On December 10

On this day in ...
... 1931, the Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on Jane Addams; she was a co-winner with Nicholas Murray Butler. Nobel Committee Chair Halvdan Koht said in his presentation speech:

(credit)

'America helped – perhaps it would be more correct to say compelled – Europe to create a League of Nations which would provide a firm basis for peaceful coexistence among nations. It was a crushing blow that America herself did not join this organization, and without doubt her failure to do so contributed largely to the failure of the League of Nations to live up to expectations. We still see too much of the old rivalries of power politics. Had the United States joined, she would have been a natural mediator between many of the conflicting forces in Europe, for America is more interested in peace in Europe than in lending her support to any particular country.
'It must be said, however, that the United States is not the power for peace in the world that we should have wished her to be. She has sometimes let herself drift into the imperialism which is the natural outcome of industrial capitalism in our age. In many ways she is typical of the wildest form of capitalist society, and this has inevitably left its mark on American politics.
'But America has at the same time fostered some of the most spirited idealism on earth.'

A longtime advocate of peace, suffrage, and measures to alleviate poverty, Addams was emblematic of that idealism – of "the work which women can do peace fraternity among nations," Koht continued. But Addams, who was then 71 years old, was admitted to a hospital in Baltimore on this day in 1931, and so was unable to attend the ceremony in Oslo, Norway. She would die 4 years later in the city where she had long lived, Chicago. We IntLawGrrls honor her as a transnational foremother.

(Prior December 10 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Welcoming Irene Ten Cate

It's our great pleasure to welcome Irene M. Ten Cate (leftt) as an IntLawGrrls contributor.
Irene is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she teaches in the areas of civil procedure and business associations.
Interested in the interplay between the functions of adjudication and the process of judging, Irene focuses her research on how the presence or absence of adjudicative lawmaking affects adjudication in international commercial and investment arbitration.
Irene earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School in New York and her LL.B. degree from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She spent two years as an associate-in-law at Columbia and more than six years as a litigation and international dispute resolution associate in the New York office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. She also interned with the Secretariat of the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris and worked as a corporate associate in the Brussels office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.
In her introductory post below, Irene surveys studies demonstrating the paucity of women among arbitrators appointed in arbitrations administered by the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Irene dedicates her post to Aletta Jacobs, portrayed in the sculpture below right, about which Irene writes:

'I frequently passed by this statue during my high school years in the university town of Groningen. Aletta Jacobs (1854-1929) started the world’s first birth control clinic, played a key role in the Dutch and international suffrage movements, and was actively involved in women’s peace organizations. But in the Netherlands, she is best known for being the first woman to graduate from a Dutch university. She needed special permission from Prime Minister Johan Rudolph Thorbecke to enroll in medical school and, a few years later, to sit for exams. This dedication is also an expression of support for all the courageous girls who are fighting the battle for equal access to education today.'

Today Jacobs joins other inspiring women on IntLawGrrls' foremothers page.
Heartfelt welcome!

On October 26

On this day in ...
... 1892 (120 years ago), Doris Stevens (right) was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Following her graduation from Oberlin College, she was a teacher, social worker, and Midwest regional organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. By 1914, she was a full-time organizer for the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; her cohorts included 4 IntLawGrrls foremothers, Lucy Burns, Crystal Eastman, Helen Keller, and Alice Paul. (photo credit) Stevens served 2 months in prison for picketing the White House, and recounted her experience in a book, Jailed for Freedom (2008). As our colleague Ed Gordon wrote at page 153 of a recent Green Bag article, Stevens was a friend of artist Jeannette Scott and so knew the artist's brother – and as a result, Stevens was instrumental in the visage of international lawyer James Brown Scott becoming the likeness of Vitoria (whose actual looks are unknown) in a portrait.

(Prior October 26 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On August 27

On this day in ...
... 1979, Judge Anna Moscowitz Kross died at a hospital in the Bronx, 88 years after her birth in Neshves, Russia, and 80 after she and her family immigrated to the United States. She won a scholarship to study law at New York University, and after being admitted to the bar she built up a law practice and was active in women's suffrage and other causes. Kross had an illustrious career in law. Serving as the 1st woman New York City Commissioner of Correction, she was "responsible for wiping out many of the dungeon-like features of the prison system," according to her New York Times obituary. (credit for 1958 photo of Kross, at right, listening as Eleanor Roosevelt talks to inmates at Women's House of Detention in New York) Kross had also been the city's 1st woman assistant corporation counsel and among the 1st women to serve as a city magistrate, holding the latter job for 20 years.
This 'Grrl recently heard about Kross and her feminist colleagues in a fascinating presentation by Mae C. Quinn (left), Professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis and the author of numerous articles that build on her examination of Kross' papers. (prior post) The most recent is "Feminist Legal Realism," published this year in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender.

(Prior August 27 posts  are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Frances Power Cobbe, foremother

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity today to honor a transnational foremother, in addition to contributing a post on the legal regulation of migrant workers)

Frances Power Cobbe (credit)

I have chosen to acknowledge Dublin-born Frances Power Cobbe, as an Irish woman who was unafraid to challenge the social conventions of her time and a lifelong and tireless campaigner for social reform.
Frances’ determination to express her radical views was a lifelong trait.
When she voiced doubts about conventional religious faith to her father as a young woman, she was expelled from the family home (although she was allowed back a few months later, as housekeeper).
On moving to London she became a prolific columnist and writer. Throughout her life she published at least eighteen non-prose books, hundreds of periodical essays and thousands of newspaper tracts on such varied subjects as travel, theology, women’s issues and animal rights. Her peers and friends included well-known thinkers of the day such as John Stuart Mill and Charles Darwin.
Cobbe was a dedicated women’s rights advocate and an influential member of the executive council of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
She published many articles on women’s property rights and the legal rights of women in marriage, including a pamphlet entitled “Truth on Wife Torture” which argued, among other things, that assault of his wife by a husband should be grounds for a legal separation. This and other papers were a key part of the Victorian women’s movement that influenced the landmark Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878, which gave a wife the right to a separation with maintenance and custody of children under ten years where she had been the victim of violence in the marriage.
In later life, she became interested in animal rights issues and founded a number of animal advocacy groups – including the National Anti-Vivisection Society  in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection in 1898 – which are still in existence today.
When she died in Wales in 1904, at age 81, Frances was buried next to her long-term partner, Mary Lloyd, who had died several years before.

On July 25

On this day in ...

(credit)

... 1947 (65 years ago today), Mary Ware Dennett died at a nursing home in New York, not far from its border with Massachusetts. She'd been born Mary Coffin Ware in the latter state, in Worcester, 75 years earlier; her extended family included 2 social reformers, with whom she lived at times. Graduated with honors in 1891 from the School of Art and Design in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, she began teaching art, then married an architect and started a design firm with him. Following 3 difficult childbirths the couple endeavored to prevent pregnancy without benefit of contraceptive advice. Divorce came in 1912. Needing to support her children, she began work outside the home -- as Field Secretary of the Massachusetts Suffrage Association. Thus began a lifelong career of activism for women's suffrage and other rights (in particular, for sex education and reproductive health), and against militarism. In 1928, Dennett was convicted of distributing obscene materials on account of a frank pamphlet that she initially wrote for her own adolescent boys, The Sex Side of Life (1918); in 1930, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit reversed. Case materials in United States v. Dennett are archived here.

(Prior July 25 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 18

On this day in ...
... 1890, Lydia Becker (left) died in Aix-les-Bains, France, 63 years after her birth in Chadderton, Lancashire, England. (image credit) Educated at home, Becker eventually became active in learned societies, and at the 1886 meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Social Science, the delivery by Barbara Bodichon entitled "Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women" spurred Becker to career of activism on behalf of suffrage and other women's rights. For 20 years, Becker served as founding publisher of the Women's Suffrage Journal; her colleagues ceased the publication when she died. Becker also organized speaking tours for women, at one of which "fifteen-year-old Emmeline Pankhurst experienced her first public gathering in the name of women's suffrage."

(Prior July 18 posts  are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 15

May Craig, left, interviews unnamed servicemember (credit)

On this day in ...
... 1975, noted American journalist May Craig died in Silver Spring, Maryland. About 85 years earlier, in Coosaw, South Carolina, she'd been born Elisabeth May Adams. As a girl she moved to Washington, D.C.; she studied nursing at George Washington University. In 1924, Craig -- by then a married woman in her mid-30s -- began writing for Gannett newspapers in Maine. A women's suffrage activist before passage of the 19th Amendment, as a journalist she "took on leadership roles within both the Women's National Press Club and Eleanor Roosevelt's Press Conference Association, both organisations supporting women in journalism." She was posted in the European theater during World War II, writing 1sthand about London bombings, the liberation of Paris, and other events. Craig was the 1st woman journalist on a battleship at sea, and the 1st woman to fly over the North Pole. (A 1966 oral history interview of Craig is here.) She was noted for her more than 200 appearances on "Meet the Press." A notable quote by her points to her frustration at being left out of some news stories on account of her sex:

'When I die, there will be the word "facilities," so often it has been used to prevent me from doing what men reporters could do.'

(Prior July 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 13

On this day in ...
... 1913, was published the following letter by one "M.C.," clearly not a fan of then-active women's suffragists, like IntLawGrrls' foremothers Lucy Burns, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Emmeline's daughter, Sylvia Pankhurst:

(Prior July 13 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1902 (110 years ago today), the Governor-General signed into law the Commonwealth Franchise Act for an Uniform Federal Franchise (image credit), by which women in 4 Australian states who did not yet enjoy suffrage were granted the right to vote in elections for both houses of a new Commonwealth Parliament. The statute did not provide universal suffrage, however; it forbade "aboriginal native[s] of Australia Africa Asia or the Islands of the Pacific except New Zealand" from voting, unless they were otherwise covered under Australia's Constitution.

(Prior June 12 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On May 23

On this day in ...
... 1846, a daughter, Belle Aurelia Babb, was born into a farming family in Burlington, Iowa. Having grown up largely without her father present (the California Gold Rush lured him from home) she was graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1865, the Civil War having opened seats for women students. She and her brother placed 1st and 2d, respectively, in that graduating class. Subsequently married to one of her college professors, Arabella Mansfield (right), as she became known, studied for the bar in her brother's law office, took the bar exam notwithstanding a state law barring anyone but white men over 21, and, in 1869, became the 1st woman admitted to the Iowa bar. (photo credit) Though she never practiced law -- becoming a university dean instead -- she belonged to the National League of Women Lawyers. Mansfield also led her state's campaign for women's suffrage. Nearly 70 years after her 1911, she was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame; 2 decades after that, an award was established in her name to honor "outstanding women lawyers in Iowa who have promoted and nurtured women in the legal profession."

(Prior May 23 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On May 10

On this day in ...

...1902 (110 years ago today), Irene Silva Linares (right) was born in Cajamarca, Peru; eventually she moved to Lima to be educated at Colegio Sagrados Corazones. Married at age 20, Irene Silva Linares de Santolalla not only would give birth to 3 daughters and a son, but also would become a leader in Peru and beyond. (photo credit) In 1949, she founded and was the 1st president of the Peruvian Committee for Collaboration with the United Nations. She spearheaded the campaign for women's suffrage in Peru, and in 1956 became the 1st woman elected to the Peruvian Senate (8 women were elected to the legislature's lower house the same year). Linares de Santolalla died at age 90, on July 30, 1992, in Lima.

(Prior May 10 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On April 3

On this day in ...
... 1807 (205 years ago today), Mary Carpenter (right) was born into the family of a Unitarian minister in Exeter, in Great Britain. (photo credit) Educated at her father's school, she became a governesss at age 20; then, 2 years later, she and her mother opened a small girls school. By the mid-1830s she was active in working on behalf of the poor, founding a "ragged school" for poor children in Bristol. This led to interest in the fate of young persons caught up in the criminal justice system and, in 1852, establishment of a reform school. She published widely and campaigned for women's suffrage and for educational reform statutes. A frequent visitor to India, she pushed for reform there as well. Carpenter died in Bristol in 1877.

(Prior April 3 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On March 5

On this day in ...
... 1882 (130 years ago today), Dora Marsden (right) was born in the community of Marsden in Yorkshire, England. When she was about 8, economic reversals led her father and eldest brother to leave for America while her mother worked as a seamstress. At 13, she began to work as a tutor, and after attending what's now Victoria University in Manchester, she became a schoolteacher. (photo credit) Active in the women's suffrage movement even as a student, she would work full-time for the Women's Social and Political Union for a couple years. From 1911 on, Marsden devoted herself to publishing, serving as editor of feminist, modernist magazines whose patron was Harriet Shaw Weaver: The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist. The last was the 1st to publish "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce. Following the poor reception accorded her own writings, The Definition of the Godhead (1928) and Mysteries of Christianity (1930), Marsden suffered a breakdown. She died in 1960, having spent the last quarter-century of her life as a patient in a psychological institution in Scotland.

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

On February 27

On this day in ...
... 1917 (95 years ago today), in Canada, women in Ontario secured the right the vote in provincial elections, but still could not run for a seat in the provincial legislature. "The struggle for female suffrage in Canada had started in Ontario, and was instigated for the most part by the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Association," whose leaders included 2 physicians about whom we've posted, Dr. Emily Howard Stowe (1831-1903) (left) and her daughter, Dr. Augusta Stowe-Gullen (1857-1943) (right). (photo credits here and here)

(Prior February 27 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Love those rights

"Love me, love my vote."
That was the phrase of the day for February 14, 1918, Valentine's Day 2 years before American women achieved the right to vote by dint of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
It appears, however, that the artist hedged her bet: this site attributes not only the Valentine at left, but also another, which declared "Woman's sphere is in the home," to the same year and the same artist, Ellen H. Clapsaddle. Born in 1865 in New York state, Clapsaddle was among her era's most popular card illustrators. Yet she "died penniless" in 1934.
As for women's rights and Valentines, illustrators seemed to play both sides of the divide. (See here, too.) And pro-suffrage activists back then used the day to push for voting rights.
Rights activism today?
See here.

On January 25

On this day in ...
... 1871, Maud Wood Park (right) was born in Boston, Massachusetts. An 1898 summa graduate of Radcliffe, "where she was one of only two students in a class of seventy-two to favor the vote for women," Park would go on to a career in social work and political activism. Initially, she worked in her own area, serving as a leader in city and state suffrage organizations; then, recruited by Carrie Chapman Catt, she became a campaigner for women's suffrage throughout the United States -- a goal achieved with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. That same year, Park became the 1st President of the League of Women Voters, serving till 1924, and in that time successfully lobbying for legislation that benefited women and children. (credit for photo from Library of Congress collection of her papers) She would remain a popular lecturer till her death in 1955.

(Prior January 25 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On November 28

On this day in ...
... 1853, a daughter, Helen Magill, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, into a Quaker family. Her father's professorial posts proved her entree into formal studies: as a child she was the only girl student at Boston Public Latin School. She was among the 5 women and 1 man who made up the 1st graduating class at Swarthmore College, where her father was president. In 1877, she became the 1st American woman to earn a Ph.D. -- in Greek, from Boston University. Following further studies in England, she returned to the United State and became a teacher. Three years after meeting a retired-Cornell-president-turned-diplomat (and onetime classmate of her father) while presenting a paper at American Social Science Association, she married him in 1890. Diplomatic service would find the couple living in St. Petersburg, Russia and Berlin, Germany, before his death in 1918 -- 5 years after she made a stir by voicing opposition to women's suffrage. Helen Magill White (above right) died in Maine in 1944. (credit for 1873 photo)

(Prior November 28 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Thanks for the vote

Today we American 'Grrls settle into a day of Thanksgiving.
In years past, things were much less settled. Newspaper archives reveal that Thanksgiving once offered a platform for debate about whether American women ought to be allowed to vote.
In 1909, women in Chicago postponed dinner to attend a Thankgiving Day arrival of Emmeline Pankhurst, the famed British suffragist and IntLawGrrls foremother.
That same year, The New York Times reported, one Madison Avenue minister deployed his Thanksgiving-Day pulpit

to attack the campaign for women’s right to vote, by attempting to denigrate some of those who support it.

The charge levied against leaders who'd recently taken part in a Woman’s Suffrage Convention at Carnegie Hall? Daring to divorce. The minister told his congregation:

'I do know that there was one woman very conspicuously present upon that platform who had herself changed husbands, so I suppose that there must have been something in her case that might give point to her abjurations; yes, and there was another one there, too, prominently connected with the movement — I mean the eruption — that also belonged to the migratory sisterhood.'

The minister professed not to be painting all suffragists with the same broad, tainted brush:

'I do not mean at all that this agitation is in the interests of what might be called ‘tandem polygamy,’ but our ladies, of the delicacy with which they are supposed to be possessed, and with which, as a rule, they certainly are possessed, should be made thoughtful of facts of this kind.'

A very different note was sounded when the Woman Suffrage Party met in the same month 4 years later at Carnegie Hall. The partied rallied in "thanksgiving for the suffrage victories won in the States in this country and abroad in the last year" -- and raised $7,000 for the cause. The Times reported that "Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt [left], President of the International Suffrage Alliance," (photo credit) defended suffragists' militancy with these words:

'I do not believe in war, but I say to you, fellow-citizens,that if the women are going on making their demand and election after election the voters are going against them at the polls, I tell you we will not endure it.'

As posted, by Thanksgiving Day 1920, women had won the franchise.

On October 28

On this day in ...
... 1886 (125 years ago today), the Statue of Liberty was dedicated. According to a contemporary New York Times report, ceremonies at "Bedlow's Island" [sic - as our friend and reader Rita Maran's pointed out, the Times should've spelled it "Bedloe," and in any event it's been called "Liberty Island" since the 1950s] in New York Harbor, the new home of the French-made, 46-meters-tall bronze figure, included a formal acceptance by U.S. President Grover Cleveland from the representive of the gift-giver, France. (credit for 1886 painting of unveiling) Another highlight was a waterborne parade of vessels (perhaps the source of the parade term, "floats"?). One vessel belonged to the Woman Suffrage Association, which had been excluded from the ceremonies.

(Prior October 28 posts are here, here, here, and here.)