1911
America
..... Harriet Quimby became the first licensed woman pilot
..... women in California gained the right to vote
United Kingdom
..... the Second Conciliation Bill failed and the WSPU responded with an outbreak of window-breaking
..... Emily Wilding Davison hid in a broom cupboard in the House of Lords on census night in order to give her address as Parliament
..... Equal Pay - National Insurance was introduced with women retiring at 60 and men at 65 meaning that women lost five years earning capacity
..... Woman's Weekly was launched and the first issue carried an article on bust enlargement and included an advertisement for La-Mar Reducing Soap which "Washes Fat Away"
..... Eleanor Davies-Colley became the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons
Around The World
..... Marie Curie became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry making her the first person to receive 2 Nobel Prizes
Dated items
January 4th ..... FRANCE ..... the Académie des Sciences debated the admission of women as Marie Curie was a candidate for election. However on the 23rd of the month they decided against it and admitted a man, Jean Bequerel
March 8th ..... AUSTRIA, DENMARK, GERMANY, SWITZERLAND ..... International Women's Day was celebrated for the first time in these countries and had been celebrated a month earlier in America
March 17th ..... NORWAY ..... the first woman member of the Storting, Anna Rogstad, took her seat. She was originally deputy member
March 25th ..... AMERICA ..... more than 145 workers, most of them teenage girls, died when a blaze in a fabric waste bin quickly spread through the premises of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Manhattan, new York. The cramped factory was on the 8th and 9th floors of the ten storey building on the corner of Washington Place and Green Street. Only twelve girls reached the lift before acrid fumes made waiting for its return impossible. Ladders only reached to the 6th floor and the firemen's hoses could only reach the 7th. People watched helplessly as terrified girls broke windows and leapt 85' to their deaths. The weight of other bodies brought down the flimsy fire escape stairs and the press of panic stricken workers made it impossible to use inward opening doors. In 18 minutes the victims were all dead and later more than 100,000 angry mourners attended their mass funeral
April 4th ..... AMERICA ..... the Massachusetts state legislature refused women the right to vote
August 4th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... a proposal to debar young women at school from "working on the screens" and to make the occupation of their elder sisters, cousins and aunts and even their mothers as degrading and improper. The pit-brow lasses worked almost in the open air but were sheltered from the rain. As the coal left the screens it passed slowly before them and it was their job to remove the 'dirt' and send large and small lumps to their proper destination
August 11th ..... SWITZERLAND ..... Olive M May earned a medal for swimming across Lake Lucerne. Before this she had gained the following awards - The Queen Charlotte Medal awarded for service, The Royal Life Saving Society Medal (1908) The Royal Life Saving Society Award of Merit (silver) St John Ambulance Association No.87151, Royal Sanitary Institute, equivalent to Public Health Inspector. All these took place in the early days of women's emancipation, prior to receiving the vote and showed that she must have been an outstanding young lady, physically strong and mentally brilliant ( Mrs Audrey Collins, East Sussex)
August 29th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... Mrs Hilda B Hewlett became the first British woman to be granted a pilot's certificate
November 29th ..... UNITED KINGDOM ..... 20,000 women packed London's Albert Hall to protest at the government plans to make householders pay National Insurance contributions for their servants. They claimed that the Bill would force many employers to choose between cutting their servants wages to pay the extra tax or doing without servants altogether