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June 24

06-24 TABLE of CONTENTS: Margaret Brent DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS QUOTES by Jeannette Rankin, Elinor Langer, and Letty M. Russell.       On June 24, 1647, Margaret Brent, the largest landowner in the Maryland colony and executor of the late Maryland Governor's estate demanded two votes in the Maryland assembly. She was refused because of her sex. Some sources say she also attempted to preside over the assembly because at Lord Calvert's death she became acting governor. She was ejected from the assembly for her audacity because "it would set a bad example to ye wives of ye colony."       A remarkable businesswoman, she arrived in Maryland from England in 1638. She received a land grant of 70 acres, the first to be given to a woman in that colony. Through astute business transactions, family connections, etc. (the usual, accepted ways most men operate) she enlarged her holdings until she was the leading landowner in the colony.       Some say that Gov. Calvert was her brother- in- law. Regardless, she was probably named executor because she raised and paid for a troop of soldiers who fought for Calvert during his dispute with a Virginia man.       After she was refused her voting rights, Brent moved to Virginia where HIStorians say she lived in feudal splendor and estorians/herstorians say she became influential in Virginia's colonial affairs. HIStorians also give a great deal of the credit for her success to her brother and family, which ignores the fact that she and not her brother was named executor - and also beg the reverse ... how much did she aid her brother since it was she not he who became the largest landowner in the American colony. 06-24 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS Baptized 06-24-1578, Mary Fitton, whom some critics, in spite of rather conclusive records to the contrary (and Shakespeare's overt homosexuality) insist she is the mysterious "dark lady" of William Shakespeare's sonnets. B. 06-24-1831, Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis, author of startlingly realistic works that predates the realism of Dickens, Zola, etc. One of her children was Richard Harding Davis, noted journalist. B. 06-24-1880, Agnes Nestor - U.S. labor leader. AN emerged as the leader of the 1898 women glove-maker's strike in Chicago when she was only 18. The strike victory ended the pay deduction women had to pay for the rental of the machines the women used to sew gloves. A short time later she led the women into their own union because men did not always support women's needs. She held posts with the International Glove Workers Union for the rest of her life and served as president of the Chicago Women's Trade Union League 1913-1948.       She was a long time advocate of the eight-hour day that became a reality in 1937. Child labor, minimum wage, maternity-health, and women's suffrage were also part of her life's work B. 06-24-1917, Portia White - Afro-Canadian concert and operatic contralto. Event 06-24-1931: Lili de Alvarez shocks social propriety by playing at Wimbledon in shorts instead of the longish, hampering dresses that were de rigueur. Event 06-24-1943: a male pilot failing to take ordinary precautions on the runway following a too fast landing, turns off his radio and smokes his plane around and heads up the runway to the hanger area, right into the path of an incoming PT with no radio.       Marjorie Ketcham piloting the PT as part of the Women's Auxiliary Ferry Unit (WAFS) never sees the AT-6 which slices into her plane. Her facial injuries are terrible and her fiance cannot live with it and breaks their engagement. Event: 06-24-1952: President Harry Truman signs the bill that directs women be commissioned officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force as various medical specialists such as dentists, doctors, osteopaths, and veterinarians. QUOTES DU JOUR RANKIN, JEANNETTE:       "The individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition of the wreckage of self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition."             -- Jeannette Rankin as quoted in Hanna Josephson's biography, Jeannette Rankin, First Lady in Congress, 1974. LANGER, ELINOR: "If in 1970 women who worked had earned the same amount per hour as men who worked, it would have cost employers an additional $96 billion in payroll alone . . . .If women had earned the same as men and worked the same number of hours, the addition to the payroll would have been $303 billion . . . .the significance of the figures, I think is plain enough. The Equal Rights Amendment and the traditional role of women in the capitalistic economy are incompatible."             -- Elinor Langer in "Why Big Business is Trying to Defeat the ERA," May, 1976. RUSSELL, LETTY M.:       "Women not only seek identity in history but begin to seek out their sisters so that, in community, they can build a strong feminist culture which supports the ideas and actions of those who do not think persons are inferior because of their sex. Here the emphasis is on vertical support from the past and from women of the past, as well as horizontal support from sisters close by, and in every part of the globe."             -- Letty M. Russell in Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective - A Theology. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974. | PRIOR DATE |        | HOME |       | WOA INDEX |       | NEXT DATE |   | RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE |