March 28

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Women peacemakers born today

  • 1515 Teresa of Avila born Avila, Castile (d. 1582). Spanish mystic and preacher.

  • 1822 Mary Ann McClintock born Philadelphia, PA (d. 1884). Quaker nonviolent resister. Co-founded Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1833. Organized Seneca Falls Convention with Jane Hunt, Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848.

  • 1903 Eugenia Morariu born Kassa, Hungary (d. 1977). Romanian-Hungarian Esperantist. Dedicated herself to spreading Esperanto as a universal language, to bring all people closer.

  • 1948 Loreta Navarro-Castro born Malabon, Manila, Philippines. Pioneer of national peace studies. Founded Center for Peace Education. Secretary of Philippine Council for Peace and Global Education. Nobel Peace Prize nominee, 2005.

  • 1957 Raya Kadyrova born Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz peacemaker. Oversaw tolerance education project for UN High Commissioner of Refugees, 1993. Founding president of Foundation for Tolerance International (FTI), 1998.

  • 1959 Laura Chinchilla born Carmen Central, San José, Costa Rica. First woman president of Costa Rica, 2010-14. Under her leadership, Costa Rica became second nation to ban nuclear weapons, 2011.

Women's peacemaking on this day

  • 1915 In The Hague, Kathleen D’Olier Courtney put forth the International Women’s Peace Initiative at the first WILPF Women’s Conference.

  • 1918 French school teacher Lucie Colliard sentenced to 2 years prison for pacifist teachings.

  • 1928 Australian women first celebrated International Women’s Day, Sydney.

  • 1948 Polish premiere of Wanda Jakubowska’s Auschwitz film The Last Stage.

  • 1964 On Good Friday, eight women from the Congress of Racial Equality, including Doris Castle, were arrested for forming a “freedom ring” at Loew’s Theater, New Orleans. They remained jailed until Monday.

  • 1968 WILPF president Dorothy Hutchinson presented her pamphlet "Proposal for an Honorable Peace in Vietnam."

  • 1972 Vera Leff began a public campaign against nuclear weapons, later picked up by CND.

  • 1977 Mothers of the disappeared held first rally in Plaza de la Mayo, Buenos Aires.

  • 1986 In Kansas City, Jean Gump damaged a missile silo, for which she received a 13-year prison sentence.

  • 1993 Susan McHugh organized Dublin peace rally of 20,000. “Enough is enough. We don’t want any more deaths. We want a cease-fire.”

  • 1997 Hyun Sook Lee founded Women Making Peace "for the peaceful reunification of Korea… from a feminist perspective."

  • 1998 In Reading, England, Greenham women presented World Court opinion against nuclear weapons to a British court.

  • 2002 Meike Capps-Schubert opened Clearing Barrel GI-Café Kaiserslautern for US military resisters.

  • 2003 In North Carolina, members of Asheville Women in Black were arrested for their Iraq War protest.

  • 2003 In Bonn, the German Women's Security Council formed to find alternatives to Iraq War, and promote women's involvement in security issues.