06-12 TABLE of CONTENTS: Harriet Martineau was Major Economics Writer DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTES by Harriet Martineau and Joseph Biden. Harriet Martineau was Major Economics Writer Born 06-12-1802, Harriet Martineau, British writer best known for her writings on economics, although she wrote novels, essays, and historical pieces.       She is also noted for her disabilities which ranged from deafness and heart disease - and few mention her greatest disability: her womanhood in a time when clergymen delivered sermons questioning whether women had souls. Her best known work is probably the translation and condensation of the six-volume philosophy of Auguste Comte. He said thought development goes through three stages:       (1) religious, then       (2) abstract, or metaphysical, and finally       (3) scientific. A trip to the U.S. converted her to the then unpopular position of abolitionism. It also marked her philosophical conversion from free enterprise (laissez-faire) to a system akin to socialism.       A trip to the Middle East led her to a study of religions and led her to a deepening doubt towards them all. She was a Unitarian. Her reading public was large and her effect on the intellectuals of the time profound, but she would have been marked as one of the great thinkers of her time except - she was not a man. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 06-12 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS B. 06-12-1829, Johanna Spyri - Swiss novelist, author of Heidi, the endearing tale of a child living in the Swiss Alps. It has been retold many times in plays, film, and on TV making it one of the world's most popular non-folk tales. B. 06-12-1881, Isabel De Palencia, (Sabel De Aplendia) - Spanish Minister Plenipotentiary to Sweden and Finland.       IdP was exiled with other loyalists when Franco took power.       She had edited the first woman's magazine in Spain La Dama when 52% of all Spaniards were illiterate. The literacy for women was much lower because of the machismo society that saw women as merely breeders.       IdP founded the first woman's club in Madrid, was a member of the Spanish delegation to the League of Nations for the Republic, and the first woman to sign a convention for Spain. Djuna Barnes - photo by Berenice Abbott hangs in the Women's Museum of Art in Washington, DC. B. 06-12-1892, Djuna Barnes - U.S. expatriate writer who lived in France best known for Nightwood (1936). Her father orchestrated her rape by one of his friends when she was 15. Event 06-12-1906: the first class graduated from the Simmons College of Boston, the first technical college for women. B. 06-12-1912, Eva Crane - U. S. biologist. EC conducted research on bees and formed a world-wide organization for exchanging authoritative information on bees and bee keeping. B. 06-12-1916, Alice Potter - British illustrator who published a number of ground-breaking children's books with her husband, The series was known as the Puffin Picture books and centering around Alice's marvelous sketches. B. 06-12-1929, Anne Frank - Dutch teenager whose diary written while in hiding from the Nazis for two years in an attic was published as the Diary of a Young Girl.       She died March, 1945, age 16, exact date unknown, in a German concentration camp.       Critics are claiming now that the diaries were embellished. B. 06-12-1929, Antonia Brophy Brigid - British novelist and playwright whose campaign for royalty payment to authors for books lent in libraries resulted in a 1979 royalty law that was funded by the government. ABB was a victim of multiple sclerosis. B. 06-12-1930, Barbara Harris was the first woman bishop of the Episcopalian Church. Black and lesbian, her ordination as suffragan bishop of Massachusetts in 1989 is still being opposed by many in the religious community. Event 06-12-1973: Emily Howell is hired by Frontier airlines, the first woman pilot for a scheduled passenger airline in the United States.       EH had trained male commercial pilots for years. About six months later Bonnie Tiburzi flew out of New York as the first woman pilot of a nation-wide airline, American Airlines. Event 06-12-1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman are slashed and stabbed to death outside Nicole's Brentwood, Calif., condo while her young children sleep upstairs. Event 06-12-1997: Mary Robinson, President of Ireland since 1990, was appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. It is the highest rank any woman has held in the UN and made her the most important human rights advocate in the world. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR "The veneration in which I hold domestic life has always shown me that that life was not for those whose self respect had been early broken down, or had never grown." Harriet Martineau (1802 1876). Everywhere they [Egyptian womenl pitied us European women heartily. . . . They think us strangely neglected in being left so free, and boast of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the value in which they arc held." /// Harriet Martineau (1802 1876) in her _Eastern Life: Present and Past_, 1848. "If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power from the exercises of the right of the strongest." . . . . "Persecution for opinion, punishment for all manifestations of intellectual and moral strength, are still as common as women who have opinions and who manifest strength." . . . . ". . . the sum and substance, of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so." . . . . ".. . there is no country in the world where there is so much boasting of the "chivalrous" treatment (woman) enjoys. . . . In short, indulgence is given her as a substitute for justice. . . . . ". . . fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered." . . . . "It is clear that the sole business which legislation has with marriage is with the arrangements of property; to guard the reciprocal rights of the children of the marriage and the community. There is no further pretence for the interference of the law, in any way." . . . . "Marriage . . . is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient. . . . . ". . . nobody, I believe, defends the arrangement by which . . . divorce is obtainable only by the very rich. The barbarism of granting that as a privilege. . ." . . . . "I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart s-love for legal prostitution (marriage)." . . . . "Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry. . . . . "During the present interval between the feudal age and the coming time, when life and its occupations will be freely thrown open to women as to men, the condition of the female working classes is such that if its sufferings were but made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble through the whole of society." . . . . "What office is there which involves more re- sponsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honour-able, than that of teaching?" . . . . ". . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?" /// -- Harriet Martineau (1802 1876) from her _Society in America_, Vol. III,1837. ". . . in the history of human affections the least satisfying is the fraternal. Brothers are to sisters what sisters can never be to brothers as objects of engrossing and devoted affection." Harriet Martineau (1802 1876). BIDEN, JOE "I don't care is she's walking stark naked from here to the Capitol. ///"I don't care if she is a prostitute or a nun. ///"No man has a right to touch a woman without her consent, and that's what we've got to get across." ///-- Joe Biden, Chairman, U.S. Senate Judiciary committee, 1993. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |