---

May 15

05-15 TABLE of CONTENTS: Madeleine Albright, the first woman U.S. Secretary of State DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTE by Madeleine Albright. Madeleine Albright Born 05-15-1937, Madeleine Albright is the first U.S. Secretary of State who is also a woman.       When President Bill Clinton first appointed MA as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1992 he made it a full cabinet post to show his high regard for Albright. It was also a signal that she would be an important part of his administration since she sat in on the major foreign affairs meetings.       When Clinton's first secretary of state resigned, Albright was promptly moved up. Clinton and Albright go way back to when she held weekly political discussions at her home when she was with Georgetown University (where Clinton studied).       A noted expert in foreign affairs, she was one of the first to advocate new relationships with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev which led to the fall of the Iron Curtain. /// She also argued that economic sanctions would force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait and she opposed the Gulf War.       MA was on President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council from 1978-81. She advised all the Democratic candidates from Carter on and also advised former Czechoslovakian President Vaclev Havel.       Born in Czechoslovakia, Albright speaks Czech, French, Polish, and Russian as well as English. She is the divorced mother of three daughters and because of the traditional/fearful secrecy - her father was exiled from his homeland - she did not find out she was part Jewish until she was at the U.N.       MA headed the Georgetown University Center for National Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan research group and was director of the Women in Foreign Service program to train women for leadership positions in foreign policy.       Albright is noted for her support of women in government.       Ordinarily the Secretary of State is fourth in line for the presidency in case of disaster but it does not apply to her because she was not born within the borders of the U.S. as required under the U.S. constitution of all presidents. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 05-15 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS B. 05-15-1759, Maria Theresia von Paradis. Although blind from early childhood, this Austrian pianist, organist, composer, and singer composed organ music and light opera and toured Europe giving concerts. She founded a music school for girls and taught singing and piano in Vienna. B. 05-15-1857, Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming, Scottish-born U.S. astronomer who discovered white dwarf stars. She developed the Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra and classified more than 10,000 stars. She identified 222 variable stars, discovered 10 novae, and 94 Wolf-Rayet stars. After emigrating to the U.S., her husband abandoned her when she was pregnant. She got a job as a maid in the home of the director of the Harvard Observatory who, angry at his men for their sloppy work, hired her to show them up at the observatory. She was the first American woman elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1906. B. 05-15-1863, Annie Fellows Johnston, her Little Colonel series of more than 50 novels and sold more than a million books. She didn't get a chance to write until her husband died. B. 05-15-1890, Katherine Anne Porter, American writer most admired for her short fiction. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Stories (1965). B. 05-15-1901, Dorothy Hansine Andersen, American pathologist and pediatrician who in 1938 identified the disease cystic fibrosis and later developed a simplified diagnose. Graduating from Johns Hopkins Medical School, she was unable to get a residency in surgery. After recognizing CF in autopsied baby hearts, her prestige and responsibilities grew, but she was continually maligned (there were always efforts afoot to get ride of that troublesome woman) - a cigarette was usually hanging from the corner of her mouth (she died of lung cancer) and her hair was always a mess - and because she did "unladylike"-things like rebuilding her cabin getaway with her own hands, as well as not being properly deferential. DHA perfected a course on open heart surgery and conducted seminars throughout the country. She had been orphaned at 19 without a single close relative. B. 05-15-1919, Mary Eugenia Charles, prime minister of the Commonwealth of Dominico (1980). B. 05-15-1930, Grace Ogot, Kenyan author of short stories and novels that examined the problems in transition from colonial to modern culture. A nurse and midwife by training she became an announcer for BBC in Kenya, a member of parliament, a United Nations delegate, and a member of UNESCO. Her bride price in 1959 was 25 head of cattle. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR  ALBRIGHT, MADELEINE:       "[I] had to learn to speak out [for myself]. I would be in a White House meeting, and I would think of somethihg and not saying anything because I wasn't sure that it would add to the discussion. Then some man would say what I had been thinking, and it would be hailed as a agreat idea."             -- Madeleine Albright | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |