Sweet Wilma

First American woman to win three gold medals in the Olympics, born 1940 in St. Bethlehem, Tennessee; died of brain cancer, November 12, 1994 in Nashville, Tennessee.  

From the unlikeliest of beginnings, Wilma Rudolph became one of the most admired women of the 20th century.  Her father was a porter and her mother was a housekeeper 6 days a week in a Southern town which was still gripped by Jim Crow.  She was born prematurely, weighing just 4-1/2 pounds, the sixteenth of her father's nineteen children (11 of them were stepbrothers and sisters).  The doctors didn't give her much of a chance of survival, but she lived through several bouts of illness in her first 3 years.  When she was 4, she contracted double pneumonia, scarlet fever and polio, and the prognosis was grim; soon the muscles in her left leg and foot weakened to the point where she couldn't use them, and the doctors at the nearest hospital for blacks, 50 miles away from her hometown, said she'd never walk.  For 2 years, Wilma's mother took her by bus to Nashville for physical therapy, bought her special shoes and put her leg in metal braces.  Gradually she walked, but haltingly.  When she was 11, she shocked her entire family by throwing away the braces during a church service and walking down the aisle.  In short order she found she could also run, and she seemed to be a pretty good with a basketball, shooting hoops through the peach basket her brother had set up in their yard.  At 13, she made the girls' basketball team at Clarksville High School and averaged 32.1 points per game, a state record.  Her coach encouraged her to run, and she enjoyed an undefeated record before qualifying for U.S. Olympic track team in 1956.  

In the Olympics at Melbourne, the 16-year old Rudolph won a bronze medal in the 4 x 100-meter relay.  She entered Tennessee State University in 1957 to work with the famed coach of the Tigerbelle track team, Ed Temple.  (For his part, Temple said his only contribution to Rudolph's greatness was that he reduced her intake of junk food.)  She was sidelined with injuries over much of the next several years, and a tonsillectomy threatened to take her out of the 1960 Olympics.  She managed to recover, however, setting a world record for the 200-meter dash during the Olympic trials.  When she arrived in Rome, the foreign press was captivated by her charming smile, her graceful 5'-11" frame and her deceptively easy, long strides, calling her "La Perle Noire" (the "black pearl") or "La Gazzella Nera" (the "black gazelle"); indeed, even the American press made itself look a little silly by celebrating her beauty, after years of neglecting women athletes, especially African-American ones.  By the end of the games, she had won the 100-meter dash by three yards with a time of 11 seconds; easily beat the field in the 200-meter dash with a time of 23.2 seconds; and, running the anchor leg of the 4 x 100-meter relay, she led the team to a world-record 44.4 second race despite a sloppy final pass of the baton, becoming the first American woman to win three gold medals at the Olympics.  

After an audience with Pope John XXIII, she returned to Tennessee, where she was honored with the first ever racially-integrated parade in her hometown of Clarksville.  Through it all, Rudolph radiated a sweetness which reflected the gratitude she felt for being given the chance to succeed, becoming one of the most beloved sports figures ever.  After the Olympics she finished college; set a new world record in the 100-meter dash (11.2); and won the Sullivan Trophy as America's best amateur athlete (1961), becoming only the third woman to do so up to that time.  She later had 4 children, wrote a best-selling autobiography (later filmed as Wilma, starring Cicely Tyson), modeled extensively, and worked tirelessly to support underprivileged athletes.  

"She was always in my corner.  If I had a problem, I could call her at home.  It was like talking to someone you knew for a lifetime." -- Jackie Joyner-Kersee. 

Ever Try to Win an Earthquake?

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." -- Jeannette Rankin.

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, was born on this day in 1880 near Missoula, Montana.

A graduate of the University of Montana with a B.S. in biology, Rankin taught briefly in Montana before settling in New York and attending the School of Philanthropy studying social work. She worked briefly at a children's home in Spokane, Washington, studied at the University of Washington and joined the women's suffrage movement, returning to Montana in 1910 to lobby for the passage of the suffrage bill introduced there as the first woman to speak before the all-male Montana legislature.

Rankin drew a forceful connection between conditions of poverty and the inability of women to affect the democratic process, as well as arguing that women were being taxed without representation. While she was unsuccessful in Montana, she attracted the attention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which appointed her as a field secretary. She successfully directed the effort for suffrage in North Dakota, then quit NAWSA and returned to Montana to continue the suffrage fight.

In November 1914, Montana granted women the right to vote. Running as a Republican for one of Montana's 2 at-large congressional seats, Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916. Young and attractive, she became an object of media curiosity, but she also bore the responsibility, somewhat unfairly, of being the voice of American women in Congress. Thus, her position on the most important issue before the 65th Congress, American entry into World War I, became a hotly debated topic among leaders of the suffrage movement. NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt cautioned that a vote against the war would make women seem unpatriotic (and many had not yet received the right to vote which would be guaranteed by the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1920); meanwhile, the more radical Alice Paul thought that women should stand together for peace.

With the first vote on the issue of war ever cast by a female parliamentarian in the history of the Western world, Rankin voted with 49 other congressmen against Wilson's declaration of war in 1917 -- a position that cost Rankin her seat in the following congressional election. In one term, however, Rankin served as the ranking minority member of the special committee which drafted the women's suffrage amendment; sponsored a women's health education bill which later passed as the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921); presented the demands of the Industrial Workers of the World to the federal government during the Anaconda Copper Company strike in Butte, Montana; and enjoyed immense popularity throughout the country.

After leaving Congress, Rankin joined the pacifist cause with all her energies, helping to found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, repeatedly testifying before Congress against military budget increases, and lobbying for women's and children's legislation around the U.S.

As World War II loomed on the horizon, Rankin ran for Congress again in 1940, and with the help of well-known pacifists such as Bruce Barton, she won. Although Speaker Sam Rayburn would not permit her to speak against the War, she nonetheless voted against it -- this time as the only representative to do so -- and was jeered on the House floor. Failing to win reelection, in later years Rankin traveled to India to study nonviolent resistance with Mahatma Gandhi and organized an anti-Vietnam War march on Washington at the age of 88.

Fight Like Hell for the Living

"Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." -- Mother Jones.

Mother Jones, the labor agitator known as the "Miners' Angel," is thought to have been born Mary Harris on this day in 1830 in Cork, Ireland (although some recent research suggests she may have been born on August 1, 1837).

Mary Harris emigrated from Ireland to Toronto with her mother and siblings as a youngster, joining her father there, who had allegedly fled prosecution in Ireland for his revolutionary activities. Following her own grammar school education, she taught for awhile in public and convent schools before settling in Chicago as a seamstress. Before the Civil War she moved to Memphis, where she met and married George Jones, an iron molder and union member. They enjoyed a happy marriage and had 4 children together, until a plague of yellow fever swept through Memphis' Irish-American "Pinch" ghetto; within a week, 38-year old Mary had lost her husband and all 4 children to the disease. She returned to Chicago to resume dressmaking, but there fell victim to the great Chicago fire of 1871, in which her home and all of her possessions were destroyed.

Wandering through victim's shelters after the fire, she stumbled upon an underground meeting of the Knights of Labor. She was befriended by Terence Powderly, and thereafter she decided to devote her life to the labor movement. From the 1870s to the turn of the century, she became a somewhat unlikely "Forrest Gump" of the blossoming union cause. With her deceptively fragile and demure looks, trademark bonnet and long lace-trimmed dresses, she criss-crossed the country, appearing (by her own account) at nearly every major happening -- from the violent 1877 railroad strike in Pittsburgh, to the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago, to the 1884 march of Coxey's Army on Washington, to the 1899 establishment of Eugene Debs' Social Democratic Party -- gathering intelligence and working behind the scenes.

By the 1890s, she was known as "Mother Jones" to the initiated, but was nothing like the stereotype of motherly meekness and mildness; her embodiment of motherhood was as a tireless, fighting mother who stood up straight-backed to thuggery and brutal authority on behalf of her working "sons" and "daughters." Her experiences in Alabama textile mills in the late 1890s, where 30% of textile workers were underage, led her to take on child labor as a cause, writing articles for Socialist rags, giving speeches and, in 1903, leading a "Children's Crusade" from a textile mill in Pennsylvania to Theodore Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, to demand a federal child labor law.

In 1899, she gave aid to anthracite miners in Pennsylvania by organizing their wives into a broom and mop militia against strikebreakers -- "raising hell up in the mountains with a bunch of wild women," as one reporter put it. She was unabashed about the aura of violent resistance she inspired: "I'm not a humanitarian," she would say, "I'm a hellraiser." For the next two decades, sometimes as an agent of the United Mine Workers (with whom she often disagreed on policy matters), she concentrated much of her efforts in the coalfields of West Virginia and Colorado. In West Virginia she participated in 5 major strikes, and in 1912, faced with martial law, Mother Jones was arrested during a march on Charleston to see Gov. Glasscock (on the rumor that she had planned to assassinate him). A military court convicted her of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced her to 20 years in prison, but a state commission settled the strike and the new governor, Henry Hatfield, commuted her sentence. Meanwhile, by the end of World War I, about half of West Virginia's miners would become union members.

Arriving in Colorado in 1913, she recommended a strike against John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The authorities physically escorted Jones out of the state 3 times; when she re-entered, she was subjected to a bogus smallpox quarantine on one occasion and locked for a month in the rat-infested basement of the Walsenburg courthouse on another. Pancho Villa, who had benefited from her call for an inquiry into the treatment of Mexican revolutionaries jailed in the U.S., wrote to President Wilson to appeal for her release. In April 1914, the Colorado authorities overplayed their hand, massacring 20 women and children during a raid on a union camp at Ludlow. Ludlow became Mother Jones' touchstone as she testified before Congress, and by December, federal mediators descended on Colorado and exacted an uneasy peace. The following month, Rockefeller invited Jones to his office in New York, and they apparently enjoyed some version of a meeting of the minds: Rockefeller permitted a company union to be formed and dropped some criminal charges against the strikers, and Jones publicly announced (to the outrage of fellow travelers such as Upton Sinclair) that she didn't "hold the boy [Rockefeller] responsible."

Ideologically, she has been accused of being inconsistent: she chided the United Mine Workers for selling out to cooperation with management, but, even as a founder of the IWW in 1905, she broke with the Wobblies, seeing them as too radical for her taste. Often without an official home for her activities, she frequently freelanced, joining William Z. Foster in a post-World War I steel walkout, and traveling as a delegate to the 1921 Pan-American Labor Congress in Mexico, where her train was stopped by striking jewelry workers and she was showered with carnations and violets.

She died a few months after a grand 100th birthday party, on November 30, 1930 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was buried with the victims of the Virden mine massacre at Mt. Olive, Illinois. Her power as an icon of the movement, representing the native strength of the archetypically weak, dissipated somewhat as the union movement settled into respectability in the years after her death, but in the 1960s her image was resurrected as her name became the title of a leftist magazine, and she has become something of a patron saint of radicalism.

Giliani the Prosector

Alessandra Giliani died on this day in 1326 at the age of 19.

A student at the University of Bologna, Giliani became an assistant to Mondino dei Luzzi, a leading anatomist, serving as the first woman prosector, or preparer of dissections for anatomical study. She developed a method of draining blood from the corpse and replacing it with quick-hardening colored fluids, thus allowing scientists to see the smallest blood vessels with ease. She may be said to have been the lynchpin of Mondino's success, for he seems to have disappeared from the stage of history after her death.

When Alessandra died (her cause of death is not known), it is said that her boyfriend Otto Agenius (also one of Mondino's assistants) died a short time later from grief.

More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters

Lucy Parsons died on this day in 1942 in a house fire in Chicago at the age of 89.

Although she is remembered as an uncompromising radical labor activist, marriage may have been the central theme and concern in her life: it inspired her earliest activism, in partnership with her husband; it provided a model of the voluntary, self-governing, self-empowering labor unions which she supported, and provided a context for her interest in hunger policy, birth control and divorce rights; and her vigorous defense of the institution of marriage in the face of her comrades' support of free love caused her estrangement from radical movement leaders such as Emma Goldman. Half Creek and half Mexican, Lucy Waller met Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier turned radical Republican and married him in 1871 in Texas. Because interracial marriages were harshly viewed in the South, the couple moved to Chicago, where they became involved in the Socialist Labor Party.

While Albert Parsons gained fame as a speaker at labor rallies (causing him to be fired from his printing job with the Chicago Tribune), Lucy opened a dress shop to support their family while writing radical publications such as The Alarm and The Socialist. Anti-labor authorities began to see Lucy as a more dangerous player in the labor movement; she was a woman who lived unconventionally, not solely as a wife and mother, but as a radical activist who advocated violence or the threat of violence as the only effective means for laborers to gain their basic rights from the captains of capitalism.

After the 1886 May Day strike and the Haymarket protest resulted in violence and police assaults, Albert went into hiding, and Lucy was arrested -- although she would not be charged along with the other Haymarket defendants for conspiracy to commit murder, since the Chicago prosecutors felt that it was unlikely that a jury would send a woman (a mother of two) to the gallows.

She fought tirelessly to save the Haymarket defendants, including her husband, but failed to beat the coalition of Chicago authorities and big business who wanted to shut down labor unrest, and when she brought her two children to visit their father one last time, she was arrested, stripped and thrown into a jail cell, where she sat naked while Albert was executed on November 11, 1887. At the same time, she waged a battle against conservative forces within the Knights of Labor, a union she helped to establish, when Terence Powderly came out against the Haymarket martyrs.

If she wasn't already strongly committed to radicalism, after losing her husband it was an obsession for her, causing her to part company with the growing number of moderate labor union leaders who were beginning to join the Democratic Party in 1890. With Big Bill Haywood and others, she was at the vanguard of the radical movement as a founder of the International Workers of the World (1905), and organized the Chicago anti-hunger demonstrations of 1915, leading a coalition of the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party and Jane Addams' Hull House in demanding the decentralization of federal hunger policy. Finding less and less support for her vision of laborer-empowerment within traditional labor unions, she worked through the U.S. Communist Party from 1925 onward. During the 1920s and 30s, the Chicago police still regarded 60/70-something Lucy Parsons as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters," and her papers were seized by the police from the ruins of her house after the fire in which she was killed.

'Petticoat Rule'

Susanna Madora Salter was born on this day in 1860 near Lamira, Ohio.

A 27-year old housewife, mother and officer in the local Women's Christian Temperance Union in Argonia, Kansas, in 1887 Mrs. Salter presided over a nominating caucus for support of local political candidates who would support the cause of the prohibition of alcohol. Although the Kansas legislature had just given women the right to right to vote in third-class city elections, a number of men objected to the WCTU's attempt to enter the exclusively male domain of politics. In an effort to discredit the WCTU, a group of unsympathetic men secretly drew up a different election slate with Susanna Salter's named penciled in for mayor of Argonia; they assumed that the WCTU would lose its credibility in the election and that the uppity women would leave political matters to the men thereafter. Instead, the local Republican Party backed Salter and she won by a 2/3 majority.

She received instant international notoriety, with articles appearing in newspapers around the world marveling at this new "petticoat rule" in America, but her term was uneventful. Nonetheless, she managed to win over those who opposed the participation of women in politics with her fair and efficient administration of the town. She retired from active political affairs after the end of her term in 1888.

First Woman Physician in the U.S.

Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman physician in the U.S., the sister of pioneer woman surgeon Emily Blackwell, and the founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, was born on this day in 1821 in Bristol, England.

The Blackwell family was chock full of progressives. Elizabeth's brothers Henry and Samuel were active opponents of slavery and supporters of women's rights; Harry married suffragist Lucy Stone, and Samuel married the first formally ordained woman minister in the U.S., Antoinette Brown. Indeed, they arrived in the U.S., in part, because their father's interests in reform had marred his commercial prospects in England. Unfortunately, he died when Elizabeth was 17, whereupon the Blackwells opened a school for girls to support themselves.

Elizabeth, who had received a decent education, taught at the school, but did not see teaching as her life's calling. Despite feeling tempted by the attentions of men, she made up her mind early that she would not marry -- and her attitudes about the way men alter the course of women's life and health would be a constant theme for her throughout her career. A woman friend dying of cervical cancer urged Blackwell to study medicine because the presence of a woman doctor (then unheard of in the U.S.) might have eased her worst suffering.

Blackwell was intrigued by the idea, but she was aware that to pursue medicine would be to take on a disapproving male medical establishment, as well as the unfavorable perception of women who dabbled in medicine, such as Madame Restell in New York City, a then-notorious backstreet abortionist. Nevertheless, she began to read medicine with family friends in the Carolinas and with progressive physicians in Philadelphia. She was rejected entrance to medical schools in Philadelphia and New York, and turned down the suggestion that she study in Europe or disguise herself as a man. Finally, in 1847, she was accepted at the Geneva Medical College (after a vote of the student body prankishly approved), and fought her way past the cynicism to earn the respect of her anatomy professor, who had initially decided to exclude her from lectures on the reproductive system until Blackwell convinced him otherwise.

While at Geneva, she made clinical studies in the wards of a Philadelphia poorhouse, where her observations of Irish immigrants suffering from typhus, and of women suffering from syphilis, awakened in Blackwell a conviction that hygiene and sanitation were critical aspects of medical practice, and that the moral dimensions of sexuality were also aspects of a patient which needed to be "treated."

After graduation, Blackwell went to Paris to study at La Maternite, but contracted opthalmia from an infant she was treating and left Europe blinded in one eye. Although her plans to become a surgeon were dashed, Elizabeth returned to New York City to open a general practice; her earliest attempts were foiled by landlords and a cold shoulder from her male colleagues, but after a period of public lecturing on women's health issues, she bought her own place and opened her practice in 1856, with her sister Emily (who had recently studied surgery in Edinburgh) and Marie Zakrzewska, a recent graduate of Western Reserve Medical School.

While Emily and Zakrewska ran the practice, Blackwell assumed the role of international spokesman for women's medicine, undertaking a critique of male-dominated medicine in writings and speeches which indicted "medical materialism" (the treatment of patients as objects) and "laboratory medicine" (which focused on certain afflictions in a specialized way). For Blackwell, preventive care and treatment of the whole patient -- techniques which emphasized nurturing, empathy and moral education, as well as an awareness of the social and political climates of disease -- were "female" ideals which needed to be advanced within the "masculine" milieu of the new experimental medicine. At times, her ideas kept her from recognizing progress (she resisted vaccination, for example), but Blackwell's ideas continue to live through the approaches of alternative medicine, and more recently have been given increased attention in formal medical education.

She settled permanently in England after 1869, providing inspiration to England's first generation of women physicians, such as Sophia Jex-Blake. She died on September 7, 1910 in Argyllshire, Scotland.

Muslim Princess

Noor Inayat Khan was born on this day in 1914 in Moscow, Russia.

A direct descendant of India's last Muslim ruler, Tipu Sultan, her father was a Muslim mystic invited to Nicholas II's court by Grigori Rasputin. She moved to Paris as a youth, and after receiving her education there joined Paris Radio as a resident writer of children's stories, publishing Twenty Jataka Tales in 1940.

When the arrival of the Nazis, however, Noor moved to London and joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and secretly infiltrated France under the code name "Madeleine" in June 1943 as a resistance radio operator, the British War Office's first woman spy in Nazi-occupied France. The War Office ordered her to return after growing concerned about her safety, but she refused on the grounds that she was the last radio operator in the resistance.

Later that fall, she was finally captured by the Nazis, refusing to give them information or to sign a declaration that she would cease her activities -- although they did manage to break her coded messages and send false messages back to London, culminating in the arrest of 3 more British spies. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Karlsruhe, and eventually taken to Dachau concentration camp, where she was executed on September 13, 1944 for her refusal to cooperate. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, the Croix de Guerre and an MBE.

Ada

Ada Byron -- born on this day in 1815 in Piccadilly Terrace, Middlesex -- was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and his wife Annabella. Shortly after Ada was born, however, Annabella had had enough of the poet's excesses and threw him out. Byron, who left England for the rest of his relatively short life, never knew his daughter, but pined after her -- at least mimetically -- in his lines from Child Harolde: "'Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child!/ Ada! sole daughter of my house and of my heart?/ When I last saw thy young blue eyes they smiled/ And then we parted -- not as now we part, but with a hope.'"

Ada's mother, knowing all too well Byron's capacity for b.s. and thus a little skeptical of her daughter's bloodlines, recommended an intensive course in mathematics for her daughter, unusual for a woman then sadly as now, to ward against the "heedlessness, imprudence, vanity, prevarication and conceit"she might otherwise inherit from the old man. When she was still a teen, while attending a women's literary meeting at the home of Mary Somerville, Ada first heard of Charles Babbage and his design for a calculating machine, the Difference Engine, which could be used to determine the polynomial equation for a table of data, and she was inspired by his notion that a machine might be made, not only to foresee, but to conduct some activity based on that foresight.

She put her inspiration on hold temporarily, marrying Lord William King in 1835 and having 3 children, but she maintained her acquaintance with Babbage, and became fascinated by the possibilities of Babbage's new proposal for a more sophisticated calculating machine that could perform any kind of calculation, the Analytic Engine, understanding much more quickly than many of Babbage's male contemporaries how it could work and what it could do.

After Babbage delivered a talk on the Analytic Engine in Italy in 1841, Luigi Menabrea published a paper about the machine. Attempting to channel her passionate interest in Babbage's work into something meaningful, Ada translated Menabrea's paper from French into English, and at Babbage's suggestion, added her own extensive commentary. Published in 1843, Ada's translation was in fact almost a completely new book on Babbage's proposed machine, 3 times the length of Menabrea's article, in which she outlined the fundamental concepts by which the machine could be "programmed" to complete certain tasks (observing that a working Engine could "weave[ ]. . . algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves"), the main elements required in any mechanical "language" used to program the machine (including a discussion of the machine might be programmed to compute Bernoulli numbers, a discussion which some have cited as perhaps the ealiest articulation of a computer program), and her predicitions that such a machine might be used to compose music, produce drawings and handle other practical and scientific tasks.

The article was not simply the best description of the Analytic Engine and its capabilties to date, but a work of some vision, as unappreciated until the 20th century as Babbage's plans ultimately were by his contemporaries. After the article was published, the charming, vivacious countess of Lovelace (who also numbered David Brewster, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday among her parlor guests) fell ill with uteran cancer, and treated herself with alcohol, opium and morphine, leading no doubt to the instability which inspired her to become, in her final days, a compulsive gambler (albeit a mathematically talented one) and going into debt before her death at age 36.

A Pascal-based software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense in 1979 was named "ADA" in her honor, and Tilda Swinton played her in an unusual fantasy film, Conceiving Ada (1997).

Dame in the Water

Reviewing the career of champion swimmer Eleanor Holm, it strikes one that if hard-drinking, hard-partying baseball great Mickey Mantle had the stamina of Miss Holm, he might have had a longer career, and would have been, indisputably, the greatest baseball player ever. Heck, Eleanor Holm trained on "champagne and cigarettes" (to use her own words), and was one of the finest backstrokers ever, living to age 90. Too bad Mickey was such a lightweight!

Eleanor Holm was born on this day in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of a fireman. By the time Holm was 14, she was already competing in the Olympics, finishing 5th in the 1928 100-meter backstroke. By 1932, despite taking a career detour as a Ziegfeld Follies dancer at age 16, Holm was indisputably the best backstroker in the world, setting new world records at every distance between 1929 and 1932. She won the 1932 Olympic gold medal in the 100-meters, setting a new world record in Los Angeles which bested the previous standard by almost three seconds.

Her performance in Los Angeles, combined with her trim good looks and vivacity led to her signing a $500 per week contract with Warner Brothers to appear in films. She soon quarreled with the Warners, however, since they wanted her to swim on film, which would have jeopardized her amateur status, so she quit. In 1933 she married bandleader Art Jarrett and traveled with him as the band's singer, burning the candle at both ends while remaining undefeated in numerous swim competitions and establishing new world records in the 100- and 200-meters.

On her way to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, she partied round the clock with sportswriters aboard the S.S. Manhattan, drinking with the likes of writer Charles MacArthur, smoking and gambling. When U.S. Olympic czar Avery Brundage learned of her behavior, he banned Holm from competing in Berlin, accusing her of being drunk and disorderly. While she admitted drinking heavily, she pointed out that she won a couple of hundred dollars shooting craps, which someone who was intoxicated wouldn't be able to do. Brundage didn't find the argument very amusing (despite receiving a petition signed by more than half of the U.S. Olympic team members to let her back in), and Holm found herself in Berlin, banned for life from amateur competition, but nevertheless enjoying a white-hot celebrity glow. Goering, for one, was captivated by her, and gave her a sterling silver swastika (which she later had reset with a Star of David in the middle).

In 1937, Holm returned to Hollywood to star in Tarzan's Revenge with Olympic decathlete Glenn Morris, and after divorcing Jarrett married show business promoter Billy Rose, starring in his 1939 New York World's Fair Aquacade. She divorced Rose in 1954 (the saga was labeled the "War of the Roses" by the tabloids), and settled in Miami Beach working as an interior decorator. She entered the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1966 and was one of the first six women to be selected for induction in the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame. She died on January 31, 2004 in Miami.

Lady Mountbatten

Beautiful, vivacious, intelligent and compassionate, Edwina Ashley (born on this day in 1901 in London) was a wealthy heiress when she married Lord Louis Mountbatten, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and a rising star in the British Royal Navy, in 1922. They went on an extended honeymoon in the U.S., rubbing elbows with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and becoming favorites among the Broadway set in New York City. Lady Mountbatten is credited with having rescued George Gershwin's classic song "The Man I Love" from a Broadway flop and popularizing it among London bands, and she was rather famously (and somewhat morbidly) painted by Salvador Dali in 1940.

While her husband fought in World War II and served as Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, Lady Mountbatten worked devotedly with the Red Cross, and following the War inaugurated the relief effort with respect to returned prisoners of war. In 1947, Lord Mountbatten became Viceroy of India -- the last, as it turned out, as Great Britain granted India later that year. A persistent rumor held that Lady Mountbatten's close relationship -- some said "affair" -- with Indian partisan Jawaharlal Nehru helped to influence Lord Mountbatten in dividing Kashmir between the Indians and the Pakistanis, to the detriment of the Pakistanis. The "affair" has been consistently denied -- U.S. ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith once asking impatiently, "Can't people realize that men and women can be friends?" -- but is known that they were devoted intimates. Whatever their relationship or the measure of her influence over the Kashmir partition, Lady Mountbatten was a perceptive and persuasive politician during the founding of independent India.

She was traveling on behalf of relief organizations in South East Asia when she died suddenly on February 20, 1960, and was buried at sea.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady, born on this day in 1815 in Johnstown, New York, was the 7th of 10 children, the daughter of a New York jurist. Her only brother died when she was 11, leaving her father distraught at the prospect of not leaving a male successor.

At that moment, she recalled, she wanted to be everything a man could be. She consciously pursued her goal by studying Greek and horse handling, to become "learned and courageous" like the men she knew. She would never gain the recognition she sought from her father, a fact which perhaps drove her throughout her life to pursue equality for women. She studied at Emma Willard's seminary (1830-32), and through anti-slavery activities met her future husband and father of her 7 children, Henry Stanton, whom she married in 1840 (with the word "obey" stricken from their ceremony).

Immediately after the ceremony, the Stantons attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, but Elizabeth was shocked to find that she and Lucretia Mott were refused admission to the Convention on the grounds of their sex. As a response to this narrow-mindedness, the two women eventually called the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls on July 19-20, 1848, at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Declaration of Sentiments," the first public demand for women's suffrage in the U.S., was read, marking the beginning of a 72-year struggle for the right to vote.

In 1849, Stanton co-founded, with Amelia Jenks Bloomer, a women's rights journal, The Lily, in which Stanton pounded at practical themes aimed at reducing the artificial barriers between male and female activity, including the promotion of dress reform and the wearing of "bloomers" (named for her cohort), loose trousers covered by a short skirt for ease of movement. In 1851, she met Susan B. Anthony, and soon Stanton and Anthony became partners in the cause, with Stanton staying home with her children and writing the speeches, and the unmarried Anthony stumping on the circuit. As Stanton observed: "While she is slow and analytical in composition, I am rapid and synthetic. I am the better writer, she the better critic. She supplied the facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric, and together, we have made arguments that have stood unshaken through the storms of long years; arguments that no one has answered."

Stanton's philosophy, representing a convergence of Comte, Spencer and Fourier molded around feminist principles, tugged her past women's suffrage at times to defend even more controversial ideas, such as free love and eugenics. As Stanton's children grew, she began to play a more active role in the movement, being the first woman to address a joint session of the New York state legislature (1860), arguing against the 14th Amendment (which granted the right to vote to African-Americans but not to women; her disdain for African-Americans and indeed for recent immigrants and members of the working class was often unvarnished in her pronouncements), running for Congress (1866), campaigning around the country for suffrage and engaging in civil disobedience by attempting to vote.

In 1892, she delivered her most famous address, "The Solitude of Self," before the Senate and House judiciary committees. In 1892, nearly blind, she published The Woman's Bible, an attempt to "correct" biblical interpretations which demeaned women; her criticism of Judaism and Roman Catholicism within the book caused it to be condemned by the 1896 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (an organization of which she once served as president), signaling that Stanton's WASP-supremacy leanings were no longer embraced by the new fighters for women's suffrage.

Nonetheless, by the 1880s, although women's suffrage was still a number of years away, Stanton was revered as an elder statesperson, her 80th birthday celebrated as "Stanton Day" in New York City with a festival at the Metropolitan Opera. Susan B. Anthony highlighted Stanton's preeminent role as wordsmith of the women's suffrage movement following her death on October 26, 1902 by noting, "Well, it is an awful hush." Stanton's daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, followed in her mother's footsteps as a suffrage activist.

Eleanor

Eleanor Roosevelt was the most influential woman in 20th century American politics, and it was not just because she was the president's wife.

Born on this day in 1884 in New York City, the niece of Theodore Roosevelt, Eleanor grew up in relative material comfort, even if she was emotionally deprived. Shy and insecure, her mother nicknamed her "Granny" for her precocious solemnity. Her parents separated when she was 7; her beloved yet unreliable father was confined to an alcoholic sanitarium when her mother died the following year, so she was packed off to live with her mother's mother in an emotionally austere environment.

When she was 14, however, she was sent to Allenwood -- not the minimum security prison, but a girls' school outside of London -- where her hollowness was filled by her relationship with the headmistress, 70-year old Marie Souvestre, who in addition to giving Eleanor warmth and affection, provided her with a role model as a freethinker who supported unpopular causes, such as the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus and the independence of the Boers in South Africa.

Unpopular causes stayed in Eleanor's bloodstream when she returned to New York debutante society at age 18; while attending fancy dress parties in the evenings, during the days Eleanor went to the East Side slums for the Rivington Street Settlement House, doing social work among the poor. At the same time, she began a secret courtship with her fifth cousin-once removed, a dashing young Harvard man named Franklin D. Roosevelt. He chattered about society-doings, she took him on a tour of the tenements, and he was smitten, proposing to the 19-year old Eleanor in November 1903. Franklin's mother was against the match, but he would not be deterred; they were married on March 17, 1905, with her uncle, then the president of the U.S., giving her away at the ceremony.

Eleanor and Franklin took up residence in New York, where she played second fiddle to Franklin's mother in running the household, and gave birth to 6 children in quick succession (one died in infancy). Apart from volunteer work with the Red Cross and the League of Women Voters, as well as some activities with the then-considered-radical Women's Trade Union League, Eleanor's life was confined to being a mother and political hostess as Franklin scaled the ranks in Albany and Washington.

Everything changed, however, in 1922 when Franklin was stricken with polio and rendered paralyzed from the waist down. In addition to continually spurring her husband to return to public life (he was elected governor of New York in 1928), Eleanor began appearing as her husband's stand-in at political events, soon becoming an active campaigner on social welfare issues in her own right. As head of the national women's campaign for the Democratic Party in 1928, she became the hub of the nation's network of women activists, and when Franklin was elected president in 1932, she brought many of them and their concerns to Washington.

Although from at least 1918, when Eleanor discovered Franklin's ongoing affair with Eleanor's social secretary Lucy Mercer, Eleanor and Franklin grew emotionally distant, they remained a formidable professional team, and Eleanor's proximity permitted her to operate as the White House's conscience of social justice and compassion.

Still unafraid to take unpopular stands, she lobbied forcefully behind closed doors to bring important issues to the president's desk, such as land reclamation for poor Appalachian farmers, textile union grievances, African-American civil rights and equal opportunity for women. In public, she was more visible than any previous first lady, using a daily syndicated newspaper column ("My Day"), a radio program and regular press conferences to further her social welfare agenda. Her dramatically symbolic acts drew as much comment as the activities of congressmen and diplomats (and made her a target of political enemies), such as when she announced in "My Day" her resignation from the Daughter of the American Revolution (DAR) in 1939 after the DAR decided to ban African-American soprano Marian Anderson from giving a concert at its hall, and when she flouted segregation at a public meeting in Birmingham, Alabama by placing her chair between the white and African-American sides of the aisle.

Nevertheless, she could easily play the more traditional role assigned to public women of her time, as she did when she toured the South Pacific during World War II, visiting soldiers in hospitals and at bases to boost morale. When her husband died in 1945, she told her friends that her public life was over, but President Truman cut short her retirement by appointing her as one of the nation's representatives to the newly-created United Nations. Soon afterwards, Eleanor was elected the head of the UN Human Rights Commission, whereupon she drafted the "Declaration of Human Rights" which the UN adopted in 1948. She threatened to resign from the UN if Truman failed to recognize the new state of Israel; and stayed on board until 1952, when she resigned to campaign for Adlai Stevenson.

Even during the Eisenhower years, Eleanor continued to be an influential voice with regard to human rights issues and against McCarthyism, and just before her death from tuberculosis, was invited by President Kennedy to rejoin the UN, as well as to head the President's Commission on the Status of Women. She died on November 7, 1962 in New York City.

The Irrepressible Mrs. Woodhull

With her sister, Tennessee Claflin, Victoria Claflin (better known as Victoria Woodhull) was notorious for chipping away at social taboos involving religion, sex, business and politics. She was an ethical gadfly with a tarnished pedigree, a screwball pioneer where pioneers were not invited or even tolerated, and it is only in hindsight that we can appreciate some of her adventures, since they represent the first bold gestures toward the multifarious identity of the 20th century American woman.

Born on this day in 1838 in Homer, Ohio, Victoria grew up on the run; her father having been accused of insurance fraud, he brought his family along as he wandered throughout the Midwest posing as a faith healer. At 15, she married a Chicago physician of questionable character, Canning Woodhull, and they proceeded to move from coast to coast, Victoria supporting Canning's bad habits and her retarded son Byron with sewing jobs and as a spiritual healer in the mold of her huckster father.

At 26 Victoria divorced Canning, and joined Tennessee to travel as faith healers and clairvoyants. They had brushes with the law, including being accused of running a whorehouse in Cincinnati, but generally they survived by their wits. Victoria remarried in 1866 to Col. James H. Blood, a Civil War vet who introduced her to socialism and free love, and 2 years later they moved to New York in answer to the suggestion of the spirit of Demosthenes, whom Victoria claimed appeared before her in a hotel room in Pittsburgh.

In New York, Tennessee was asked to perform a healing massage on tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. Soon, with Vanderbilt's assistance, the sisters were speculating successfully on Wall Street, opening their own brokerage house in 1870. Woodhull, Claflin & Co. was the first woman-owned enterprise of its kind, and was a moderate success. Around the same time, Woodhull became captivated by the utopian ideas of Stephen Pearl Andrews. Together with Blood and Tennessee, Woodhull and Andrews promoted their ideas in Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, along with running translations of George Sand and the first American appearance of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto -- this despite the fact that Woodhull was a Wall Street tycoon.

Around the same time, Woodhull announced her candidacy for president, and began to give speeches which were an interesting melange of progressive politics and bold assertions of sexual independence for women. Benjamin F. Butler arranged to let Woodhull speak on women's suffrage before Congress, a move which caught Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton by surprise and caused them to invite her to speak at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention.

Her participation in the convention allowed critics to conclude that women's suffrage would lead to pernicious free love and the breakdown of the family. Rather than quieting the critics, she continued to advance the cause of free love in bold terms, stating in an 1871 speech that she had "an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love everyday." With support from Susan B. Anthony and the rest of the suffragettes drifting away, she convened her own Equal Rights party convention, which nominated her for president and African-American leader Frederick Douglass as vice president. Douglass ignored the honor, and like Anthony, supported Grant's re-election in 1872.

Soon afterward, her successes began to fall apart: with expenses mounting (even Canning Woodhull had joined the eclectic household in New York by this time), she and her extended family were evicted from her New York mansion, the brokerage house was in a shambles, and Woodhull was sued for her debts.

Lashing out at those who she perceived were exercising their sinister indirect influence on her financial affairs and who would seek to co-opt her radical reform crusade with half-measures, she gave a speech accusing moderately reform-minded preacher Henry Ward Beecher, a former lover of Woodhull's, of having an extramarital affair with another woman, and published an account of it in the Weekly. She was arrested on the eve of the election for peddling obscenity, and spent election day and a month more in a New York jail cell. Released on bail, she put out another issue of the Weekly; was reindicted; and went on the lam, speaking around the country about the Beecher affair. The obscenity charge was later dropped, and Beecher's mistress published a full confession of the tale.

Blood continued the Weekly until 1876, when he and Woodhull divorced; and the following year Woodhull moved to England (in part to avoid giving testimony in a dispute over Vanderbilt's will). There she met and married a wealthy banker, John Martin, against the objections of Martin's family (the story provided the basis for Henry James' story, The Siege of London). In 1892, Woodhull again declared herself a presidential candidate, to considerably less attention, and visited the U.S. from time to time to speak on eugenics, women's suffrage, public health reform and government assistance for science and the arts. She died on June 10, 1927 in London.

Jane Addams

Jane Addams was born on this day in 1860 in Cedarville, Illinois.

Growing up in frail health and uncertain of her future after studies at Rockford College and the Women's Medical College in Philadelphia, Addams became attracted to social reform after visiting Toynbee Hall, the London charity house. Arriving in Chicago in 1889, Addams sought out the city's most needy neighborhood, rented a portion of the old Hull mansion on South Halstead Street and founded Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in America attempting to address the needs of the poor immigrant families in the neighborhood.

Largely through the force of her own personality -- her tact, personal charm and leadership abilities -- Hull House became a center of social reform in the U.S., attracting like-minded talents from a variety of disciplines such as Florence Kelley, Julia Lathrop, Alice Hamilton and Grace Abbott, as well as exerting a powerful influence over Chicago political battles regarding child labor laws, protection of immigrants, industrial safety and organized labor. With respect to labor, she was an enthusiastic supporter of worker organization and helped to negotiate a number of labor disputes. She lobbied for municipal suffrage in Chicago and served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Assocation from 1911 to 1914.

When World War I broke out, Addams turned her attention to pacifist causes, observing that war consistently destroys social reform and that reform and peace were inseparable. As president of the International Congress of Women, Addams visited the heads of state of warring and neutral antions urging round-the-clock peace negotiations, and attempted to convince President Wilson to initiate an international mediation. Although Wilson would not heed her advice, he later adapted some of Addams' 11 peace planks, drafted in 1915 for the Women's Peace Party, to his famous "Fourteen Points." During the war, she led food drives to help the starving women and children of the warring nations -- including those of the enemy. While American Relief Committee chair Herbert Hoover and others supported her efforts, Addams was branded unpatriotic or worse by newspapers and was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

In addition to her peace efforts, she assisted in the establishment of the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union. After suffering an angina attack and reducing her workload, she received the Nobel Peace Prize (with Nicholas Murray Butler) in 1931, and donated the $16,000 in prize money to peace organizations.

Her writings, principally about the philosphical underpinnings of reform and peace (including Democracy and Social Ethics, 1902; Newer Ideals of Peace, 1907; Twenty Years at Hull House, 1910; and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House, 1930), combined analysis with anecdote to raise American consciousness about the poor and the disenfranchised. She died on May 21, 1935.

Phoolan Devi

Her poverty and her iron will, seemingly able to withstand violence and dire humiliation, conspired to make Phoolan Devi a country folk hero in northern India -- a diminutive woman with a bandana around her head and a poisonous look in her eyes who struck such fear in the hearts of some that they would swear that she was 6 feet tall with hair the color of dried blood.

Bandit, parliamentarian and poverty activist Phoolan Devi, known as the "Bandit Queen," was born on this day around 1963 in Shekhpur Gudda, Uttar Pradesh, India. Her father was a member of the Mallah caste, a sub-caste of the lower caste Sudras (farmers and laborers), who had been duped out of his share of some ancestral land by his manipulative brother Biharilal and nephew Maiyadin. In protest, the defiant 10-year old Phoolan convinced her 13-year old sister to sit with her in the fields of what used to be her grandfather's land, eating sweet chic peas raised by Biharilal. Maiyadin had the girls kicked off of the property by the village authorities, and had their parents thrashed for failing to curb the children.

Following the incident, Phoolan's impoverished parents endeavored to find suitable husbands for the girls to keep them out of trouble. At 11, Phoolan was sold to a 30-year old man for a cow and a bicycle, and, barely comprehending of sexuality, was raped by her husband. She became a mere household slave when her husband took a second, older wife, and was ultimately abandoned by her husband for her insubordination.

Back home, Phoolan was harassed by higher caste men who considered divorced teenagers to be loose women, but her unwillingness to be anybody's fool frequently landed her in hot water with local authorities -- until, in 1979, she was kidnapped by daciots, roving gang members who terrorized the countryside, and raped by the gang-leader Babu Singh Gujar. The gang's second-in-command, Vikram Mallah, protested Babu's treatment of Phoolan, and during the ensuing fight, Vikram killed Babu. Phoolan pledged herself to her protector, and together Vikram and Phoolan lived off the land and outwitted bumbling local police as they terrorized the rich and committed reprisal attacks against local corrupt officials who targeted the lowest classes.

After Vikram was murdered by a pair of higher-caste Thakurs who wanted to take over the gang, Phoolan was briefly held hostage (again being subjected to multiple beatings and rapes), but escaped to become the leader of her own gang of daciots which was later implicated in the cold-blooded execution of 20 Thakur men during a raid on a wedding at Behmai.

Although Phoolan claimed she was not present at the raid, her notoriety led Indira Gandhi's government to direct the police to make a deal for her surrender. After believing that she had secured an agreement that she would receive only 8 years in prison, on February 12, 1983 she surrendered to authorities before a cheering crowd of several thousand in a concert theater in Bhind, placing a wreath on a picture of Mahatma Gandhi before handing over her rifle and 25 bullets and being led away by police. Phoolan was charged with 48 crimes, including the massacre of the 20 men at Behmai, and due to delayed trials she ended up serving 11 years in prison, before emerging in 1994 as a lower-caste heroine.

In 1995 she formed a social welfare organization, Eaklavya Sena, and in 1996, following the publication of her autobiography I, Phoolan Devi, she was elected to the lower-caste house of the Indian Parliament. Although she was a formidable voice for the plight of poor Indian women, the cloud of unprosecuted criminal charges continued to hang over her, and northern Indian Thakurs were particularly bitter in their denunciation of the Bandit Queen as a murderer.

She was assassinated on July 25, 2001 in New Delhi. Several Thakurs were arrested and charged with conspiracy in her death.

Aida

Socialite and philanthropist Aida de Acosta Breckinridge, a real "get-it-done" woman, was born on this day in 1884 in Elberon, New Jersey.

The daughter of wealthy Cuban parents, Aida de Acosta attended the Sacred Heart Convent in Paris. While she was there, she became fascinated by the flying experiments of Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was in Paris testing his dirigible, the Santos-Dumont IX, by flying it around the Eiffel Tower. Attracted by the young woman's curiosity, Santos-Dumont began giving her ground instruction in the operation of his craft; and one Sunday afternoon (June 29, 1903), without a warning of his intentions, he impetuously hoisted the 19-year old de Acosta into the basket of the dirigible, started the engine and let loose the ropes, sending her on a 5-mile course and giving her instructions from his bicycle on the ground. By this impromptu flight, Aida became the first woman ever to pilot a dirigible. Her parents, reading about the incident in the newspapers, were so mortified by their daughter's un-ladylike display that they immediately dragged her back to New York.

Not to be kept under wraps, Miss de Acosta began to make a name for herself in charitable causes, starting a milk fund for poor children. She married Oren Root (nephew of diplomat Elihu Root) in 1908 and subsequently gave birth to 2 daughters, but during World War I she sold "Victory" bonds -- raising more than $2 million, a record-breaking sum, from stunts such as having Enrico Caruso sing to Wall Street from the steps of the Treasury Building in New York. After the War, she went to France with the American Committee for Devastated France, helping to provide food, shelter and day care to displaced families.

In 1922, while on vacation, she developed an eye inflammation, which turned out to be glaucoma; shortly thereafter, she and Root were divorced in Paris. After several operations, she managed to recover sight in one eye, and (following her marriage to her old friend, ex-assistant secretary of war Henry S. Breckinridge; they would divorce in 1947) she was inspired to raise over $5 million for what eventually became the Wilmer Opthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins, opened in 1929. She followed this in 1944 by organizing the world's first bank for corneal transplants, the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, an enterprise to which she devoted much of the rest of her life with indefatigable energy and an uncanny ability to keep people from saying "no."

De Acosta was also known as a patron of the arts, serving as New York City art commissioner (appointed by Fiorello LaGuardia in 1935) and financing such projects as Robert Flaherty's documentary, Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1925).

She died on May 26, 1962 in Bedford, New York.

Artemisia

Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few female painters of the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1593 in Rome.

Artemisia lost her mother at 12 and spent most of her adolescence learning in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a significant painter and follower of Caravaggio. At 17, as she was feeling her power as her father's finest pupil, she was raped by another artist in her father's studio, Agostino Tassi. Tassi was acquitted in the ensuing trial, during which her father's property was threatened and, most significantly, Artemisia was subjected to her own trial by ordeal -- she was put to the thumbscrew as a test of her veracity. She later married an obscure painter, a relationship which gave her the ability to practice her art in a man's world without further fear of scandal.

Her art, however, is distinctive for its feminine point of view, and perhaps even more so for its personal content, so temptingly equated with her biographical facts. Among her favorite subjects is Susannah and the Elders (first painted in 1610), a biblical tale in which a young girl is sexually harassed by some men in her community. Most male painters employed the subject as an opportunity to display the female form and usually showed Susannah as a flirtatious participant in the event; Artemisia also painted Susannah in the nude, but (according to some scholars) painted her as a self-portrait, and showed Susannah's anguish at the behavior of the men.

Her treatment of another biblical subject, Judith slaying Holofernes (c.1625), is Caravaggesque in its lighting effects, but is almost clinically violent in its depiction of two women, Judith and her maid Abra, slicing off the head of the Assyrian general.

Artemisia died in 1642. Her works were largely ignored until they began to be noticed by feminist art historians in the 1970s. Since then, she has become an icon of woman's history, and has been the subject of several fictional works, including Agnes Merlet's film Artemisia (1998) and Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia (2001).

The Diving Venus

"There is nothing more democratic than swimming. Swimming, like running, is a sport that requires in its most basic mode no equipment other than one’s body." – Annette Kellerman.

Swimmer and silent film actress Annette Kellerman, known as the "Diving Venus," was born on this day in 1888 in Sydney, Australia. She apparently occupies a number of obscure but important niches in pop culture history: by legend, she was the first woman to attempt to swim the English channel; the first to perform underwater ballet, the forerunner to today's synchronized swimming; the first to brave North American shores in a one-piece swimsuit; and, as a pioneering athlete turned film star, the first celebrity to appear nude on screen.

Born with weak legs and requiring braces to walk, Kellerman began swimming at an early age as therapy. She moved with her family to England when she was 14, where her down-and-out father Frederick Kellerman promoted her swimming prowess shamelessly. After a series of local exhibitions, Mr. Kellerman announced to the press that his little Annette would swim 26 miles down the Thames from Putney to Blackwall, training on a diet of bread and milk. The teenaged Annette succeeded mightily, and thereafter earned a small fortune by performing other swimming feats, but failed twice to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel (a feat finally accomplished by Gertrude Ederle in 1926).

In 1907 she moved to the U.S., performing water ballet to packed houses at the New York Hippodrome and doing high diving stunts at Chicago's White City amusement park in the dead of winter. While visiting Boston's Revere Beach in 1907, Annette appeared before the assembled press in a tight-fitting boy's one-piece racing swimsuit -- demure by today's standards, amply covering both bottom and top, but scandalous by the standards of the day, which required a woman to wear skirts, bloomers and stockings when cavorting in the surf. The police arrested her on the spot (some would cynically say it was just another publicity stunt) and hauled her away.

Kellerman, however, was not so easily turned away: when she discovered that it was not the tightness that violated the law but the amount of flesh shown in the outdoors, Kellerman returned to Revere Beach wearing a modified version of her original one-piece, showing off her curvaceous figure (she was actually 5'-4" weighing 140 lbs; perhaps more chutzpah than cheesecake, although a gawking Harvard professor stammered that Kellerman was "the most beautifully formed woman of modern times") in her tight, scoop-necked, sleeveless black leotard and tights while still not showing more skin than the law allowed. The woman’s one-piece bathing suit was born -- or at least a standard which allowed a woman to wear tight-fitting garb. For Kellerman, it was a matter of sport, not fashion: "I can’t swim," she declared, "wearing more stuff than you can hang on a clothesline."

Her overnight celebrity caused Hollywood to take note, and Kellerman's swimsuit was shown off in a couple of quick newsreels in 1909. Kellerman made her bona fide film debut later that year, and starred in 8 features, including Neptune's Daughter (1914, directed by Herbert Brenon). Her most notorious appearance, however, was in Brenon's Daughter of the Gods (1916; produced by William Fox), by reputation a bit of overripe nonsense as cinema (it is now lost), but enormously popular on the strength of Kellerman's "startling nude scenes," including a bit of nude swimming (confirmed in surviving production stills) -- 78 years before another uninhibited Australian, Elle Macpherson, would cause barely a ripple by appearing nude for long glorious stretches of the film Sirens (1994). At any rate, Daughter of the Gods made a fortune for Fox and Brenon.

In 1918, Kellerman wrote a book, Physical Beauty and How to Keep It, in which she offered diet tips. Her film career ended in the 1920s, but Kellerman's tale was revived when Esther Williams portrayed her in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). Kellerman died on November 5, 1975 in Southport, Australia.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, critic, novelist and poet, was born Charlotte Anna Perkins on this day in 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut. The great-granddaughter of theologian Lyman Beecher and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, Charlotte Perkins' father left her mother shortly after Charlotte's birth. After a spotty education, culminating with a stint at the Rhode Island School of Design, she earned a living by designing greeting cards and, less happily, teaching children; in her spare time, however, she was a voracious reader, particularly of Social Darwinist tracts.

Against her better judgment she married artist Charles Stetson in 1884, gave birth to a daughter, and quickly sank into a deep depression. Her consulting neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell, prescribed a "rest cure," forbidding her ever to write again and limiting her reading severely. Horrified, Charlotte fled to California, where she turned to writing and lecturing as her career. She eventually divorced Stetson, who married her best friend Grace Ellery Channing.

Fueled by her readings of such commentators as Lester Ward, in countless articles and lectures (and even in poems) Charlotte Perkins began to articulate a critique of gender relations, proceeding from Ward's assumption that humans are set apart from other animals in that they are able to determine their own laws of social behavior. Perkins' further observation was that human volition had been twisted over time; women were denied autonomy, and thus their ability to define social relations had atrophied, whereas men's personalities were distorted by lazy habits learned from having uninterrupted dominance over women. The goal of a reorganized society, she asserted, would be to transform the prevailing "masculinism" into a humane social order, equally informed by nurturing and collaborative female values.

Perkins' breakthrough work, Women and Economics (1898), was a sensation; in it, Perkins declared that the sex relationship is an economic relationship. In that both men and women are essentially defined by the way they make their living, she argued, the lack of occupational autonomy suffered by women meant that they were almost completely in the service of the men who take care of them, creating the underpinnings of all gender-based social imbalance. Her subsequent social critiques developed the theme in other contexts: Concerning Children, 1900; The Home: Its Work and Influence, 1903; The Man-Made World, or Our Androcentric Culture, 1911; His Religion and Hers, 1923. While such works were influential among later academic feminists, she is perhaps better known today for her fiction, especially the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892, based on her experience with Mitchell's "rest cure") and Herland (1915, describing a world of women only).

In 1900, having established herself as a leading feminist critic, she married her cousin George Gilman and lived relatively happily until his death in 1934. Shortly thereafter, Perkins, who was suffering from inoperable breast cancer, took her own life on August 17, 1935 in Pasadena, California, leaving behind a note in which she explained: "When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."