02-26 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Women in the Air Force
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES by
Carol Hymowitze and Michaele Weissman, and Voltaraine de Cleyre.
Women in the Air Force
In 1944, Liberty Field, Camp Stewart, the Women
of the Air Service Pilots (WASPS) who flew military aircraft during World
War II, were ordered out on ground maneuvers with the regular male Army
troops. Although the women were not military (without military benefits
such as insurance, housing, free meals, health care, or uniforms, etc.),
they were often ordered by misogynistic C.O.'s to perform as if they were
military personnel.
Out in the field without military equipment (the women
often didn't even get shoe rations!) the men were busily showing the women
up when the officers rang an alarm. The WASPs had no idea what the alarm
meant until GI's whipped out gas masks and put them on. Not the WASPs.
They had no gas masks! As the acrid smoke drifts over everyone, the women
gag and cough while the men laughed and the officers smirked.
From Byrd Howell Granger's On Final Approach, The
Women Airforce Service Pilots of W.W.II. Scottsdate, AZ.: Falconer
Publishing Company, 1991. ISBN: 0-9626267-0-8.
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02-26 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 02-26-1599, Mary of the Incarnation (Marie
De L'Incarnation), French mystic. In Canada
she is known not only as a mystic but also for establishing the Ursuline
Order in New France whose responsibilities included the education of girls
in the colony.
B. 02-26-1858, Lavinia Lloyd Dock, nurse, settlement
house worker, suffragist. LLD trained as a nurse at Bellevue Hospital,
the first American school to follow Florence Nightingale's principles of
patient care and nurse self-reliance. LLD nursed during a yellow fever
epidemic in Jacksonville, FL, and at the Johnstown, PA flood.
She wrote Materia
Medical for Nurses (1890), the standard nursing text for a generation.
Moved to the Henry Street Settlement house Lillian Wald had created, became
a member of Wald's inner circle, and lived there for 20 years. She also
wrote A History of Nursing (1907 with Adelaide Nutting which explored
the glorious historical past of women's involvement in nursing, until men
took over to bring "general contempt" to nurses and "misery"
to patients, "until Florence Nightingale came to the rescue."
She had to move out of the Henry Street Settlement because of her actions
- including arrests - in connection with the radical American Woman's movement.
B. 02-26-1858, Alice Mabel Bacon, traveled
in Japan where she both studied and later taught daughters of nobility
at the Peeresses' School in Tokyo. She authored Japanese Girls and Women
(1891) because "while Japan as a
whole has been closely studied, and much and varied information had been
gathered about its country and people, one-half of its population has been
left entirely unnoticed, passed over with brief mention or altogether misunderstood."
She had formed close friendships with many
Japanese women from all classes from princesses to fisherwomen.
B. 02-26-1869, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya,
revolutionary who became Lenin's wife and continued to play a central
role in the Bolshevik revolution and the communist party after his death.
B. 02-26-1906, Madeleine Carroll, Anglo-American
actor best known for her screen portrayals in The Thirty-Nine Steps
(1935) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1937). While some actors played
at being World War II heroes in front of the cameras, MC six years away
from a lucrative career at its peak to do war work.
B. 02-26-1921, Betty Hutton, brash actor/singer
best known for her role in the movie Annie Get Your Gun (1950).
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QUOTES DU JOUR
HYMOWITZE, CAROL and WEISSMAN, MICHAELE:
"One day after the
Patriot defeats at Lexington and Concord, the women of Groton, Massachusetts,
dressed in men's clothing, armed themselves with muskets and pitchforks,
and set out to defend the local bridge from the retreating British. The
women captured a small group of British solders, including a courier carrying
valuable intelligence and handed their prisoners over to the local militia."
--
A History of Women in America by Carol Hymowitze and Michaele Weissman.
Printed in cooperation with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith,
Bantam Books, 1978.
De CLEYRE, VOLTARAINE:
"I never expect men
to GIVE us liberty. No, women, we are not WORTH it, until we TAKE it."
--
Voltaraine de Cleyre (1866-1912).
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