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1821 to 1830

1821 

born 

..... Elizabeth Felix ..... French tragedienne known as ‘Rachel’. She was the daughter of a poor Jewish merchant and during her childhood sang on the streets of Lyons and Paris for money. Her talent was soon noticed and for a time she studied at Saint-Aulaire’s drama school but her father forced her to seek work and in 1837 she appeared at the Gymnase-Theatre. A year later she joined the Comedié-Francaise and went on to play all the feminine roles in the plays of Corneille and Racine.  She toured Europe, played in London, America and Russia and established a tradition of tragic acting that has never been surpassed. She died at the age of 37 in 1858 of tuberculosis. ‘If I marry, goodbye to the actress and in her place only one married woman the more’

born 25th March

..... Isabella Banks  ..... author of The Manchester Man, she was born in Oldham Street, Manchester, daughter of a chemist.  He was an ardent politician and she supported him in his work and she was also fond of writing poetry.  On 12th December 1846 she married George Linnaeus Banks, a journalist, and as he moved from one editorship to another they moved a lot. Isabella contributed articles and reviews to many of these papers but did not write her first novel " God's providence House" until she was 44 years old.  The Manchester Man was serialised in Cassell's magazine and was published in full in 1876.  It presented a graphic picture of Manchester (England) in the nineteenth century and the plot centred around the Peterloo Massacre. Her novels show a strong grasp of the parts of the country in which she sets them and a detailed knowledge of the historical events she describes. She died in 1897

born

..... Mary Baker Eddy ..... discoverer and Founder of Christian Science. She was married three times and for a long time was an invalid. In 1862 she became a patient of Phineas D Quimby, a mental healer. Due to her recovery from a serious injury in 1866 she attributed her discovery of Christian Science and began to work out her own system. She published Science and Health qv 1875 and a year later the Christian Science Association was formed. In 1879 the various associations were merged in the Church of Christ Scientist. She also founded and edited the Journal of Christian Science and although she retired in 1889 never ceased to be the actual leader of the movement and the chief author of its writings until her death in 1910

1822 

..... Mary Ann Mantell discovered the first fossil to be recognised as a dinosaur

born

..... Elizabeth Cary Agassiz .....  founder and president of Radcliffe College. She was born in Boston and in 1850 married Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz, scientist and educator who was a widow with small children. She was not trained as a naturalist but  shared his work and they established a seaside laboratory on Sullivan Island. In 1856 she opened a select school for girls in Massachusetts which she ran for eight years. She also helped to develop the Natural History Museum at Cambridge and the National History School on Penikese Island. Her husband died in 1873 and she wrote his autobiography Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence which was published in 1885. In 1879 at a meeting about Harvard education for women she effectively founded the institution which became Radcliffe College. She was against co-education but believed that women should have the same educational rights as men. From 1893 to 1903 she was president of Radcliffe and a scholarship and a student hall were endowed in her honour. She died in 1907

born

..... Frances Power Cobbe .....  philanthropist and religious writer who published anonymously  The Theory of Intuitive Morals in 1855/57. She was associated with Mary Carpenter in her ragged school and reformatory work and occupied herself with the relief of destitution and workhouse philanthropy.  She was an early advocate of women’s suffrage and an opponent of vivisection. She died in 1904

1823

born

..... Charlotte Mary Yonge ..... English novelist born at Otterbourne in Hantshire. She was educated by her father but was influenced by John Keble, a local vicar who urged her to expound his religious views in fiction. The Heir of Radclyffe (1853) was her first novel and in all she issued 160 books on upper class family life, full of heroines and noble lovers. She was editor of The Monthly Packet from 1851 to 1898 and was also a biographer, historian and translator. The proceeds from her first novel helped to provide the schooner for Bishop Selwyn’s Melanesian Mission. She firmly opposed Catholicism, feminism, socialism and other threats to Victorian decencies. She died in 1901   

born

..... Marietta Alboni ..... Italian contralto and one of the few pupils that Rossini was prepared to teach. She made her debut in 1842 and appeared at La Scala in Milan in the same year. She was one of the greatest exponents of classical Italian bel canto and toured Eastern Europe, Germany and Italy and went to London for the Royal Italian Opera’s first season at Covent Garden. She was a rival in success to Jenny Lind and her salary was raised from £500 to £2000 for the season. Her greatest triumphs were in Paris and London and in 1852 she made a highly successful tour of America. She died in 1894

1824

America

..... women weavers allied with men at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the first joint strike

born

..... Anne Ross Cousin neé Cundell .....  who wrote the longest English hymn The Sands of Time are Sinking.  Altogether there are 152 lines but only 32 are shown in the Methodist Hymn Book. She died in 1906. Another famous hymnist is Frances Jane Van Alstyne (1820 to 1915) who wrote 8500 hymns even though she had been blind from the age of six weeks

born

..... Marie Alphonsine Plessis ..... French literary figure and the original Dame Aux Camellias. She was born in a small Normandy village and brought up by a relative and later joined her father in Paris. He died in the winter of 1839/40 and she had already had a varied career as an apprentice, laundress, mistress of an elderly bachelor, servant in an inn and as a child prostitute. She soon acquired the patronage of wealthier clients and at the age of 18 entered fashionable society, gambling, riding in the Bois de Boulogne and attending first nights at the Opera where she always wore a corsage of fresh camellias. In 1845 she met two other characters who were also recreated in the novel by Alexander Dumas – an elderly Duke who wished to adopt her because she resembled his dead daughter and the young Comte de Perregaux whom she met in 1846 and who squandered his entire fortune on her. After their wedding she returned to Paris. Debt and consumption left her lonely and she died in February 1847 at the age of 23. The following year her life was immortalised by Alexander Dumas in his first successful novel La Dame Aux Camellias

1825

England

..... "Appeal of one half of the human race, women - against the pretensions of the other half - men, to restrain them in the political and thence civil and domestic slavery" ..... by William Thomson - arguing for women's suffrage

1826

born

..... Baba Petkova ..... in Bulgaria. She established a system of education for young women in Eastern Europe and began teaching in 1859 when hundreds of girls attended her classes. Though they and their parents supported her efforts to bring education to women, government officials tried to stop her and she was arrested and her home searched for seditious books. Although forced to stand trial she was released through lack of evidence and continued her campaign to educate women until her death in 1894

born

..... Harriet Tubman ..... in Maryland, America, into slavery. At the age of 23 she escaped to the North where she established her ‘ underground railroad’ from which she never lost a single passenger. She led over 300 men, women and children from slavery into freedom during the 1850s risking her own life many times on her trips into the slave states. She became a legendary figure, was called ‘Moses’ and a reward of $40,000 was offered for her capture. During the Civil War Harriet worked as a spy, scout, nurse and a commander of troops for the Union Army. In her later years she attended women’s suffrage conventions and helped to organise the National Federation of Afro-American women in 1895

1827

born

..... Candace Wheeler ..... American designer born in Delhi, New York. Before her marriage at the age of 17 and the birth of her four children she had learnt spinning, embroidery and other crafts. In 1865 the Wheeler family toured Europe and at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1866 she was inspired to begin her own Society of Decorative Arts which was followed by the establishment of a craft distribution outlet in 1878, the Women’s Exchange. A year later she founded the interior design firm Associated Artists with Louise Tiffany before leaving to set up her own all woman firm for designing textiles and undertaking needlework commissions. She supervised the Women’s Applied Art Exhibition and decorated the Women’s Building at the 1893 Columbia Exposition. She remained a highly influential figure until her death in 1923

1828

born

.....  Josephine Elizabeth Butler neé Gray ..... born in Northumberland she became a social reformer and a zealous promoter of the civil rights of women. She was a true feminist and worked to bring about the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 and also led the agitation for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. She was the leader of a nation wide campaign against the white slave traffic in which young girls were bought for a few pounds from their parents and shipped abroad to become prostitutes. This was abolished in 1886. She travelled widely through Europe and founded the International Abolitionist Federation in 1875. As a result of her work the law on prostitution in Britain is different to that of many other countries. It is lawful to be a prostitute but unlawful to run a brothel or to solicit for custom. The Josephine Butler Society opposes the introduction of legalised, regulated brothels because it believes that it would encourage the trafficking of women and children. She died on December 30th 1906

1829

America

..... Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen published the Free Enquirer newspaper in New York, using it as a vehicle to further the cause of women's emancipation

born

..... Catherine Booth .....  English co-founder of the Salvation Army, in Derbyshire, the daughter of deeply religious parents. Because of ill health she was educated at home, chiefly in theology. In 1844 she became an active member of the Wesleyan Methodist Church at Brixton, London, where her father had moved to and it was here that she met William Booth. She persuaded him to leave the Methodists and from preaching on street corners and the formation of a Hallelujah Band, they began to build up what was to become known as the Salvation Army. The improvement of the lives of women and children was of chief importance to Catherine and she was a notable orator and a firm believer of the right of women to preach the gospel, as expressed in her pamphlet Female Ministry in 1859. She had eight children and they all became Salvationists. When she died in 1890 of cancer her funeral was attended by a gathering of   approximately 36,000 people. Her daughter was  Evangeline Cary Booth

1830

England

..... Mary Fairfax Somerville's – The Mechanisms of the Heavens – was a popularisation of Mécanique Céleste by Laplace. She was a self educated woman and Laplace declared that she was the only woman to have understood his work

born December 10th

..... Emily Dickinson ..... American poet who was the granddaughter of one of the founders of Amherst College which she attended between 1840 and 1847 and where she proved to be a very able student. In 1847 she transferred to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary but stayed for only one year as her father declined to send her back for her final year. In all she penned a total of 1775 poems but saw only eight published during her lifetime as she had no desire to see her work in print or to make any money from them. On the rare occasions that her work was published it was because they had been sent to a publisher without her knowledge. Her style was quite her own and she did not adhere to the strict rules of grammar or rhythm that the Victorians had come to expect.  After a long and painful illness she died in 1886 and her literary executors edited her poems quite heavily to make them fit in with the taste of the day. It was not until 1955 that a decent complete works was published

born

..... Isabella 11 ..... Queen of Spain, the only child of Ferdinand V11 and Maria Christina who was regent for the first seven years of her daughter’s reign, a period which was marred by scandal and avaricious greed. In 1846 , for reasons of state, Isabella married her cousin Francis, and in 1870 was deposed after a series of insurrections. Her son Alphonso X11 became King and she fled to France where she remained in exile in San Sebastian, remaining an embarrassment but not a threat, until her death in 1904

born

..... Marianne North ..... doyenne of the botanists of her day who became a much travelled naturalist and flower painter and between 1871 and 1884 visited Jamaica, Brazil, Canada, the USA, Singapore, Japan, Borneo, Java, Ceylon, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and the Seychelles, travelling most of the time with her widowed father. When he died in 1869 her travelling broadened even more. She was obsessed with finding and recording tropical vegetation from all over the world. Towards the end of her life she donated her collection of 800 paintings to Kew Gardens and in addition provided funds for a gallery to house the pictures, which was designed under her supervision in the manner of a Greek temple. This still stands as she left it. She died in 1890 and three years later the diaries of her travels were published under the title she had decided on herself Recollections of a Happy Life