On June 1

On this day in ...
... 1919, Hedwig Dohm died in Berlin, Germany, 88 years after she'd been born Marianne Adelaide Hedwig Jülich in the same city. She and her editor-actor husband had 5 children; granddaughter would include 2 women about whom we've posted, Erika Mann and Elizabeth Mann Borghese. Dohm (right) also was noted as an author -- "one of the first feminist thinkers to see gender roles as a result of socialization and not biological determinism." (photo credit) Among her work translated in English is a novella-plus volume called Become Who You Are: With an Additional Essay, "The Old Woman" (Elizabeth G. Ametsbichler trans. 2006).

(Prior June 1 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Uncommon heritage: Elisabeth Mann Borgese

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of a woman known by some as the "mother of the oceans."
She was Elisabeth Mann Borgese (right). A talented and peripatetic woman who successfully forged her own path in North American academic and intellectual circles in the middle of the twentieth century. “EMB” died on February 8, 2002, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
The Ocean Yearbook, which Elisabeth founded, has dedicated its current issue to her and to the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Law of the Sea Convention. "Celebrating 30 Years of Ocean Governance under UNCLOS: Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Ocean Governance Mission of IOI." is the title of that issue, Volume 26.
My own contribution to that forthcoming volume – an article entitled "Uncommon Heritage: Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Pacem in Maribus, the International Ocean Institute and Preparations for UNCLOS III," provides the basis for this post.
Born in Munich on April 24, 1918, in her 83 years Elisabeth claimed four different national affiliations – German, Czechoslovakian, U.S., and Canadian – and five different countries as her home – Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Italy, and Canada.
Elisabeth landed in the United States in 1938, at the age of 20, a young German woman with almost no English and no formal secondary education. Yet she ended up as a Canadian university professor.
She had studied piano performance in Zürich. She and her family had fled to that Swiss city from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 when she was fifteen. Such schooling offered little preparation either for her life in North America, which began with her parents in Princeton, New Jersey, or for the work she would initially find in her new home: first as a Research Assistant to the University of Chicago’s “Committee to Frame a World Constitution” in the 1950s, and later as the only female fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where she moved in 1964.
In these first two positions, surrounded by male intellectuals who were shaping the U.S. academic and political landscape, Elisabeth pieced together an informal education and laid the foundation for her life’s work as an oceans activist, environmentalist, and teacher of the law of the sea.