1896
America
..... women in Colorado, Idaho , Utah and Wyoming had been given the vote by this time but it was not until 1920 that all women in America were enfranchised
..... Mary Church Terrell was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women
..... Mrs H H A Beach became the first American woman to write a symphony
England
..... Anne Gulvin and Alice Hutchings began work as the first women gardeners at Kew Gardens after they had graduated from Swanley Horticultural College and were entered in the register as 'boys' earning 10s per week. Anne had to retire when she married in 1900
Celebrated women born in this year
..... Dodie Smith ..... playwright and novelist who specialised in the gentle comedies that depicted English upper-middle class life. However it was her children's book One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) which gained her a world wide audience especially after the Walt Disney film of the book appeared in 1961 and her character Cruella de Wit became the most convincing and scarifying villainess in cartoon history. She was born on May 3rd in Whitefield in Manchester (UK) and educated at Whalley Range High School and St Paul's, Hammersmith and RADA and subsequently joined the Lena Ashwell Players who put on shows for the troops in France during the First World War. She worked in theatre for six years but in 1923 took a job at Heal's where she was soon running her own department. In 1924 she wrote a play British Talent and followed this in 1931 with Autumn Crocus. She used a pseudonym when writing this but the headlines still declared "Shop girl writes play". This was made into a film soon afterwards starring Ivor Novello. Other plays include Service (1932) Call It a Day (1935) ( the first play written in her own name) and the triumphant Dear Octopus her best known play. She married in 1939 and shortly afterwards went to America with her husband where they lived in Beverly Hills for 15 years and she wrote film scripts. She also kept 17 Dalmatians although the book was not written until later. Whilst in America she began to write novels and her first in 1949 I Capture the Castle was an immediate success and sold more than 1m copies. It was later made into a stage play. Her last novel The Girl from the Candle-lit Bath appeared in 1978. She also wrote four volumes of autobiography from 1974 to 1985. She died in 1990
..... Lady Conran- Smith neé Gladys Mary Dunk ..... born September 18th she played a leading role in the introduction of the Girl Guide movement to India in the 1920s. During the Second World War she ran the WVS in Delhi and was one of the few Englishwomen to be welcomed by the Indian women of the congress party. In 1943 she was awarded the Kairsr-i-Hind medal for her services to the Indian community. She died in 1991
..... Joyce Bishop ..... born July 28th, for 28 years she was a legendary figure in the world of education and pioneered the recruitment of married women as teachers. She developed her lifelong feminism at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, during the First World War, alongside such contemporaries as Vera Brittain, and was determined that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men. It was through her that Holly Lodge High School for Girls was built in Smethwick in the late 1920s and within ten years, nine of her pupils had places at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1935 she was appointed headmistress of Godolphin and Latymer and in 1950 became president of the Association of Head Mistresses. Three years later she was appointed to the governing body of the Royal Ballet School. After retiring from Godolphin in 1963 she became a member of various committees. In 1953 she was appointed CBE and DBE ten years later. She died in 1993
..... Juliette Huxley neé Marie Juliette Baillot ..... sculptor and writer who was for many years at the hub of the Bloomsbury set. She was born on December 6th and arrived in England from Switzerland at the age of 19 to look for work as a governess and was interviewed in the first-class waiting room at Oxford station by Lady Ottoline Morrell of Garsington Manor near Oxford. Two years later she was married to Julian Huxley and became an integral part of the group. Three months after their wedding she nursed her husband through the first of his nervous breakdowns. In 1929 they trekked through the Belgian Congo, reporting on education for the Colonial Office and in the 1930s she made a solo three-month trip to Baghdad and to Bedouin tribes. From 1935 to 1942 they lived at London Zoo where her husband was Secretary of the Zoological society. During the Second World War she worked with the WVS and helped in a White City canteen where Dunkirk evacuees were billeted. In 1946 her husband was appointed first Secretary-General of Unesco and they lived in Paris for two years. She was a keen sculptor and showed works at the Royal Academy in the 1930s. In 1963 she published Wild Lives of Africa, about her travels there. She was one of the first to read the typed manuscript of Lady Chatterley's Lover and suggested it be called John Thomas and Lady Jane. In 1986 she published a moving and generous account of her life Leaves of the Tulip Tree. She died in 1994
..... Kathleen Garscadden ..... who was familiar to millions of young Scots as "Auntie Kathleen", of Children's Hour on the old BBC Scottish Home Service. Her voice was heard in the early pioneering days of the 1920s and 30s when Children's Hour was a regular afternoon feature. She had a natural, sweet soprano voice and could fill a gap in any programme with a song. Among her most notable protégés are Gordon Jackson, Stanley Baxter and Tom Conti who read and dramatised children's stories on her programme. She retired in 1969 but kept in touch with many of her listeners and eagerly followed the careers of her former young colleagues and never turned down an invitation to visit a radio or television station in Glasgow to recall her early days in radio. She died in 1991
..... Lilian Gish neé Lillian de Guiche..... star of the silent screen who was born on October 14th in Springfield, Ohio. She was put on stage at the age of 5 years with her sister and their friend Mary Pickford and made her film debut in the film An Unseen Enemy. As a child she also played opposite Sarah Bernhardt on the New York stage and recalled how the French actress kept bottles of champagne in the famous coffin that toured with her. She rose to stardom in 1915 in the film Birth of a Nation and during her long career personified the 'helpless heroine in distress' of the silent era. When sound arrived she returned to the stage but in 1946 she returned to film work again and received an Oscar nomination. In 1970 she was given a Special Academy Award and in 1975 at the age of 80 years appeared in a Broadway musical. During the filming of one of her films in 1920 Way Down East, three technicians and an actress died of exposure. President Ronald Reagan called her the "First Lady of the Silent Screen". She also starred in Intolerance (1916) and Hearts of the World (1918)
..... Margery de Brissac-Bernard (Margery Irene) ..... founder of the Garden House pre-preparatory school near Sloane Square in London, she was born on December 3rd. The school was officially opened in 1950 and she was headmistress until she retired at the age of 78. It remained a successful school with more applicants than places and yet she had no formal training. The pupils began reading at three, started French at five and were into long division at seven. During WW1 she worked at the Admiralty and then trained as a nurse with the Red Cross. When she decided to open her own school she asked her uncle for help and he wrote her a cheque for £2000. She died in 1994
..... Marutha Menuhin ..... mother of Yehudi Menuhin, the celebrated violinist.. She was born Marutha Sher in Crimea on January 7th and was the only one of seven babies to survive beyond infancy. Her father sent Marutha and her mother to live in Palestine after he had been wounded in a pogrom and here she enrolled in a Catholic convent school and shrugged off the restraints of traditional Judaism. It was in Palestine that she met her husband Moshe and they married in 1914. Although both had been raised in Yiddish-speaking families they made it a rule to speak Hebrew at home, admixed with Russian and as they grew older would throw in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. Her son Yehudi, made his professional debut at the age of seven with the San Francisco orchestra and was an immediate sensation but they were careful to limit his appearances. When it was pointed out to them that he was being held back he was finally allowed, at the age of 12, to burst upon the musical world. Her other son Hepzibah and Yalta also became musicians of the highest rank. Once their children became international celebrities Marutha and Moshe resigned their jobs and once their children were married and settled down they retreated to Los Gatos, near San Francisco. Moshe died in 988 and Marutha died in 1996. Hepzibah died in 1984
..... Violet Dickson neé Violet Penelope Lucas-Calcraft ..... born on September 3rd at Gautby in Lincolnshire. At the time of her death in 1991 she was a celebrated figure in Kuwait, where she had lived for more than 60 years. During this time, half of them as a widow, she knew many of its dignitaries including King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Faisal of Iraq, four Kuwaiti rulers, many tribal sheikhs and was equally at ease with western diplomats and travellers. Her knowledge of Kuwait and its feuds and rivalries among the kingdom's 600-strong royal family made her an indispensable resource for British ambassadors and visiting notables. Her 80th birthday party in 1976 was a major event in the life of the British community there. Despite all her prestige however, she continued to live in the same modest house to which she had been brought as a bride in 1929 by her husband Col Harold Dickson, political agent and later local representative of the Kuwait Oil company. When they arrived the entire European community numbered only 11 and they were obliged to do their own repairs to their house and get rid of the rodents which lived there. She returned to England every summer and paid annual visits to Switzerland ( courtesy of Swiss Air) where she had spent part of her youth. She was appointed MBE in 1942, CBE in 1964 and DBE in 1976