October 28

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Women peacemakers born today

  • 1816 Malwida von Meysenbug born Kassel, Hesse, Germany (d. 1903). German writer; feminist and revolutionary. Friend of Wagner, Nietzsche, Mazzini, Rolland. Published Memories of an Idealist, 1869.

  • 1816 Mary Frame Thomas born Montgomery County, Maryland (d. 1888). Quaker (later Methodist) doctor. Radical nonresistant abolitionist; prison reformer; suffragist. President, American Women's Suffrage Association, 1880-85.

  • 1842 Anna Elizabeth Dickinson born Philadelphia, PA (d. 1932). "America's Joan of Arc"; Quaker; playwright and orator; Garrisonian abolitionist.

  • 1867 Nivedita born Dungannon, Tyrone, Ireland (d. 1911). Teacher; author and orator; disciple of Vivekananda, 1898; nonviolent anarchist; militant Indian nationalist.

  • 1876 Rosalie Slaughter Morton born Lynchburg, VA (d. 1968). Internationalist; doctor for hospitals and schools in Serbia; President of Zonta; founder of American Women's Hospitals, 1917.

  • 1921 Peggy Terry born Haileyville, OK (d. 2004). Community organizer; civil rights activist in Montgomery bus boycott. Member of Women for Peace Chicago; SNCC activist, 1966; organizer Jobs or Income Now (JOIN). Peace & Freedom Party Vice-Presidential candidate, 1968.

  • 1939 Jane Alexander born Boston, MA. Actress; leader of WAND; opposed Vietnam War.

  • 1944 Caroline Moorehead born London. British human rights journalist and author. Chronicled tales of pacifists and war resisters in Troublesome People: The Warriors of Pacifism, 1987; wrote biographies of Bertrand Russell and Martha Gellhorn, told the stories of Magda Trocmé of Chambon, and French women resisters.

  • 1962 Achta Djibrine Sy born Chad. Economist. Worked with Oxfam and women’s groups to facilitate recovery from civil war.

Women's peacemaking on this day

  • 1908 Suffragist Muriel Matters interrupted House of Commons with protest.

  • 1911 Belgian Alliance of Women for Peace through Education founded in Brussels.

  • 1916 5,000 Australian women protested war and conscription, Melbourne.

  • 1942 Mary Emma Woolley organized the first meeting of women on postwar peace, New York City.

  • 1986 300 women occupied Statue of Liberty in "Women Take Liberty '86," first national event of Women Rising in Resistance.

  • 1992 Belgrade Women in Black protest: "They have been ceaselessly killing, torturing and raping for a year and a half already. They have banished more than three million lives. They manipulate women. Blackmail men. They spread hate, destruction and death; we are left without words to express our horror and anger. . . People die by the minute."

  • 2015 Women detainees at Don Hutto Detention Center in Texas began hunger strike for release.