02-28 TABLE of CONTENTS: Revealing the "unknown" Dr. Alice Hamilton DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTE by Hepzibah Menuhin. Dr. Alice Hamilton, continued from WOA 02-27       Like several other women doctors at the time, Alice Hamilton had to go to Germany to get her advanced education. She studied at Leipzig and Munich on the condition she did not make herself conspicuous and then studied at Johns Hopkins.       After her graduation, she lived at Jane Addams' Hull House in Chicago (she'd heard Addams speak in Germany) and then worked closely with the Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins and with the Department of Interior and was instrumental in gaining worker's compensation laws and safer working conditions. working conditions. She got her MD degree at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 1893 and after her return from Germany taught at the Women's Medical College, Northwestern University and was active in the birth control movement.       An outbreak of typhoid in 1902 led her to take an active role in getting a safe drinking supply but it was exposure to matchmakers and their 'phossy-jaw' from contaminates that led her to her life's work of protecting workers from dangerous substances.       She studied and revealed the dangers of lead poisoning in making of, among other things, bath tubs and hats. She discovered that workers who were killed by nitrous-fume poisoning were being diagnosed as dying of heart failure instead of death by poison. Her last study was the manufacturing and use of viscose rayon (artificial silk) which caused mental disease, loss of vision, and paralysis.       Sometimes her investigations of workers had to be done secretly because of management opposition. She testified innumerable times before the investigatory bodies of Illinois, New York and the U.S. Congress to get safer products for the home as well as safety in the work place against industrial pollutants.       Before Alice Hamilton, no one realized and/or did anything about conditions under which workers were being poisoned and crippled by the chemicals used in their work.       Her grandmother was a friend of Susan B. Anthony. Dr. Hamilton never married. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 02-28 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS B. 02-28-1797, Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and the first woman's college, Mount Holyoke College which was chartered in 1836. Elected to Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1905. B. 02-28-1808, Sybil Jones, pioneer woman speaker and moving force within the American and International Quaker movement. Born in Maine, she traveled in the South to minister to blacks, ministered in Liberia as well as much of Europe, even forming a Friends' school for girls in Palestine (now Israel). B. 02-28-1820, Mademoiselle Rachel, French classical actor. B. 02-28-1882, Geraldine Farrar, American-born opera singer who studied in Europe and became the toast of the continent before being offered a contract at the Metropolitan Opera in 1906. She overworked her voice which broke in a performance in 1913. She returned after a rest and amassed a record of 493 performances of 29 roles including 95 as Butterfly.       She and Arturo Toscanini were lovers for seven years and before that she and Crown Prince Frederick Wilhelm of Germany had been lovers. For her verve and modern life-style she drew a legend of "Gerry-flappers" women fans.       Most HIStorians rank her physical beauty before her voice but contemporary critics including Willa Cather, a rabid opera aficionado described Farrar's voice as "feeling which manifests itself in sound." B. 02-28-1895, Guiomar Novaes, Brazilian concert pianist who specialized in romantics such as Chopin. B. 02-28-1948, Bernadette Peters, Tony award winning stage, screen, and TV actor and singer. Event: 02-28-1960: By a narrow margin, the male residents of Geneva, Switzerland, approved a referendum granting women the right to vote and hold office. Yes, you're reading right - 1960! Event 02-28-1975: the first women ever received their wings after the standard training course with the U.S. Navy. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR MENUHIN, HEPZIBAH:       "Freedom means choosing your burden."             -- Hepzibah Menuhin | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |