Drawing
Room
: The Art of Romaine Brooks
by Whitney Chadwick, Joe Lucchesi (Introduction),
Romaine Brooks, Nancy Risque Rohrbach

B. 05-01-1875, Harriet Quimby - U.S. aviator.
      HQ was the first woman to qualify for a pilot's license (#37) from the Aero Club of America. She was the second licensed woman in the world; Baroness de la Roche of France was the first.
      HQ was the first woman to pilot a plane across the English channel. Planes in 1912 were very similar to the Wright brothers' original with open seats in the nose of the plane just in front of the tiny engine and they had all struts exposed.
      As a favor to a friend back in the United Statesto take part in a Boston race, HQ took a passenger up for a ride. The large man panicked and tried to stand (or escape). His movements threw the tiny plane into a roll. Both Quimby and the man were thrown out of their seats (no seat belts yet) and they fell to their deaths.
      Before becoming interested in aviation, HQ earned her living as a journalist and was drama critic for Leslie's Weekly. She moved to New York to work for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly as a drama critic but also filed stories from Cuba, Mexico, Europe, and Egypt. Her writing skills as well as an acquaintance with D. W. Griffith made her one of the first female screenwriters, and she wrote seven films for Griffith.

B. 05-01-1881, May Massee - U.S. editor and children's literature specialist
      MM was the editor of The Booklist published by the American Library Association(1913-1922). She organized the second children's book publishing department in the world at Doubleday, and in 1933 founded, edited, and directed the Viking Press children's book department 1933-1960.

B. 05-01-1898, Anny Rosenberg Katan, M.D. - U.S. pioneer in psychoanalysis for emotionally disturbed children
      She taught child analysis at the School fo Medicine of Western Reserve Universlity 1946-64.
      She helped established the Cleveland psychoanalystic Institute and the Cleveland Center for Research in Child Development.
      An Austrian Jew, in 1939 Dr. Katan took refuge in the Netherlands to avoid German persecution. After the Germans conquered the Netherlands, using false papers, she went underground and was very active in anti-fascist movement at the risk of her life.
      At the recommendation of Dr. Anna Freud with whom she'd studied, Dr. Katan moved to Cleveland, Ohio and began teaching at Wester Reserve.

B. 05-01-1904(1900?), Valentina - fashion designer and costumer. Valentina claimed credit for the bolero jacket, snoods, dolman sleeves, and pleated skirts. She also claimed her parents were killed in the Russian revolution and she escaped with only the family jewels.

B. 05-01-1905, Geraldine B. Zorbaugh - general counsel (1956), vice-president and special assistant to the president of ABC, the highest positions ever held by a woman in a major broadcast network to that time.

B. 05-01-1909, Kate Smith - the number one American singer on radio and television (1931-1947), so popular that it is almost impossible to compare her to anyone today except Elvis (without the swooning).
      FDR introduced her to the King of England as "Miss Smith (who) is America."
      Nineteen of her records sold over a million copies, and she sold more war bonds during World War II than anyone else.
      Her theme song was "When the Moon Comes over the Mountain," but she is best known today for her rendition of "God Bless America." In 1982 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
      She starred in a succession of highly popular radio and tv shows as well as concerts.

B. 05-01-1912, Anna Pollack - British opera and concert mezzo-soprano. One of her best roles was a strikingly modern rendition of Carmen, not as a vamp but a freedom loving moving woman (feminist?)
      She was noted as an actor and one of the most popular singer of the Sadler Wells company who gave outstanding performances at every outing. Her popularity was amazing.

B. 05-01-1916, Jane Jacobs - U.S. planner. JJ dissected the urban expansion philosophies and claimed planner ignored the needs of people for stylized buildings, streets, and recreation locations. JJ authored The Economy of Cities (1969) and The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

B. 05-01-1917, Ann Kullmer - U.S. classical conductor.
      Although she won the competition to qualify for a scholarship to the Leipzig (Germany) Conservatory of Music for conducting, the director refused to admit a woman until she could conduct a Ceser Frank symphony from *memory*. (Many conductors can't conduct a Ceser Frank symphony from the score.) Her primary conducting successes were in Europe.

B. 05-01-1924, Evelyn Boyd Granville - U.S. mathematician, one of the first two African-American women to received a Ph.D. in mathematics.

B. 05-01-1933, Jane Danowitz - executive director of the Women' s Campaign Fund, a bipartisan organization supporting pro-choice women candidates.
      JD explained, "We're the beneficiaries of throwing the bums out. And there are many more male bums... All the focus on Hillary Clinton reflects the ambivalence of American society to the profound social changes that are now under way.
      ``As Americans struggle to come to grips with the altered role of women, it's reflected and magnified at a time of political decision.''

B. 05-01-1936, Delores Goodwin Kelley - Maryland state senator 1995- , and member house of delegates 1991-94.

B. 05-01-1939, Judy Collins - U.S. singer.
      JC was one of the leading lights of the folk music craze of the 1960s, has continued unabated into the 1990s with her clear soprano voice and her politics unchanged. She remains an uncompromising liberal and feminist.
      (We witnessed her rendition of "Amazing Grace" a capella at an outdoor concert in 1996. It was so utterly beautiful and soaring that it held a Black gospel choir speechless - hesitant to join in the chorus! )
      JC is noted for giving singers and songwriters a helping hand with their careers by featuring their songs: Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot and especially Joni Mitchell's "Both sides now."

B. 05-01-1940 Mason, Bobbie Ann - U.S. short-story writer and novelist known for her evocation of rural Kentucky life.

B. 05-01-1945 Rita Coolidge - U.S. pop singer.

Event 05-01-1952: Marine Colonel Katherine A. Towle, the first Director of Women Marines, was retired under the statutory age provision of the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 that required retirement for colonels at age 55.
      A special sunset parade was held in her honor and for the first time in the history, a platoon of women Marines joined the contingent of men Marines who passed in review.

Event 05-01-1953: Colonel Julia E. Hamblet, was appointed the third Director of the Marine Corps Women's Reserve.

B. 05-01-1979, Jennifer Botterill - U.S. athlete.
      JB was a member of the women's national hockey team that won the Olympic gold.

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QUOTES DU JOUR

JONES, MOTHER:
      "Get it right, I'm not a humanitarian. I'm a hell-raiser."
            -- Mother Jones

PAYNE, ETHEL:
      "Age is not a handicap. Age is nothing but a number. It is how you use it."
           -- Ethel Payne

ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN DELANO:
FDR who was born of moderate wealth and one of the privileged class became, against almost all odds, a liberal. An extremely pragmatic president, hIs was a record of many contradictions in terrible times of trouble including the Great Depression (more than 25% of the working men and women of the nation out of work) and World War II.
      He was often accused of being a "betrayer of his class," by supporting working people.
      Perhaps for good reason....
      In a speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave before the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), Roosevelt opened by saying: "greetings fellow immigrants."
      (For those who aren't aware, the DAR is an exclusive organization that was at the time limited to WHITE people who can trace their ancestry to people living in the U.S. at the time of the American Revolution. Anyone whose immigrated to the U.S. after the revolution - and thus the United States - is not eligible. for DAR membership.)

THORNE-SMITH, COURTNEY:
      "My therapist said something once that I replay in my head every morning when I get dressed. I had been complaining that a certain pair of pants didn't fit me anymore, and she said, 'What is this stuff people say about, I don't fit into my clothes? You're not supposed to fit into your clothes. They're supposed to fit you!'
      "In other words, you know those teeny, tiny jeans you bought after that horrible breakup when you couldn't eat anything but an occasional Popsicle for two weeks? Give them to Goodwill so that the 12-year-old girl they were made for can wear them!"
            -- Courtney Thorne-Smith is an actress who dieted and starved herself for years to fit into the image of what a woman should look like - according to male directors, photographers, and producers. She finally realized that gaunt was not healthy.
      "I feel proud of trying to set my own standards instead of manipulating my body to fit into someone else's idea of what is acceptable. There will always be those who criticize me no matter what I look like. I can't win that fight, so my goal is to stop listening to them. After all, it's my own body I'm beating up, and why would I want to do that?"

STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY:
      "Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position."
           -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion.


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