08-08 TABLE of CONTENTS:
Were Lavoissier's Discoveries Actually Those of His Wife?
French Obstetrics Pioneer
Esther Morris's Forceful Personality Won the Vote
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTES from Sheri
S. Tepper.
Were Lavoissier's Discoveries Actually Those of His Wife?
WOAH has been able to confirm
and publish a number of examples about the all to customary mis-attribution
of scientific discoveries to the nearest available male when the discoveries
were actually made by a woman.
However, WOAH has not been able to confirm the following
note to us and would welcome any information. We post is because it has
the ring of truth:
"In the first chapter of almost any chem book, one always reads about
how Antoine Lavoisier established that oxygen is essential to combustion
and from that, with many careful measurements and exhaustive lab work,
formulated the Law of Conservation of Mass, a fundamental chem law that
says matter cannot be created or destroyed in a chem reaction... Well guess
what gals? Hahahaha, he was a politician. His wife did all the work.
"And I am sad to say I have forgotten her first
name. Old Antoine was particularly keen on the politics of his day and
spent most of his waking hours at the local pub arguing with his mates.
His political philosophy caught the attention of the local authorities
who didn't like it very much and ooopsy, he lost his head: guillotined
off... Anyway there are many examples of women doing the work, men taking
the credit, in many fields. And many examples of women posing as men in
order to be published or work... in music, literature, performance, etc."
[The message is signed Kelly]
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
French Obstetrician
Marie Lachapelle (1796-1821) was a French obstetrician
who devised method of shortening labor. Her Pratique des accouchements
(1821-25) in three volumes, summarized 40,000 childbirths. Her mother and
her grandmother had been noted midwives.
Among her most noted innovations was the immediate
repair of perineum that was torn during delivery instead of waiting until
later when the success of the repair was much less. She trained hundreds
of midwives and her modern methods, had they been followed, would have
saved thousands upon thousands of women's lives.
She studied obstetrics in Heidelberg, Germany, and
operated her own hospital for women and children.
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
Esther Morris's Forceful Personality Won the Vote
Born
08-08-1814, Esther Morris - U.S. activist and political figure.
EM is known as the mother of women's suffrage in Wyoming
for being instrumental in the passage (1869) of the territorial women's
suffrage legislation. EM is said to have "nagged" the all-male
legislator with her forceful personality into passing woman's suffrage
and it was finally approved as a joke, thinking that the governor could
certainly veto it. He did not and Wyoming, in 1869, became the first place
in modern western civilization to lift the masculist's ban on women's right
of franchise. Attemps to rescind the act failed and when the territory
of Wyoming was admitted to the U.S., its constitution that allowed women's
voting was retained.
Morris was appointed justice of the peace for South
Pass City, a job for which, Despite the rough character of the gold-mining
town of saloons and fewer than 500 people, her robust frame and blunt fearlessness
well suited her. In her 82 months in the post she tried over 70 cases expeditiously
and without reversal. She was the first woman ever to hold such a position.
By the way, Morris didn't parade or the like. She
worked hard to get her man elected to the Wyoming legislature and he immediately
repaid her by introducing the woman's suffrage bill. Now THAT's how political
power works!
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
08-08 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 08-08-1849, Vera Ivanovna Zasulich - Russian revolutionary who
founded the first Marxist organization in Russia. She was a leader in the
group who opposed the Bolsehviks in 1917. VIZ spend much of her life in
jail, in hiding, or in exile. In 1878 VIZ shot and wounded the governor
of St. Petersburg but was acquitted by the jury in a much-publicized trial.
She was born into a noble family. She favored legal changes in the system
rather than violence.
B. 08-08-1896 B. 08-08-1857, Cécile-Louise-Stéphanie
Chaminade - French composer and pianist. CSC was the recipient of the
ribbon of the Légion d'Honneur for her more than 500 songs
and 200 piano and orchestral works.
B. 08-08-1863, Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey - U.S. ornithologist
and author. She produced the Handbook of Birds of the Western United
States and Birds of New Mexico (1928) as well as a half dozen
other bird guides. She also produced some books with the help of her husband
whom she married after her major publications.
Her powers of observation
veered off into another direction when she was diagnosed with tuberculosis
and went to Arizona and southern Calfiornia for convalescence. There she
researched a devastating book My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894)
that revealed the stiffling life of Mormon women. She was wondrous after
seeing the suffering of women under polygamy but who retained their faith
in it. "The spirit that is first
and best in woman - her power of self-sacrifice in the face of abstract
rights - has been used as a tool or torture and it will be used successfully
until education teaches her that there is a higher light for her to follow."
and later, "I recalled with a shudder
the statistics I had known about the number of farmers; wives who go insane."
During this period she also wrote A-Birding on a Bronco
1896, and Birds of Village and Field (1898).
FAMB was the first woman
associate of the American Ornithologists' Union. She won its Brewster medal
in 1931 for her comprehensive report on the birdlife of the Southwest in
Birds of New Mexico. A variety of California chickadees were named
in her honor.
She attended Smith College.
Her first book was Birds Through an Opera Glass (1889). Her mother
was a graduate of Rutgers Institute.
B. 08-08-1882, Olga Smaroff - U.S. pianist and musician who followed
in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother to become another generation
of concert pianists.
She was the first American
woman to win a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. She performed with
the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphonic Orchestra among others
in the U.S. and Europe.
She gave up her successful
concert career in 1911 to marry but gradually returned to it and her nationwide
concert tours even before after her divorce in 1923 to the dictatorial
orchestra conductor Leopold Stokowski. However, her performing career was
cut short by an arm injury in 1925.
She became a much honored
faculty member of Juilliard graduate school and the Philadelphia Conservatory
of Music. OS established the Schubert Memorial to aid musically talented
young Americans to overcome the prejudices against American-trained artists.
She lectured world-wide
and was a prolific author of books introducing classical music to the layperson.
She joined the faculty of Juilliard graduate school and the Philadelphia
Conservatory of Music. Her autobiography is An American Musician's Story
(1939.)
Her first piano lessons
were by her mother and then her grandmother who was a noted concert pianist.
B. 08-08-1884, Sara Teasdale - U.S. poet, one of the finest lyricists
of her generation. Her later works became haunted and subtle with great
style and depth with an economy of words. She was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer
Prize in poetry for Love Songs (1917).
Most biographers point
to a divorce and "an unhappy life," but she was known to have
had a lasting relationship with at least one woman, She died of an overdose
of barbiturates while ill in 1933.
B. 08-08-1891, Sally Butler - U.S. attorney and president of
Business and Professional Women who pushed for passage of the Equal Rights
Amendment pledging, "[We] will not rest until
trained, equipped women, representing more than half our population, are
elected in large numbers to both the Senate and the House and to leading
posts in state, county, and local government."
When the ERA failed
before Congress on July 19,1946, Butler promised that the fight for its
passage would continue. The fight for equal rights for American women continues
into the 21st century.
Her other aims were appointment
of American women to U.S. Commissions "extension
of the merity system in government with promotion not dependent on employee's
sex," adequate appropriate for the Women's Bureau of the U.S.
Dept of Labor, federal aid in support of public education with state control
and funds and policies guaranteed, universal jury service for women, enactment
of the equal rights amendment, and equal pay for equal work, and legislaltion
restricting child labor.
"The
road ahead is rugged but it is plainly marked. We shall advance surely
and steadily to make the world of tomorrow a man's and a woman's world."
B. 08-08-1896, Majorie Kinnan Rawlings - U.S. writer. Her novel
The Yearling (1938) won the Pulitzer Prize. She had been a reporter,
but it wasn't until she divorced and moved by herself to Cross Creek, Florida,
that she found her fiction writer's voice.
Perhaps her autobiographical
Cross Creek (1942) is her finest as she weaves in poetical voice
how she discovered her Florida home and the richness of the land. She had
suddenly broken off her reporting career and her marriage to move to the
40 acres of orange trees in northern Florida. Writing of the people and
the place, she won the O. Henry memorial Award for her short story "Gal
Young Un" (1933). Other lesser known works followed until The Yearling
burst onto the scene to become an instant classic and win the Pulitzer.
It was also made into a movie. MKR remained at her beloved Cross Creek
home until her death in 1953.
B. 08-08-1901, Nina Nikolayevna Berbérova - Russian novelist,
poet, historian, biographer, and autobiographer. NNB began writing
poetry before the 1917 Revolution when she emmigrated. She lived in Paris
until 1950 when she moved to the U.S. where she taught Russian literature
at Yale and Princeton Universities. Her best known novel is The Accompanist
(1935) but it was her collection of her poetry from 1921 to 1983 that she
was finally recognized as a supreme artist. Her novellas are also much
admired.
B. 08-08-1910, Sylvia Sidney - U.S. stage, film, and TV actor
who was still on the boards and acting before TV cameras in her 70s. She
was type-cast in Hollywood films as a lower, middle-class victim of life
although she was an accomplished sophistical actor and comedian. In later
years, her long-time hobby of needlepoint led to her to publishing several
creative books that featured her original designs and kits.
B. 08-08-1914, Erica Collier Anderson - Austrian-born film maker
and photographer.
B. 08-08-1922, Dr. Gertrude Himmelfarb - historian, expert on
Victorian England.
B. 08-08-1923, Esther Williams - Hollywood actor and swimmer.
B. 08-08-1937, Tootsie, alias Dustin Hoffman who discovered the
feminine side of his nature (at least in the movie).
B. 08-08-1938, Connie Stevens - U.S. singer/actor.
B. 08-08-1948, Svetlana Y Savitskaya - Russian astronaut who
was the second woman in space (Soyuz T-7, T-12).
B. 08-08-1950, Geraldine Stuber - a chip off the old block. The
middle child of Irene Stuber, and granddaughter of a woman union organizer,
Geri worked her way up to manager of a restaurant in Hollywood, FL that
was part of a national chain. When the corporation that owned her restaurant
was taken over by another corporation - one directed by foreign nationals
who opposed women's rights - she and all other women in management for
the entire chain were fired. She filed suit and the anti-woman corporation
settled handsomely out of court. Attagirl, Geri! Have I told you lately
how proud of you I am?
B. 08-08-1958, Deborah Norville - U.S. broadcast journalist who
replaced Jane Pauley on the Today show and who was replaced herself after
she had a baby (and after she was shown in a magazine article breast feeding
her son.) Her mother was merchandising vice president of a manufacturing
firm before her marriage. DN was a beauty pageant queen. She continues
in TV.
Event 08-08-1983: A jury in Kansas City, MO, awards TV anchorwoman
Christine Craft $500,000 in sex discrimination suit against KMBC-TV for
removing her from her anchor position because she was too old, too fat,
and not deferential to men. The judgment was later overturned by an appeals
court. The judgment of discrimination was upheld but no money awarded.
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
QUOTES DU JOUR
TEPPER, SHERI:
From Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri
S. Tepper. Sheri Tepper keeps getting better and better and better. What
marvelous insights into the what-if future her novels give us! And what
pride in women! Oh do read her books!
"So
we go back to men doing what they want and women doing what men want...
"Mankind is a good word.
"Or humankind. I'm afraid we've spent a lot of
feminist energy on meaningless symbols rather than essential functions.
All through the seventies and eighties we should have been pushing for
a truly bicameral government: a men's Senate and a women's Senate, a men's
House of Representatives and a women's House, with each sex electing a
president in alternate terms.
"Instead of gingriching issues affecting primarily
women and children, like pregnancy, child-birth, abortion, welfare, childhood
education, and the like, men would leave them to women to decide. Men could
then pay full attention to issues of preeminent concern to men, like restructuring
professional baseball."
"We
have such different ideas about what women are. For instance, in your religion
your priests say woman brought sin into the world when she bit into the
apple, but my people would say man brought sin into the world when God
asked who did it and Adam blamed Eve. Which is the greater sin? Intellectual
curiosity? Or betrayal? Scientific experimentation? Or disloyalty?"
"But
now [she] wanted to slow down and give her mind some room. She wanted to
become what [was] called a Baba Yaga: an old hen, crouching on the top
rail of the fence and clucking warnings to the chicks. If the rooster would
just come up there and hunker down and stop crowing, they could talk about
life and share the last of their time together.
"But no; he still had his cock-a-doodle, and
he would not trade it for this satisfying androgyny of experience. If the
hen will not submit - or, perhaps, regardless of whether she will or not
- the rooster will go down among the pullets and begin again.
"The hell with it! Estrogen replacement and plastic
surgery be damned. One could not pretend to pullethood forever."
-- Sheri S. Tepper, Gibbon's Decline and Fall.
| PRIOR DATE |
| HOME |
| WOA INDEX |
| NEXT DATE |
| RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
|
|