On December 5

On this day in ...
... 1822 (190 years ago today), Elizabeth Cabot Cary was born into a family of "Boston Brahmins," as the Yankee elite of that Massachusetts capital were known. Home-schooled on account of ill health, eventually she fell in with an intellectual crowd in Cambridge, and in 1850 she married the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz, widowed scientist/natural historian 15 years her senior, who had recently arrived in the United States, with his 3 children, to take up a post at Harvard. Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz (left) accompanied her husband on a number of expeditions; her publications include A First Lesson in Natural History (1859). (photo credit) An educator, she was instrumental as early as 1879 in developing the women's school that in 1894 became Radcliffe College, part of Harvard. Radcliffe's honorary president from 1900 to 1903, she died in 1920. Her papers are available here.

(Prior December 5 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On September 17

On this day in ...

Dr. Mercy Jackson

... 1802 (210 years ago today), Mercy Ruggles was born in Harwick, Massachusetts. Following "what was for the time a good education," in her early 20s she married a preacher. He died before she turned 30, and she supported herself and 2 children, 1st as a teacher and then as a storeowner. Remarried a few years later, Mercy Jackson, as she was then known, became well-versed in medical care of the day -- she eventually gave birth to 11 children, 5 of whom predeceased her, as did both her husbands. She began studying homeopathy, and in 1860, she was graduated from the New England Female Medical College, now known as Boston University College of Medicine.She practiced medicine and wrote articles on women's rights from then till her death, in Boston, at age 75.

(Prior September 17 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On June 19

On this day in ...
... 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council against an effort by a constituent state, Massachusetts (flag at left), to its own entities, or companies doing business with them, from carrying on trade with the government that calls itself Myanmar, but which many others continue to call Burma (flat at right). Specifically, the Court held that because Congress had set forth its own legislative framework for dealing with Burma, the U.S. Constitution's Supremacy Clause pre-empted Massachusetts' foreign policy efforts.

(Prior June 19 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On May 4

On this day in ...

... 1969, as she related here, social worker Joan Ditzion was in Massachusetts, "standing in front of a packed room of women at Emmanuel College’s female liberation conference ... leading a workshop entitled 'Control of Our Bodies.'" Over the next year,

'We meet in each other’s homes; we research topics on women’s health and sexuality and gather women’s experiences; we mimeograph papers and deliver a course at an MIT lounge; women ask for a book; we raise money and print the book ourselves; in December, 1970 Women and Their Bodies (later named Our Bodies, Ourselves) is born.'

(credit for image of 1st cover) The book, known to insiders as OBOS, became and has remained for 4 decades a pathbreaking work, produced to this day by the nonprofit Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

(Prior May 4 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

New York State of Marriage

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Ruthann Robson, who contributes this guest post)

By an act of the state legislature late Friday evening, New York joined several other states in the United States in legalizing same-sex marriage; currently, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa, as well as the District of Columbia.
California and Maine had legal same-sex marriage for a limited time. As detailed in IntLawGrrls posts available here, California's Proposition 8 limiting marriage to opposite sex couples was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge, but that ruling was stayed and the case is presently on appeal.
Although in the United States marriage is within the province of state rather than federal law, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, continues to define marriage as limited to opposite sex couples. DOMA is under serious challenge in the courts, including bankruptcy courts, and in the Obama Administration, which stated earlier this year it will not defend DOMA in court. Nevertheless, same-sex couples in New York who marry will not be married under federal law -- a confusing situation when it comes to immigration, taxes, and federal benefits such as Social Security.
“Marriage Equality,” as the New York statute is entitled, has been a hard fought battle.
New York’s highest court held that there was no state constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Hernandez v. Robles (2006), an opinion stunning in its contortions, as Seattle University Law Professor John Mitchell’s article demonstrates. The New York state Senate failed to pass a law in 2009, despite support of the bill from the then-Governor.
The new Marriage Equality statute has religious exemptions, which were also hard-fought, and several otherwise conservative state senators who voted for the bill specifically referenced the “protections” for religious entities contained in the law, and absent from the previous bill. These exemptions, however, reference solemnization and celebration rather than the status of marriage. In other words, the law articulates protections for religious officials should they decline to perform a same-sex marriage. Given the broad protections for religious officials to decline to perform any sort of marriage (or officiate at funerals for that matter), most speculate that this provision is more cosmetic than substantive.
There has been much jubilation amongst LGBT supporters in New York, especially because the bill - - - quickly signed into law by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- came only a few days before the LGBT Pride celebrations of June 26-27, which mark the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Indeed, on the evening that the law was passed, the Stonewall Inn in New York City was crowded.
Even LGBT people who do not support the institution of marriage, same-sex or otherwise, found themselves in a celebratory mood. Phrased as “equality,” support for same-sex marriage has become co-extensive with LGBT rights. Moreover, rhetoric against same-sex marriage, in the legislature and elsewhere, is often demeaning and at times virulently homophobic.
Yet critiques of same-sex marriage need not be conservative.
I’ve wondered whether marriage will now become essentially mandatory. Adapting Adrienne Rich’s critique of “compulsory heterosexuality,” I've argued that "compulsory matrimony" could be just as damaging. Contemplating the passing of the New York law, Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke voiced similar worries:

'[W]e shouldn’t be forced to marry to keep the benefits we now have, to earn and keep the respect of our friends and family, and to be seen as good citizens.'

Indeed, some of the valorization of marriage is politically problematical. It is deeply troubling to read arguments in favor of same-sex marriage that rest upon marriage as indicating “maturity” or making an “honest woman” out of a woman who was merely “living with” a partner. Does that mean people who live together -- or alone -- are somehow immature or dishonest? Certainly, we can’t be saying that about LGBT people, especially women.
In the United States, “marriage” is freighted with a great deal of religious, social, and political meanings. It’s also, of course, an economic relationship. And it may be a boon to the local economy, with New York same-sex couples no longer having weddings -- and receptions -- in the neighboring states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

On December 16

On this day in ...
... 1773, the deadline date for the collection of taxes pursuant to the Tea Act recently passed by the Parliament in London, "some 50 men, unconvincingly disguised as Mohawk Indians," broke out in "war whoops" as they boarded 3 English vessels, split open its cargo of tea, and threw it into the harbor. This Boston Tea Party

was quickly restaged in other port cities in America and tended to polarize the sides in the widening dispute.

(image credit) As time would tell, the American Revolution was just a few years away.

(Prior December 16 posts are here, here, and here.)

On June 20

On this day in ...
... 1893, a headline-grabbing trial in New Bedford, Massachusetts, ended when jurors found Lizzie Borden not guilty of murdering her father and stepmother with a hatchet the previous summer. A never-married woman in her early 30s, Borden (left) was inconsistent in her accounts of what happened that day, and there were no other suspects. Thus she became "notorious," the subject of doggerel poetry and true-crime speculation, despite the acquittal. A recent study of the case may be found in The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law (2009) by A. Cheree Carlson.

(Prior June 20 posts are here, here, and here.)

On November 11

On this day in ...
... 1620, more than 3 dozen men, who had sailed across the Atlantic with their families on "a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia," signed the Mayflower Compact, on the ship of the same name depicted at left, at Cape Cod in what is now the state of Massachusetts. (image credit) By this agreement they pledged, in words not unlike those of American declarations that would follow, to

covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; ....

... 1858 (150 years ago today), Maria Konstantinovna Bashkirtseva was born to a wealthy and noble family in what is now Ukraine. She traveled widely and studied painting at 1 of the few French academies that accepted women; in the 1881 painting at right, she depicted herself, seated in the center, at her studio. (credit) The woman best known as Marie Bashkirtseff is most famous for the journal she began to keep at age 13. Published as I Am the Most Interesting Book of All, it's still in print today. Under the nom de plume Pauline Orrel, she wrote for La Citoyenne, the feminist newspaper published by Hubertine Auclert. Bashkirtseff died at age 25 from tuberculosis Among her notable quotes:

'Let us love dogs, let us love only dogs! Men and cats are unworthy creatures.'

On June 1

On this day in ...
... 1660, in North America, the British colony of Massachusetts hanged Mary Dyer because she was a Quaker. Dyer and her husband William had immigrated there, from England, around 1635. The couple were supporters of religious dissident Anne Hutchinson, and Mary accompanied Anne out of church when the latter was excommunicated in 1638; the Dyers then moved with Hutchinson to Rhode Island. In her final return to Massachusetts, Dyer "deliberately challenged the legal right ... to carry out the death penalty."
... 2000, the Patent Law Treaty was adopted at Geneva, Switzerland. "Its aim is to harmonise the formal requirements set by patent offices for granting patents, and to streamline the procedures for obtaining and maintaining a patent." Today the treaty has 53 contracting parties; the United States is not among them. It is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization.