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April 7

04-07 TABLE of CONTENTS: Some notable women... DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTE by Marilyn vos Savant. Some Notable Women       Bessie Abramowitz organized the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was probably the first woman to sign a collective bargaining agreement to settle a labor dispute. She had started small by leading a few of her sister seamstresses out on strike protesting poor working conditions and wages. That strike eventually grew to 20,000 workers and she was chosen by the union members as their arbitrator.       Anna Pedersdotter Absalon - one of the most renowned Norwegian women writers of the Renaissance, who was burned as a witch in 1590. John Masefield turned a description of her into the play The Witch (1926) which ran for a long time on the New York and London stages.       A noted theologian (Roland H. Bainton writing in Women of the Reformation, From Spain to Scandinavia. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1977. ISBN: 0-8066-1568-0) pointed out that all 35 witnesses against Absalon were women. He also discounts the claims that women were burned as witches because they were women, asking "Was this feminine anti-feminism?" (Feminism in 1590? Why does he equate feminism with witch burning?) However, he forgets that he earlier wrote that her husband and the Bishop were too entrenched to be removed, so authorities got at them by charging their wives with witchcraft. Also, that the testifying women were controlled by their men and faced starvation or beatings, or worse - such as being charged as witches - if they failed to obey their husbands' orders. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | 04-07 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS B. 04-07-1890, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author, conservationist, especially for the Florida Everglades, wrote The Everglades: River of Grass (1947) probably the most influential book in Florida's history. It forced the establishment of the Central and South Florida Flood Control that kept the Everglades River system viable.       [I can proudly say that while a newspaper reporter in Broward County, I discovered a sleazy land sales scheme that used a loophole to sell land in that flood control/river district. I exposed it and pressured the Florida Land Sales Commission to force him to return the investors money. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a fabulous woman! She tried so hard to save the real Florida. -- I. Stuber.] B. 04-07-1891, Dr. Martha May Eliot, first woman president of the American Public Health Association (1947), active in UNESCO, and made great contributions to child care regulations. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE | QUOTES DU JOUR VOS SAVANT, MARILYN:       "Why are women listed as a "minority"? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more females than males."             -- Dave Powers, Syracuse, NY.       Marilyn vos Savant wrote the following reply in her column in Parade Magazine:       "The earliest and predominant meaning of 'minority' is 'the condition of being smaller, inferior, or subordinate.' This is the origin of the word, 'minor' when referring to a person under legal age. Even if there are more of them in number, they're still minors. And, as there's no doubt that women have always been subordinate, they are clearly a 'minority' group.       "If it were solely number that defined the term, we would call Caucasians a minority because there are fewer of them in the world than, say, Asians." | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |