"The trailblazing Harvard scientist, who documented the dominance of hydrogen and helium in stars, is still inspiring researchers today."
Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-century-ago-pioneering-astrophysicist-cecilia-payne-gaposchkin-showed-us-what-stars-are-made-of-180986193/
#WomenInHistory
#OnThisDay, 19 March 1944, Yvonne Baseden parachutes into Nazi-occupied France as a Special Operations Executive radio operator. The British SOE supported the French resistance. Radio operators ran the greatest risk of discovery as their position could be triangulated when they were transmitting.
Baseden was captured and sent to Ravensbrück.
She was the subject of the first regular UK edition of This Is Your Life in 1955.
“Once, with hand-grenades in my shopping bag, I travelled in a train so full that I had to stand against a German NCO.”
#OnThisDay, 18 Mar 1943, Francine Agazarian arrives in Nazi-occupied France to be a courier in the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French Resistance.
#OnThisDay, 13 Mar 1990, Ertha Pascal-Trouillot became the provisional president of Haiti. She was the first woman to hold the role.
She stabilised the country for long enough for it to hold a free and fair election.
“I accepted the position in the name of Haitian women. I did it as a service to my country. I did it with love and determination.”
#OnThisDay, 11 Mar 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, is the first play by a Black woman to debut on Broadway.
Hansberry was a rising star when she died young of cancer. Her posthumous play, Young Gifted and Black, inspired her friend Nina Simone to write the song of the same name. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hdVFiANBTk
#OnThisDay, 10 Mar 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson attacks, with a meat cleaver, Velázquez's painting of Venus in the National Gallery in London in protest at the treatment of Emmeline Pankhurst.
Suffragette attacks on art were common enough for Punch to do a cartoon of it.
#VotesForWomen #WomenInHistory #WomensHistoryMonth #BritishHistory #Histodons
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#OnThisDay, 8 Mar 1914, #InternationalWomensDay started to settle on a date.
The idea emerged at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in 1910, inspired by an American national women's day in February 1909. The conference took up the idea and events began to be held each year, demanding equal rights for women.
The first IWD held on 8 March was in 1914 in Germany.
The day and date was formally adopted by the UN in 1977.
#OnThisDay, 8 Mar 1978, over 400 women challenged Queensland’s ban on political marches by marching through Brisbane, Australia, demanding the end of violence against women, the right to abortion and lesbian rights. 51 people were arrested.
"I awoke this morning as one person and retired in the evening as another.”
#OnThisDay, 7 Mar 1838, Jenny Lind makes her stage debut in Sweden. She became a global star, but no recordings seem to survive. A fictionalised version appears in The Greatest Show.
We wrote about her real story, and some other famous opera singers, here: https://carvehername.org.uk/eight-famous-women-singers/
#OnThisDay, 4 Mar 1933, Frances Perkins is sworn in as Secretary of Labor: the first woman to hold a cabinet post in the USA.
She was a workers-rights activist and key builder of the New Deal. She was in FDR's cabinet for all four terms of his Presidency.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #WomenInPolitics #Histodons
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Very early #OnThisDay, 3 Mar 1944, Denise Bloch and Eileen Nearne arrived, separately, into occupied France as wireless operators for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supported the French resistance in sabotaging Nazi operations.
Both women were arrested by the summer. Denise was killed in Ravensbrück. Eileen escaped but never recovered her health.
Short thread!
#OnThisDay, 3 Mar 1913, thousands of women marched through Washington DC in the Suffrage Parade. They are led by Inez Milholland, a lawyer on a white horse, with delegations from each state following.
The day before Ida B Wells and other Black suffragists were told they would be segregated, and had to march at the back. Wells said that she would march with Illinois or not at all.
#WomenInHistory #History #AmericanHistory #WHM #WomensHistoryMonth #VotesForWomen #Histodons
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#OnTheDay, 2 Mar 1977, Bette Davis receives the American Film Institute's lifetime achievement award. She is the first woman to win it.
Of the 50 recipients to date, 11 have been women.
#OnThisDay, 1 Mar 1912, Isabella Godwin is promoted, becoming the first woman police detective in the US after an undercover operation to catch a gang of bank robbers.
#OnThisDay, 1 Mar 1864, Rebecca Lee Crumpler becomes the first woman of colour to become a doctor of medicine in the USA. No confirmed photo of her exists, so here's her book instead.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AmericanHistory #WHM #WomensHistoryMonth #Histodons
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Very late #OnThisDay, 28 Feb 1944, Madeleine Damerment parachuted into occupied France to be an agent for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE worked with the French Resistance.
She was French, and had previously run escape lines for downed airmen. She escaped France in 1942, and then chose to return.
She was immediately arrested as the network had been betrayed. She was executed at Dachau in Sept 1944.
#OnThisDay, 25 Feb 1986, Corazon Aquino is sworn in as President of the Philippines. She is the first women to become President of the country, and to lead a country in southeast Asia.
Aquino had won an election earlier that month but dictator Marcos - who had held power since 1965 - had refused to step down.
The People Power Revolution demanded the restoration of democracy and the military supported her in removing him.
The Little Known Story Of The Woman Who Founded An Alabama Hospital During Jim Crow Era https://shinemycrown.com/the-little-known-story-of-the-woman-who-founded-an-alabama-hospital-during-jim-crow-era/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #BlackHistory #MedicalPioneers #JimCrowEra #AlabamaHistory #WomenInHistory
#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
#OnThisDay, 22 Feb 1943, Sophie Scholl is sentenced to death and immediately executed, alongside her brother and a friend, for distributing anti-Nazi literature at her university in Munich, Germany.
Her cellmate said her last words to her were “how can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go.”
