1909
America
..... in September Annette Kellerman and a friend were arrested in Boston for indecent exposure. They were both wearing a man's one piece bathing costume
..... the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed with Ida B Wells and Mary Terrell as founding members
..... the Men's League for Woman Suffrage was founded in America and in Washington DC a National Training School for Women and Girls was founded offering a variety of vocational courses
United Kingdom
..... the Women's Social and Political Union's suffragette campaign turned to arson. Hunger strikes and enforced feeding of imprisoned suffragettes began
..... the world famous Spirella Company, makers of made-to-measure corsets, was founded in a group of wooden huts in Bridge Road, Letchworth, Hertfordshire, by American William Kincaid. He employed 2000 people and sold 200,000 corsets each day. The corset was first believed to have been worn by Cretans of the Minoan Bronze Age in the 2nd millennium B.C. Minoan women wore the as an outer garment to clinch the waist and raise the breasts and the Minoan men favoured them to enhance a much-admired small waist
Around The World
..... the Nobel Prize for Literature was won by Selma Lagerlof
Dated items
January 11th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... Charlotte Mansfield, distinguished novelist started out from London on one of the most venturesome expeditions ever taken by a woman. She landed at Cape Town and travelled across Africa to Cairo covering 16,728 miles in seven months. She was the only white person in the expedition and travelled many hundreds of miles on foot or in a hammock slung on a pole carried by native bearers. Miss Mansfield went there as an independent writer to see the country and to write about it from a woman's point of view. Wherever she went she was well treated and was called the 'White Donna' and as she left one village to travel to another the drums would signal that she was on her way. She eventually settled in South Africa after marrying Vladimir Raffalovich, a mining engineer.
January 18th ..... NEW ZEALAND ..... brewers decided to abolish barmaids and mostly ban women from buying alcohol in bars
February 9th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... a court in London ruled that even if a woman had been deserted by her husband she was not entitled to a divorce
April 26th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... the International Women's Suffrage Convention opened in London, chaired by the American, Carrie Pratt
June 8th ..... ITALY ..... Joan of Arc was beatified by the Pope 478 years after being burnt at the stake at Rouen
June 29th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... 120 suffragettes were arrested outside the Houses of Parliament
October 23rd ..... FRANCE ..... the first certificated woman pilot in the world was
Mme la Baronne de la Roche, a Frenchwoman, who received her Pilot's Certificate at Chalons in France, having qualified in a Voisin plane
November 19th ..... RUSSIA ..... a court in St Petersburg was adjourned when the public prosecutor refused to work with Russia's FIRST woman barrister