March is Women's History Month!!!!

[Greyson]

Barbara Jordan

Member of the U.S. House of Representatives
from Texas's 18th district
In office
January 3, 1973 – January 3, 1979

Texas State Senator from District 11
In office
1967–1973
P
Personal details
Born Barbara Charline Jordan
(1936-02-21)February 21, 1936
Houston, Texas
Died January 17, 1996(1996-01-17) (aged 59)
Austin, Texas
Resting place Texas State Cemetery
Austin, Texas

Political party Democratic
Profession Attorney
Religion Baptist

Barbara Charline Jordan (February 21, 1936 – January 17, 1996) was an American politician and a leader of the Civil Rights movement. She was the first African American elected to the Texas Senate after Reconstruction and the first southern black female elected to the United States House of Representatives. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous other honors. On her death she became the first African-American woman to be buried in the Texas State Cemetery.

In 1976, Jordan, mentioned as a possible running mate to Jimmy Carter of Georgia,[4] became instead the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.[4] Her speech in New York that summer was ranked 5th in "Top 100 American Speeches of the 20th century" list and was considered by some historians[who?] to have been among the best convention keynote speeches in modern history.[citation needed] Despite not being a candidate, Jordan received one delegate vote (0.03%) for President at the convention.[citation needed]

Jordan retired from politics in 1979 and became an adjunct professor teaching ethics at the University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. She again was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 1992.

In 1973, Jordan began to suffer from multiple sclerosis. She had difficulty climbing stairs and she started using a cane and eventually a wheelchair. She kept the state of her health out of the press so well that in the KUT radio documentary Rediscovering Barbara Jordan, President Bill Clinton stated that he wanted to nominate Jordan for the United States Supreme Court, but by the time he could do so, Jordan's health problems prevented him from nominating her.[9] Jordan later also suffered from leukemia.[2]

Jordan's partner of close to 30 years was Nancy Earl. Jordan met Earl, an educational psychologist who would become an occasional speech writer in addition to Jordan's partner, on a camping trip in the late 1960s.[2][4] Jordan never publicly acknowledged her sexual orientation, but in her obituary, the Houston Chronicle mentioned her long relationship with Earl.[10][11] However, one of Jordan's biographers, Mary Beth Rogers, neither confirmed nor denied that the former congresswoman was a lesbian, commenting that there were many reasons to explain why Jordan was so intensely private about her personal life.[12] After Jordan's initial unsuccessful statewide races, advisers warned her to become more discreet and not bring any female partners on the campaign trail.[4][13]

[The_Lady_Snow]

Makers: Women who make America

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[The_Lady_Snow]

Inez Haynes Irwin ~ feminist, author and journalist who published under the name Inez Haynes Gillmore, suffragist, member of the National Women's Party, president of the Author's Guild, founder of the National College Equal Suffrage League while a student at Radcliffe, WWI war correspondent, feminist leader and political activist who was a member of the National Advisory Council of the National Women's Party. Inez wrote over 40 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the biography of the National Women's Party entitled "The Story of the Women's Party in 1921"

[weatherboi]

At age 15, on March 2, 1955 in Montgomery, Claudette Colvin refused to give up her bus seat to a white woman. This was nine months before Rosa Parks took the same action. "…as a teenager, I kept thinking, Why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so that they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.' And I did." Portrait by Robert Shetterly, image and bio on Americans Who Tell the Truth: http://bit.ly/yPnhh8 Read more in the upper elem/ms book, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice: http://bit.ly/13wmSuK Biographical sketches of other women arrested the same year as Rosa Parks who became part of the same legal case: http://bit.ly/15YnIzv

[Kobi]

1. Wyoming Territory is first to grant women the vote, 1869

In 1869, Wyoming’s territorial legislature declared that “every woman of the age of twenty-one years, residing in this territory, may at every election…cast her vote.” Though Congress lobbied hard against it, Wyoming’s women kept their right to vote when the territory became a state in 1890. In 1924, the state’s voters elected the nation’s first female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross.

2. Californian Julia Morgan is first woman admitted to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, 1898

The 26-year-old Morgan had already earned a degree in civil engineering from Berkeley, where she was one of just 100 female students in the entire university (and the only female engineer). After she received her certification in architecture from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, the best architecture school in the world, Morgan returned to California. There, she became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in the state and an influential champion of the Arts and Crafts movement. Though she is most famous for building the “Hearst Castle,” a massive compound for the publisher William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, California, Morgan designed more than 700 buildings in her long career. She died in 1957.

3. Margaret Sanger opens first birth-control clinic in the United States, 1916

In October 1916, the nurse and women’s-rights activist Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth-control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Since state “Comstock Laws” banned contraceptives and the dissemination of information about them, Sanger’s clinic was illegal; as a result, on October 26, the city vice squad raided the clinic, arresting its staff and seizing its stock of diaphragms and condoms. Sanger tried to reopen the clinic twice more, but police forced her landlord to evict her the next month, closing it for good. In 1921, Sanger formed the American Birth Control League, the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood.

4. Edith Wharton is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, 1921

Wharton won the prize for her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Like many of Wharton’s books, The Age of Innocence was a critique of the insularity and hypocrisy of the upper class in turn-of-the-century New York. The book has inspired several stage and screen adaptations, and the writer Cecily Von Ziegesar has said that it was the model for her popular Gossip Girl series of books.

5. Activist Alice Paul proposes the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time, 1923

For almost 50 years, women’s-rights advocates like Alice Paul tried to get Congress to approve the amendment; finally, in 1972, they succeeded. In March of that year, Congress sent the proposed amendment--“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”--to the states for ratification. Twenty-two of the required 38 states ratified it right away, but then conservative activists mobilized against it. (The ERA’s straightforward language hid all kinds of sinister threats, they claimed: It would force wives to support their husbands, send women into combat and validate gay marriages.) This anti-ratification campaign was a success: In 1977, Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the ERA. In June 1982, the ratification deadline expired. The amendment has never been passed.

6. Frances Perkins becomes the first female member of a Presidential cabinet, 1933

Perkins, a sociologist and Progressive reformer in New York, served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. She kept her job until 1945.

7. Janet Guthrie is the first woman to drive in the Indy 500, 1977

Guthrie was an aerospace engineer, training to be an astronaut, when she was cut from the space program because she didn’t have her PhD. She turned to car racing instead and became the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500. Mechanical difficulties forced her out of the 1977 Indy race, but the next year she finished in ninth place (with a broken wrist!). The helmet and suit that Guthrie wore in her first Indy race are on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.

8. President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O'Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, 1981

O’Connor was confirmed that September. She did not have much judicial experience when she began her Supreme Court term—she had only been a judge for a few years and had never served on a federal court—but she soon made a name for herself as one of the Court’s most thoughtful centrists. O’Connor retired in 2006.

9. Joan Benoit wins the first women's Olympic Marathon, 1984

At the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Joan Benoit (today known as Joan Benoit Samuelson) finished the first-ever women’s marathon in 2:24.52. She finished 400 meters ahead of the silver medalist, Norway’s Grete Waitz.

10. Manon Rheaume is the first woman to play in an NHL game, 1992

Manon Rheaume, a goalie from Quebec City, Canada, was no stranger to firsts: She was well-known for being the first female player to take the ice in a major boys’ junior hockey game. In 1992, Rheaume was the starting goalie for the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lighting in a preseason exhibition game, making her the first woman to play in any of the major men’s sports leagues in the U.S. In that game, she deflected seven of nine shots; however, she was taken out of the game early and never played in a regular-season game. Rheaume led the Canadian women’s national team to victory in the 1992 and 1994 World Hockey Championships. The team also won silver at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

11. Madeleine Albright becomes the first female Secretary of State, 1997

In January 1997, the international-relations expert Madeleine K. Albright was sworn in as the United States’ 64th Secretary of State. She was the first woman to hold that job, which made her the highest-ranking woman in the federal government’s history. Before President Bill Clinton asked her to be part of his Cabinet, Albright had served as the country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. In 2004, Condoleezza Rice became the second woman--and first African-American woman to hold the job. Five years later, in January 2009, the former Senator (and First Lady) Hillary Rodham Clinton became the third female Secretary of State.

12. Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, 2010

The American film director Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film "The Hurt Locker" garnered six Oscars on March 7, 2010, including the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Written by Mark Boal, a former journalist who covered the war in Iraq, the movie follows an Army bomb squad unit as they conduct dangerous missions and battle personal demons in war-torn Baghdad. Bigelow, whose previous films include "Strange Days" and "Point Break," was the first woman to take home the Best Director distinction. She triumphed over her former husband, James Cameron, whose science fiction epic "Avatar" was another presumed front-runner.

[The_Lady_Snow]

[StrongButch]

Wilma Mankiller-Was the first woman elected principal chief of Cherokee Nation she worked to improve the lives of Native Americans by helping them recieve better education and health care and urged them to preserve and take pride in their traditions.