Roosevelt was a member of the prominent American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She had an unhappy childhood, having suffered the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers at a young age. At 15, she attended Allenswood Boarding Academy in London and was deeply influenced by its headmistress Marie Souvestre. Returning to the U.S., she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in 1905. The Roosevelts' marriage was complicated from the beginning by Franklin's controlling mother, Sara, and after Eleanor discovered her husband's affair with Lucy Mercer in 1918, she resolved to seek fulfillment in leading a public life of her own. She persuaded Franklin to stay in politics after he was stricken with a paralytic illness in 1921, which cost him the normal use of his legs, and began giving speeches and appearing at campaign events in his place. Following Franklin's election as Governor of New York in 1928, and throughout the remainder of Franklin's public career in government, Roosevelt regularly made public appearances on his behalf; and as First Lady, while her husband served as president, she significantly reshaped and redefined the role of First Lady.
Though widely respected in her later years, Roosevelt was a controversial First Lady at the time for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights for African-Americans. She was the first presidential spouse to hold regular press conferences, write a daily newspaper column, write a monthly magazine column, host a weekly radio show, and speak at a national party convention. On a few occasions, she publicly disagreed with her husband's policies. She launched an experimental community at Arthurdale, West Virginia, for the families of unemployed miners, later widely regarded as a failure. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the civil rights of African Americans and Asian Americans, and the rights of WW2 refugees. Following her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life. She pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights and oversaw the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, she chaired the John F. Kennedy administration's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. By the time of her death, Roosevelt was regarded as "one of the most esteemed women in the world"; The New York Times called her "the object of almost universal respect" in an obituary.
Flikke (1879-1965) was born in rural Wisconsin, but moved to Chicago following the death of her husband from tuberculosis in 1911. Here she trained at the Augustana Hospital School of Nursing, returning a few years later as assistant superintendent after post-graduate study at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York.
Flikke enrolled in the Army Nurse Corps in March 1918, and traveled to France where she served as chief nurse. After a short period in the United States after the war, she completed tours of duty in places such as the Philippines and China before spending a number of years at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington D.C. where she was promoted to the rank of captain and appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps.
In 1937 Flikke succeeded the highly respected Julia Stimson as Superintendent, and was promoted to the rank of major. This was the highest rank available to women at the time, although it was much lower than the men who headed up other parts of the Army.
As the advent of the Second World War saw the United States Army expand at a swift pace, Flikke oversaw the growth for the ANC from around 700 nurses in 1940 to tens of thousands by 1943. It was during this period that the government passed Public Law 828, which authorized commissions up to the rank of colonel for Army nurses.
Three months later, on 13 March 1942, Flikke became the first woman in the United States Army to hold the rank of colonel. Although her rating was only temporary, it marked in important step towards the Army-Navy Nurse Act of 1947 that made such appointments permanent.
Julia Otteson Flikke (March 16, 1879 in Viroqua, Wisconsin – February 23, 1965) was an American nurse. Her service to the United States Army Nurse Corps spanned both world wars and included overseas assignments in the Philippines and China. In 1927, she was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the ANC and was promoted to the relative rank of captain. In 1937, she succeeded Julia Stimson as Superintendent with the relative rank of major. She was the last superintendent to hold the office before the statutory limitation of four years was placed on the tenure. She was also the first woman to hold the rank of full colonel in the Army. Although the rating was temporary then (1942), it marked a step forward to granting of full military rank and privileges in 1947. She retired [age 65] due to disability in June 1943.
Julia O. Flikke was born in Viroqua, Wisconsin, on March 16, 1879. She would receive her early education there. Flikke married in 1901, but her husband died ten years later. The following year, she entered the School of Nursing of the Augustana Hospital in Chicago. She graduated in 1915, and, after several months of postgraduate education, Flikke accepted a post as assistant principal of her old school. She would stay there until entering the United States Army Nurse Corps on March 11, 1918, and (after being promoted to chief nurse) serving in Lakewood Township, New Jersey as well as Staten Island. Flick moved to Base Camp No. 11, in France in 1918, serving in several hospitals before returning to the United States in 1919. She first worked at Camp Upton, and subsequently travelled around the country, before setting in Walter Reed General Hospital, where she would work for twelve years.
When the first members of the American Expeditionary Force arrived in France in 1917 they found that the telephone lines already in operation were overloaded. To solve the problem, John J Pershing called for experienced, bilingual switchboard operators, which meant women. Hundreds would don the uniform and answer the call as “Hello Girls”, serving in the Signal Corps.
The dam was designed and built between 1924 and 1926 by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, then named the Bureau of Water Works and Supply. The department was under the direction of its general manager and chief engineer, William Mulholland.
At 11:57 p.m. on March 12, 1928, the dam catastrophically failed, and the resulting flood killed at least 431 people. The collapse of the St. Francis Dam is considered to be one of the worst American civil engineering disasters of the 20th century and remains the second-greatest loss of life in California's history, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The disaster marked the end of Mulholland's career.
Maureen Morfydd Colquhoun (née Smith, 12 August 1928 – 2 February 2021) was a British economist and Labour politician. She was Britain's first openly lesbian member of Parliament (MP).
Colquhoun was elected as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Northampton North at the February 1974 general election, and identified with the Tribune Group, and served as the group's treasurer. Arguing in favour of creche facilities for female delegates at the following year's Labour conference, she said in October 1975:
"It is outrageous that we have to ask for this. The Labour Party pays mere lip service to International Women's Day. ... Young women are deterred from coming because there is no provision for their babies. Those who do are not even allowed to bring their toddlers into the gallery."
In 1975 she introduced the Balance of Sexes Bill with the objective to require men and women on public bodies in equal numbers. She had identified 4500 jobs appointed by Ministers, and 174 public bodies that were almost entirely male. In her speech to introduce the second reading of the Bill, she commended changes that had been made to the nominations process for the 'central list' from which candidates for government bodies could be selected, although she doubted that it was sufficiently broad to encourage applications from all areas of society. The Bill did not become law.
In 1976, Colquhoun was among nine Labour MPs advocating in a letter to The Times an "alternative policy" on Northern Ireland, including the removal of British troops from the country. She drew a negative response from members of her constituency party, in an area with a significant non-white population, for appearing to defend Enoch Powell in January 1977.
"I am rapidly concluding that Mr Powell, whom I had always believed to be a racialist before I went into the House of Commons, is not one".
She thought that sometimes it was wrong for members of her party to stop listening to what he was saying, and that the "real bogeymen are in the Labour Party" who do not improve the conditions for people in the multi-racial inner-cities. In February 1977, she expressed regret for her comments to her constituency party, withdrew any suggestion she supported Powell's opinions, and affirmed her support for a multi-racial society.
In 1979, she introduced the Protection of Prostitutes Bill into the House of Commons, turning up with 50 prostitutes in order to campaign for the decriminalisation of prostitution.
Colquhoun was Britain's first openly lesbian MP. In 1973, as a married mother of three teenage children, she left her husband of 25 years, Sunday Times journalist Keith Colquhoun, for the publisher of Sappho magazine, Babs (Barbara) Todd.
Colquhoun was deselected due to her sexuality and her feminist views; in late September 1977, members of her constituency party's General Management Committee voted by 23 votes to 18, with one abstention, to deselect her, citing her "obsession with trivialities such as women's rights". The local party chairman Norman Ashby said at the time:
"She was elected as a working wife and mother ... this business has blackened her image irredeemably".
"My sexuality has nothing whatever to do with my ability to do my job as an MP", Colquhoun insisted in an article for Gay News in October 1977.
The vote by her constituency party was overruled in January 1978, as supporters of Colquhoun appealed to the National Executive Committee, who agreed that Colquhoun had been unfairly dismissed owing to her sexual orientation. Colquhoun wanted to put the past behind her and work with her local party, but the Vice-Chair of the General Management Committee said he thought that was impossible as many members were unwilling to work for Colquhorn's re-election, the prospects for which he thought were not promising. At the 1979 general election, she lost her seat to the Conservative Antony Marlow on an 8% swing.
She divorced her husband in 1980. Babs Todd was still her partner at Todd's death on 13 February 2020.Colquhoun died on 2 February 2021 at the age of 92.
The issue of women’s suffrage in New Zealand began to gain momentum in the second half of the 19th century. Like in other countries, women in New Zealand had been excluded from political life. Drawing strength from the broader American and northern European movements for women’s rights, some of New Zealand’s leading suffrage campaigners argued that equal rights for women were necessary for the moral improvement of society.
The New Zealand branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union was a driving force behind the movement, which was energised by campaigners such as Kate Sheppard and Mary Ann Müller. By the start of 1893 they had secured widespread support for women’s suffrage, as shown through the thousands of names that appeared on petitions.
After previous attempts to pass bills to give women the right to vote had failed to make it through Parliament, the 1893 Women's Suffrage Petition led to a new Electoral Bill that would grant suffrage to women of all races easily passing through the Lower House.
Although the Upper House was divided on the issue, a late switch by two councillors who had originally opposed the bill led to it passing by 20 votes to 18 on 8 September 1893. Lord Glasgow signed it into law 11 days later, enabling women to vote in the general election. The European part of the election took place on 28 November and saw 65% of all eligible New Zealand women turn out to vote.
Exactly 26 years later, on 28 November 1919, Lady Astor became the first elected British female MP to take her seat in the British House of Commons.
Women in the Second World War took on many different roles during the War, including as combatants and workers on the home front. The Second World War involved global conflict on an unprecedented scale; the absolute urgency of mobilizing the entire population made the expansion of the role of women inevitable, although the particular roles varied from country to country. Millions of women of various ages died as a result of the war.
In Britain, women were essential to the war effort. The contribution by civilian men and women to the British war effort was acknowledged with the use of the words "home front" to describe the battles that were being fought on a domestic level with rationing, recycling, and war work, such as in munitions factories and farms and men were thus released into the military. Women were also recruited to work on the canals, transporting coal and munitions by barge across the UK via the inland waterways. These became known as the "Idle Women", initially an insult derived from the initials IW, standing for Inland Waterways, which they wore on their badges, but the term was soon adopted by the women themselves. Many women served with the Women's Auxiliary Fire Service, the Women's Auxiliary Police Corps and in the Air Raid Precautions (later Civil Defence) services. Others did voluntary welfare work with Women's Voluntary Services and the Salvation Army.
Britain underwent a labour shortage where an estimated 1.5 million people were needed for the armed forces, and an additional 775,000 for munitions and other services in 1942. It was during this "labour famine" that propaganda aimed to induce people to join the labour force and do their bit in the war. Women were the target audience in the various forms of propaganda because they were paid substantially less than men. It was of no concern whether women were filling the same jobs that men previously held. Even if women were replacing jobs with the same skill level as a man, they were still paid significantly less due to their gender [Expressed differently, women were paid less because of male prejudice.]. In the engineering industry alone, the number of skilled and semi-skilled female workers increased from 75 per cent to 85 per cent from 1940–1942. According to Gazeley, even though women were paid less than men, it is clear that women engaging in war work and taking on jobs preserved by men reduced industrial segregation.
When Britain went to war, as before in World War I, previously forbidden job opportunities opened up for women. Women were called into the factories to create the weapons that were used on the battlefield. Women took on the responsibility of managing the home and became the heroines of the home front. According to Carruthers, this industrial employment of women significantly raised women's self-esteem as it allowed them to carry out their full potential and do their part in the war. During the war, women's normative roles of "house wife" transformed into a patriotic duty. As Carruthers put it, the housewife has become a heroine in the defeat of Hitler.
The roles of women shifting from domestic to masculine and dangerous jobs in the workforce made for important changes in workplace structure and society. During the Second World War, society had specific ideals for the jobs in which both women and men participated. When women began to enter into the masculine workforce and munitions industries previously dominated by men, women's segregation began to diminish. Increasing numbers of women were forced into industry jobs between 1940–1943. As surveyed by the Ministry of Labour, the percentage of women in industrial jobs went from 19.75 per cent to 27 per cent from 1938–1945. It was very difficult for women to spend their days in factories, and then come home to their domestic chores and care-giving, and as a result, many women were unable to hold their jobs in the workplace.
Women were "drafted" in the sense that they were conscripted into war work by the Ministry of Labour, including non-combat jobs in the military, such as the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS or "Wrens"), the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF or "Waffs") and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Auxiliary services such as the Air Transport Auxiliary also recruited women. In the early stages of the war such services relied exclusively on volunteers, however by 1941 conscription was extended to women for the first time in British history and around 600,000 women were recruited into these three organizations. In these organizations women performed a wide range of jobs in support of the Army, Royal Air Force (RAF) and Royal Navy both overseas and at home. These jobs ranged from traditionally feminine roles like cook, clerk and telephonist to more traditionally masculine duties like mechanic, armourer, searchlight and anti-aircraft instrument operator. British women were not drafted into combat units, but could volunteer for combat duty in anti-aircraft units, which shot down German planes and V-1 missiles. Civilian women joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which used them in high-danger roles as secret agents and underground radio operators in Nazi occupied Europe.
Anna Walentynowicz ([ˈanna valɛntɨˈnɔvʲit͡ʂ]; née Lubczyk; 15 August 1929 – 10 April 2010) was a Polish free trade union activist and co-founder of Solidarity, the first non-communist trade union in the Eastern Bloc. Her firing from her job at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980 was the event that ignited the strike at the shipyard, set off a wave of strikes across Poland, and quickly paralyzed the Baltic coast. The Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) based in the Gdańsk shipyard eventually transformed itself into Solidarity; by September, more than one million workers were on strike in support of the 21 demands of MKS, making it the largest strike ever.
Walentynowicz's arrest became an organizing slogan (Bring Anna Walentynowicz Back to Work!) in the early days of the Gdańsk strike. She is referred to by some as the "mother of independent Poland."
The union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981, representing one-third of the country's working-age population. In 1983 Solidarity's leader Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the union is widely recognized as having played a central role in the end of communist rule in Poland.
In 2006, she was awarded Poland's highest honour, the Order of the White Eagle. In 2020, Time magazine included her on the list of 100 Women of the Year who influenced the world over the last 100 years.
Salter joined the Royal Air Force at the age of 18 with the intention of becoming an engineering officer but she went on to train as a pilot after the British government announced that women would be allowed to fly jet aircraft in 1992. As part of her engineering training she had studied at the Royal Military College of Science. Salter was awarded her wings on 3 April 1992 and at the end of 1992 she finished her fast jet training at RAF Brawdy with Dawn Hadlow (nee Bradley), who became Britain's first RAF female flight instructor.
In August 1994 Salter joined 617 Squadron at RAF Lossiemouth in August 1994 as a flight lieutenant, and was declared "combat ready" by the RAF on 21 February 1995. Salter was the first woman to be an operational Tornado pilot and she later flew from both Turkey and Saudi Arabia in protection of the no-fly zone over Iraq. Whilst flying ground attack Tornados, Salter started an MBA course with the Open University in 1996, being sponsored by the MoD, she completed the course in 1999.
Emily Davison stepped into the path of the King's horse at the 1913 Derby and was fatally injured. Exploring how a middle-class governess became a radical activist.
Frustrated by the lack of progress made by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies from whom the group had split, the WSPU (Women's Social & Political Union) soon became known for its militant and sometimes violent actions under the motto ‘Deeds, not words’.
The WSPU sought votes for women on the same basis as votes for men rather than universal suffrage. Many men at the time were denied the vote due to property qualifications, which meant the proposals by the WSPU were seen by some not as ‘votes for women’ but ‘votes for ladies’. The WSPU even split from the Labour Party after Labour voted in favour of universal suffrage, leading the suffragettes to became more explicitly middle-class.
The actions of the suffragettes soon brought into question the traditional ideas of ladylike behaviour as they were routinely arrested for activities that were designed to shock the refined members of the establishment. Actions such as window breaking, arson and the sending of letter bombs routinely saw members of the WSPU imprisoned, where they would often go on hunger strike and be subjected to force-feeding by the authorities. The best known militant action is probably that of Emily Davison who was killed after stepping in front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby.
Daily Mail newspaper reporter Charles Hands introduced the term ‘suffragette’ to describe the WSPU’s members as a way to distinguish their violent actions from those of the less militant suffrage groups.
