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.
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