04-19-1995 Episode 264, Women of Achievement and Herstory

      B. 04-19-1901, Edith Clara (Baroness) Summerskill, British
physician and politician, a founder of the Socialist Medical Association
which spearheaded the National Health Service (1948), Member of
Parliament 1938-1961, and chair of the Labour Party 1954-55.
Championed against antiquated laws regarding venereal disease that
required two complaints, pressed for women in the British Home Guard
to have equal rights with men with no special privileges.  
      She said that when she realized that "politicians held the purse
strings" to ease misery, pain, and needless suffering, she ran for a
seat in the parliament, losing twice before winning (elected primarily by
working women) and then upset the powers that be by taking her seat
in her maiden name.
      "I like men very much, but I am an unashamed feminist and I
want women to get a square deal," she said.
      She was president of the Married Women's Association and irately
challenged the military in the parliament in 1941 when she learned that
during a mock invasion drill in the north of England the commanding
officer called "for a thousand women *to pretend* to be hysterical"
because he felt that was what women did. 

04-19 Anniversaries ...............................................

      B. 04-19-1666, Sarah Kemble Knight, merchant businesswoman
whose detailed diary of an amazing trip she took alone on horseback
between Boston, New Haven, and New York in 1704-05 was published
after her death as _The Journal of Madam Knight_ by Theodore Dwight,
Jr. Considered an historically important source for presenting an
accurate social record of colonial times. 

      B. 04-19-1856, Anna Sarah Kugler, graduate of the Pennsylvania
Women's Medical College, she became first medical missionary of the
Lutheran Women's Missionary Society and the only woman physician in
Madras State, India.  Starting with a part-time dispensary in 1883 while
she taught school, Dr. Kulger established a medical compound at Guntur
over the next 16 years that included a 50-bed hospital, as well as
children's and maternity wards, surgical facilities, and even a nurses'
school in spite of the meagerest of funds.  Her autobiographical _Guntur
Mission Hospital_ was published in 1928. 

      B. 04-19-1899, Emily Taft Douglas, elected U.S. Representative,
Illinois, 1944.  An experienced politician and leader in the League of
Women voters and Illinois politics, but Washington reporters wrote about
her being "little and cute" instead of her credentials.  Her first voice
vote was in opposition to the Dies UnAmerican Committee (similar to the
later McCarthy witchhunts) being made a standing committee. 

      Event 04-19-1975, Joan Winn becomes the first black woman to
serve as a judge in Texas.

Quotes du jour ...............................................

  In 1852 Elizabeth Cady Stanton shocked the Women's Temperance
Society by saying,
      "Let no wife remain in the relation of a wife with a confirmed
drunkard.  Let no drunkard be the father of thy children.
      "Let us petition our state government so as to modify the laws
affecting marriage and the custody of children so that a drunkard shall
have no claims on either wife or child."
      At the time women in the United States did *not* have legal
custody of their own children.  Sole custody was in the hands of the
father who had the right to do anything with them that they cared to
do, including giving them to someone else. (What?  That doesn't jive
with what you're reading in the newspapers written by religious
supremacists?  How strange.)


(C) 1995 Irene Stuber, PO Box 6185, Hot Springs National Park, AR
71902, irenestuber@delphi.com. Distribute verbatim copies freely with
copyright notice for non-profit use. Don't let anyone tell you there
weren't notable and effective women throughout history.  They were
always there, but historians failed to note them in our histories so that
each generation of women has had to reinvent themselves.