"Ancient historians marveled at the Amazons. Greek chroniclers could not accustom themselves to the presence of the regiments of women in the army of Mithridates V, King of Pontus, who came warring upon the Roman colonies in Asia Minor at the beginning of the Christian era.
      "Scythian auxiliaries in the persons of these women supported him bravely.
      "The Roman historians expounded fully and long upon the Gothic captives which the Emperor Aurelian led back to the Eternal City in 174 A. D. These heroines, powerful of arm, deep of chest and thick of thigh, swung along in the triumph of the conqueror, wearing their armor like Knights.
      "The Caucasian Mountains for centuries contained various independent bands of women fighters who subsisted on the game they killed and upon the villages they conquered. "Civilized countries put them down as unexplained mysteries."
            -- Dorland, W. A. Newman. The Sum of Feminine Achievement. Boston: The Stratford Company, 1917.
      (Don't you just love that last line: "Civilized countries put them down as unexplained mysteries." Why don't they EVER ask women??)

B. 03-29-1843, Frances Wisebart Jacobs began the kindergarten movement in Colorado. She is the only woman among the 16 Colorado pioneers recognized in stained glass portraits at the state capitol.

B. 03-29-1880, Rosina Lhevinne, outstanding artist and doyenne of piano teachers during her long tenure at Juilliard. She disciplined many of the top musical geniuses of her day including Van Cliburn, John Browning, and Misha Dichter, emphasizing personal interpretation.

Event: 03-29-1932, Theodora Chan Wan is elected president of the newly formed Chinese Women's Association.

B. 03-29-1936, Judith Guest, author. Her novel, Ordinary People, was the first unsolicited manuscript accepted by Viking Publishers in 30 years. The movie version won four Academy Awards, including best picture.

Event: 03-29-1937, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively reverses itself by approving a Washington State minimum wage law for women after having reversed a similar law for New York the year before.

B. 03-29-1954, Karen Ann Quinlan, irreversibly comatose, she "lived" for ten years on artificial feedings and medical breathing machines and brought into focus the right to die with dignity without medical "miracles" that prolong the appearance of life.
      Federal and state law now enable people to determine whether they should be hooked into life-supports and for how long, but many judges refuse to consider a woman's decision as binding, often implying that women's decisions are "whims."
      Make sure you have written documents, properly executed in conformance with your state's law, to express your intentions regarding medical decisions (including "life support" systems that only prolong death), which may need to be made under circumstances in which you may no longer be able to make them for yourself.

COOK, BLANCHE WIESEN:
      "Now nothing shatters the myth of the angel in the house, the fragrant spirit in the garde so fundamentally as the appearance of the independently passionate woman, who chooses her mate, her partner, her lovers, for reasons of her own, and according to the needs and wants of her own chemistry. The myths of Victorian prudery and purity have been history's most dependable means of social control. Class-bound and gender- related, obscured by privets and closets and vanishing documents, establishment lust has followed the dictates of establishment culture; traditionally for men only."
            -- Blanche Wiesen Cook author of Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One 1884-1933, New York: Viking Press. 1992. This book is MUST reading, a true telling of the age and the life of women.