Almanac

December 10 - December 16

Birthdays

December 10

• In 1830, Emily Dickinson, the great poet. Criticisms of her work have ranged from referring to "that little wisp of a girl" (at 53!) to calling her the greatest female poet since Sappho. With the exception of only three poems, all her work was published posthumously.
• In 1741, Agatha Deken who with Elisabeth Wolff-Bekker wrote the first Dutch novel in 1782. Wolff was the better known writer. Deken and Wolff lived together and collaborated on writing fiction. Their novel Sara Burgerhart was influential in writing circles because of its realism and perceptive characterization.
• In 1891, Nelly Sachs - German-Jew. 1966 Nobel Prize winner for literature.
  She was a German Jew who used poetry to "make the unspeakable bearable." In 1940 she escaped the Holocaust to Sweden with the help of Selma Lagerlöff. She was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Republic in 1965 and on her 75th birthday, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for literature. She described her poetry as "representing the tragedy of the Jewish people."
• In 1903, Mary Pearson Norton - British children's author. She is best known and beloved for her series on the Borrowers, a resourceful race of beings only 6 inches tall, who secretly share houses with humans and "borrow" what they need from them (which explains where things go that are mysteriously "missing.")
  

December 11

• In 1922, Grace Paley - U.S. short story writer whose works feature the idiosyncrasies of New Yorkers. The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) is her best known work.

December 14

• In 1897, Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman elected to both houses of the United States Congress. After serving eight years in the House, she was elected overwhelmingly to the Senate in 1949, 54, 60, and 66 only to be defeated in 1972 when she was 75 and did not campaign.
  
• In 1801,
  

December 15

• In 1896, Eslanda Cardoza Goode Robeson. U.S., Afro-American-Jewish author and civil right reformer. Her grandfather was a black official with South Carolina during reconstruction and her mother's parents were prominent Sephardic Jews. After her degree in chemistry she became the first black-Jewish woman surgical technician at Presbyterian Hospital, New York.
  After marrying Paul Robeson, the noted singer, she convinced him to seek his future in the theatre rather than law which she saw as too limited for a black man. She managed his career.
• In 1906, Betty Smith, U.S. novelist best known for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943).
  

December 16

• In 1901, Margaret Mead, U.S. anthropologist who revolutionized thinking about primitive life and female adolescent sexuality by raising questions about the assumptions of rigid social mores in all cultures.
  

Happenings

December 10

• In 1869, the Wyoming territory adopted a woman's suffrage law amidst laughter by the all-male legislature. It was seen as a joke and the intention was to quickly rescind it, but wives and circumstances intervened and the law stood when Wyoming gained statehood.
• In 1931, Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first woman given that honor. She gave all the money to the Women's International League. Nicholas Murray Butler shared the prize.
  

December 13

• In 1853, the first woman's infirmary that was staffed by women physicians was opened. The New York Infirmary of Women and Children, New York City, was instituted "to provide for poor women the medical advice of competent physicians of her own sex." The physicians were Drs. Blackwell, Elizabeth and Emily, and Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska.
  

December 14

• In 1922, Vita Sackville-West met Virginia Woolf. Four days later Vita wrote her husband: "...She is quite old (forty). I've rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she's asked me to Rich mond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart." (Letter dated 12191922. page 223 of Portrait of a Marrige, V. Sackjville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson, their son. (New York: Atheneum, copyright 1973.)
  
• In 1985,Wilma Mankiller took the oath of office as the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the first time a woman has headed a major American native Indian tribe.
  

December 16

• In 1904, in spite of dire predictions of moral turpitude, nothing much happened when Majestic Theater in New York City hired female ushers.
  

For more information, check out Women of Achievement and Herstory.