February in Women's History

 

Celebrate Black History Month

February Highlights in US Women's History

  • Feb 1, 1978 - First postage stamp to honor a black woman, Harriet Tubman, is issued in Washington, DC
  • Feb 4, 1987 - First National Women in Sports Day is celebrated by Presidential Proclamation
  • Feb. 12 1869 - the Utah Territory passes a law allowing women to vote
  • Feb 15, 1921 - The Suffrage Monument, depicting Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, and carved by Adelaide Johnson, is dedicated at the U.S. Capitol
  • Feb 15, 1953 - Tenley Albright is the first American woman to win the World Figure Skating championship
  • Feb 17, 1870 - Esther Hobart Morris became the first American woman Justice of the Peace
  • Feb 24, 1912 - Henrietta Szold founds Hadassah, the largest Jewish organization in American history, focusing on healthcare and education in the Israel and the US
  • Feb 24, 1967 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell makes the first discovery of a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star
  • Feb 25 1986 - Corazon Aquino sworn in as the first woman President of the Philippines
  • Feb 27, 1922 - US Supreme Court upholds the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees women the right to vote

February Birthdays

  • Feb 1, 1878 (1950) - Hattie Wyatt Caraway , first woman elected to the US Senate (1932, D-AR) and first woman to preside over the Senate in 1943
  • Feb 3, 1821 (1910) - Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, first woman awarded a medical degree in US (1849)
  • Feb 3, 1874 (1946) - Gertrude Stein, poet, author, art critic; famous for: "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"
  • Feb 4, 1913 (2005) - Rosa Parks, "Mother of Civil Rights Movement;" her arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, leads to Dr. Martin Luther King's bus boycott and eventual Supreme Court decision to integrate buses
  • Feb 4, 1921 (2006) - Betty Friedan, a uthor and activist; wrote “The Feminine Mystique” (1963); cofounder of National Organization for Women (NOW) (1966)
  • Feb 7, 1867 (1957) - Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of beloved "Little House" books
  • Feb 9, 1944 - Alice Walker, writer, first African American woman to win Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for “The Color Purple” (1983)
  • Feb 10, 1927 - Leontyne Price, Grammy award winning opera singer
  • Feb 13, 1906 (1990) - Pauline Frederick, journalist, first woman network radio correspondent (1939), first woman to moderate a presidential debate (1976)
  • Feb 15, 1820 (1906) - Susan B. Anthony, leader of 19th century women's right movement; strategist; lecturer
  • Feb 16, 1870 (1927) - Leonora O'Reilly, labor organizer; founding member of Woman's Trade Union League; helped found NAACP
  • Feb 18, 1931 - Toni Morrison , Pulitzer Prize winning novelist; first African-American to win Nobel Prize for Literature (1993)
  • Feb 21, 1855 (1902) - Alice Freeman Palmer, educator; founded predecessor organization to American Assn. of University Women (AAUW) in 1881
  • Feb 22, 1876 (1938) - Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sha), writer; Sioux Indian activist; founded National Council of American Indians (1926)
  • Feb 22, 1892 (1950) - Edna St. Vincent Millay, first woman to receive Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1923)
  • Feb 27, 1897 (1993) - Marian Anderson, opera singer, first African-American member of the New York Metropolitan Opera (1955)