1897
Canada
..... the first Women's Institute was formed in Stoney Creek, Ontario, by Mrs Adelaide Hunter Hoodless. She advocated that girls education should include domestic science and homecrafts and whilst speaking on the subject to a County Farmer's Institute it was suggested that she start an institute for women to learn together. The resulting meeting was attended by 101 women and so the WI was formed
England
..... the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was formed under the Presidency of Mrs Henry Fawcett ( later Dame Millicent Fawcett). The organisation linked local Suffrage Societies throughout the country which were trying to educate public opinion to recognise the justice of, and necessity for, full citizenship being granted to women. Mrs Fawcett did not believe in militancy and violent methods and from 1905 had to overcome public hostility to those generally ‘extreme’ elements. Almost every year until 1918 a bill for women’s suffrage was blocked or defeated in the House of Commons and it required considerable tenacity and patience on the part of Mrs Fawcett to continue her campaign through peaceful methods
..... the Diamond Jubilee was a national celebration which marked 60 years of the reign of Queen Victoria and which was often regarded as symbolising the summit of British power. Its most splendid public events were an immense military procession which included 30,000 troops from all parts of the Empire who escorted the Queen to a service at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. There was also a spectacular review of the fleet at Spithead
..... a Private Members Women’s Suffrage Bill passed its second reading by 71 votes but it was talked out and so eventually lost
..... the Post Office introduced a 'girl clerk' grade for 16-18 year olds with the chance of eventually being promoted to the higher grade. Even though women clerks had to pass the same exam as men they were paid less money from the start
Celebrated women born in this year
..... Bertha Lindsay ..... Eldress who was born July 28th at Braintree, Massachusetts. She was orphaned at the age of four and lived with an older sister. When she was seven she was placed with the Canterbury Shakers where she shared the chores, was educated at the community school and on her 21st birthday signed the covenant and became a Shaker sister. She soon distinguished herself and was put in charge of catering to the business leaders of the community and their guests. From 1944 to 1958 she also managed the community’s fancywork trade. In the course of the next ten years she was instrumental in establishing a museum which later evolved into the Shaker Village Inc. In 1967 she was elected second Eldress of the Canterbury Shaker community and in 1970 became Canterbury Eldress. When she died in 1990, aged 93, she was the last Eldress of the Shakers and one of the two surviving Shakers at the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire. She was one of fewer than ten remaining in the whole of America. Sister Ethel Hudson, aged 94, survived her. The Shakers was an American millennial sect founded in Manchester, England in the 1770s by “Mother” Ann Lee. It espoused communal living, equality of the sexes, celibacy and pacifism and is best remembered for its production of plain wooden furniture and handicrafts. They expanded by taking in orphans and converts. By the mid 19th century they numbered some 6,000 members who lived in a score of communal villages in New England, New York, Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky
..... Christian Fraser-Tytler neé Christian Helen Sharp ..... born August 23rd in Lothian. She was the only daughter of Sheriff Campbell Sharp and was educated at home. In 1917 she joined the Foreign Office and two years later worked at the Versailles peace conference. She married Col Neil Fraser-Tytler in the same year. After her husband’s death she joined the ATS in 1937 and two years later reorganised the Corps with Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan and became Director of the Organisation, ATS. In 1943 she became head of the anti-aircraft (ATS) UK and the following year was awarded a Territorial Decoration. After the war she returned to Aldourie Castle, became a JP and ran the ATS in Invernesshire and Ross and Cromarty. She also served on the Scottish Council of the YWCA and represented Scotland on the National Council. In all she was Senior Controller (Brigadier) of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (later Women’s Royal Army Corps) during the Second World War and in 1941 was appointed CBE (Military). She died in 1995
..... Doreen Wallace (Dora Eileen) ..... novelist, who was best known for her series of novels about East Anglian life. For more than 40 years she published a book each year, mostly fiction but also some topographical works. She was born on June 18th and educated at Malvern Girls’ College and then Somerville College, Oxford. When she graduated she became a teacher until she married in 1922. In the 1930s she became chairman of the National Tithepayers Association, a body of country people who were determined to fight the right of the church to collect a tithe on their lands. She and her husband refused to pay and for six weeks in 1934 their farm was in a state of virtual siege. She recorded her side of the story in a quickly written book The Tithe War. Her last novel Landscape with Figures was published when she was 80 and she died in 1989
..... Elvire de Greef neé Elvire Berlemont ..... born June 29th in Brussels. She married Fernand de Greef some time before the outbreak of the Second World War. She was a key figure in the Comet Line which arranged the escape of Allied airmen and others from occupied Europe in WW1. Known as “Tante Go” she was personally credited with the escapes of some 337 aircrew members and at the end of the war was awarded the George Medal. She was greatly admired by M19 which financed and assisted the escape lines from London and was a special favourite of Airey Neave, the future Conservative minister who had joined the secret organisation after his escape from Colditz. She passed her last airman out to Spain, two days before D-Day. When one of her agents Jean Dassie was betrayed Elvire cycled around Bayonne, warning her network of aides that they were in danger. Dedee de Jongh, another agent, was also betrayed, though she survived her ordeal in a German concentration camp and was hailed after the war as one of M19s greatest heroines. After the war the de Greefs lived in Brussels and Elvire died in 1991
..... Enid Blyton ..... born August 11th, she became the most popular children’s writer of her time and the creator of Noddy, The Famous Five, The Secret Seven and Mr Meddle. She published about 400 books of which 200 are constantly in print and is also Britain’s most translated author. A major British industry grew up around the Noddy books with soap, china, curtains etc. In 1916 she took a Froebel teacher training course and then became governess to a Surrey family before opening her own infant school. She was already writing and her first poetry book, Child Whispers, was published in 1922. She married in 1924 and her daughter Gilian was born seven years later. In 1942 she was divorced and married a surgeon and at this point she was advised to try to write school stories for girls. These were an immediate success and from then on she wrote children’s fiction for several different publishers. She continued to write in the mid-1960s but suffered increasing mental confusion from 1966 until her death on 28th November 1968. In 1984 sales of her books reached 100m. This made her the most translated authoress in the history of British publishing after Agatha Christie. The first of The Famous Five books appeared in 1942 and the last in 1963. The Secret Seven series began in 1949 and Noddy appeared in 1950. This led to more than 100 spin-off products. Her first book was Real Fairies in 1923
..... Gloria Swanson neé Gloria Josephine Mae Swenson ..... born March 27th in the Windy City, daughter of a U.S. Army civilian employee. The greatest glamour star of all, her first films were made in Chicago with Wallace Beery, who later became her husband, and she then went to Hollywood where she appeared in several of the Mack Sennett comedies. By 1926 she was Paramount’s highest paid star earning $25,000 a week and was known as ‘Glorious Gloria’. She worked hard at both being an actress and being glamorous, wearing only the most fashionable clothes and never wearing the same dress twice. “Every inch and every moment a star” were her own words. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in the film Sadie Thompson and an Academy Award nomination for her first talking film The Trespasser. With the advent of sound she seemed set to carry on with her career but cinema audiences identified her too much with the silent screen and her career faded. In 1950 in the film Sunset Boulevard she had great success in a role reflecting her own career as a glamorous silent movie queen attempting a comeback and in Airport 75 appeared as herself. Altogether she had six husbands and at one time went to Europe where she married a Marquis. On her return to America she was treated like a queen. She also had a passionate affair with Joe Kennedy. Her last marriage was in 1976 when she was almost 78 years old and she died on 4th April 1983
..... Kattalin Aguirre neé Lamothe ..... who helped hundreds of Allied aircrew to evade capture during the Second World War and escape from France to fight again. She earned her living as a cleaner in a hotel billeting German officers and it was here that she picked up snippets of information which proved helpful to her clandestine activities. These included smuggling parts of radio equipment and working for Resistance groups in the area. She was a key figure at the end of the celebrated Comet Line (based in Brussels) which passed escaping Allied airmen from Paris and elsewhere in France and the Low Countries to the Bayonne area in the south and then on to the last stage of their l000 mile journey home. She won the love and respect of the airmen she protected as they waited for the arduous walk across the Pyrenees to Spain. She was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and held the Medaille Militaire, both the French and the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the French and Belgium Medailles de la Resistance and King George V1’s Medal for Freedom. She died in 1992
..... Lettice Cooper neé Lettice Ulpha Cooper ..... born September 3rd at Eccles in Lancashire, although she was brought up in Leeds. She decided to become a writer at the age of seven and her first novel The Lighted Room was published twenty years later. In all she produced 60 novels, several biographies (George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson) and some children’s books. She was a leader of the campaign to secure the Public Lending Rights in 1978 as one of the five founder members of the Writers’ Action Group. As she approached the age of 90 some of her works were reissued by Virago and Victor Gollancz and a dinner was held in her honour at the Savile Club. In 1978 she was appointed OBE and she died in 1994
J ..... Marion Davies neé Douras ..... born January 3rd in Brooklyn. By I917 she was a Ziegfeld girl and went into movies in the same year. She was a brilliant comediénne and was discovered by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate. He founded a film company which continued making her films until 1937 but her early career was at Paramount and MGM. She was Hearst’s mistress and the film Citizen Kane by Orson Welles is based loosely on their relationship. She stayed with him until his death in 1951 and then finally married, her own death occurred 10 years later in 1961. some of her other films are - When Knighthood was in Flower ( 1922) Little Old New York (1923) and The Fair Co-ed (1927)
..... Nancy Lancaster neé Perkins ..... a crucial figure in 20th century interior design. She was the niece of Nancy Astor and in 1917 married Henry Field but was widowed within two years. In 1920 she married Ronald Tree and he bought her Mirador, the beautiful house in Virginia that had belonged to her grandfather. As Nancy Tree she was responsible for creating the “English country house look” which had a profound effect on English interior design. They returned to England in 1926 but the marriage was dissolved in 1947 and a year later she married Lt. Col Claude Lancaster but they soon separated. She was totally committed to England and at the beginning of the Second World War became a British citizen. She died in 1994
..... Naomi Mitchison neé Haldane ..... born November 1st, daughter of John Scott Haldane, who revolutionised the science of physiology, and niece of Richard Haldane, a Liberal politician. She was the author of more than 80 books and was drawn to taboo subjects, left-wing politics and feminism. Her first novel The Conquered was written in 1923 and by 1930 she had published nine. In 1980 she was elected an honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford and of Wolfson College, Oxford in 1983. Two years later she was appointed CBE. She died in 1999 at the age of 101 years
..... Peg MacDonald neé Ina Leonora Edwards ..... born July 23rd at Hoylake in Cheshire. In 1915 she became an auxiliary VAD and two years later joined the QMAAC as a driver and her portrait was used for a national recruiting poster. At the age of 21 she was appointed MBE (Military). She married in 1922 and spent the next fifteen years bringing up her two sons, sailing, shooting, fishing and playing tennis and golf. Golf was her forte and she played regularly for Hampshire in the early 1930s. She became county champion in 1932. Her husband was appointed Commodore Malaya in the 1930s and she helped to build up the St John Ambulance organisation in Malaya and Singapore. In 1939 she was appointed a member of the Order. In the same year she became chief commandant of the Women’s Legion in England and struggled without success to secure government recognition for the Legion as part of the official Women’s Services. During the Second World War she also worked for the Women’s Voluntary Services. She divorced in 1940 and married her second husband Col. George Macdonald. She died in 1994
..... Rhoda Dawson ..... eldest daughter of Nelson and Edith Dawson, the Quaker Arts-and-Crafts workers, she was born on December 10th. She became a notable water colourist and woodcut artist and also proved to be talented in puppeteering, stained-glass and country dancing. When her father remarried after the death of her mother, Rhoda and her sister had to leave home. Rhoda decided to go to Newfoundland where she began to design rag rugs and when she returned to London an exhibition of some of her work was held at the Imperial Art Gallery. She then went on an anthropology course, taught music and worked part-time at the Horniman Museum. After the Second World War she went to Germany where she worked with displaced persons and when back in London became acting curator of the Gunnersbury Museum. She made her last visit to Newfoundland in 1989 and went to Labrador to see the stained glass windows at Cartwright that she had created 30 years before. A later exhibition at Canada House in London showed a remarkable collection of her hooked rugs some made 60 years ago to raise funds for Sir Wilfred Grenfell’s mission in Labrador. She died in 1992
..... Ruth Pitter ..... born November 7th at Ilford in the East End of London, one of the truest and most dedicated poets of her time. In 1937 she won the Hawthornden Prize and in 1955 was unanimously awarded the Queens Medal for Poetry. When she was a child her parents bribed her to learn English poetry by heart at rates of a penny to sixpence and in consequence she was able to recite the poems of Wordsworth, Milton, Tennyson and Shakespeare at will. She was only five when she wrote her first poem and only 13 when her work was first published in The New Age. During the First World War she worked for a couple of years as an apprentice to an artistic couple where she discovered that she had a talent for carpentry and was also a skilled painter. She started a business in Chelsea with Kathleen O’Hara, where she decorated trays and small items of furniture with exquisite flower paintings. By 1939 they were employing 12 women. Her poetic talent had also been developing and she began to publish. When the Second World War began they closed the furniture business and went to work in an office in a factory which made crucibles. By now she was an established poet and in 1952, still with Kathleen, she left London to establish herself at Long Creedon in Bucks where she grew vegetables. They still continued with their handicrafts and also new volumes of poetry began to appear. When Kathleen died she became a total recluse and for more than a decade lost all touch with fellow writers. It was not until 1984 that she began to reintroduce her poetry to the world after being befriended by Muriel Dickinson and her son Peter. In 1974 she was elected a Companion of Literature and in 1979 was appointed CBE. She never married. She said “one might be very fond of them (men) but it would have been cruelty to animals to marry them”. She died in 1992
..... Soong May-ling ..... born March 5th the fourth child of Charlie Soong, a former Methodist missionary turned Bible publisher. She was sent to America to be educated and arrived back in China in 1917 and in 1927 married Chiang Kai-shek, Chinese Nationalist leader, a marriage widely regarded as one of convenience. At the height of her fame during the Second World War she was one of the world's most influential women. When she died in 2003 at the age of 106 years she was the last of the principal participants in the 1943 Cairo Conference and the last of an exception family
..... Tiana Lemnitz ..... born October 6th at Metz she was one of the finest German lyric sopranos between the wars. She studied at Frankfurt and made her stage debut in 1921. From 1922-28 she appeared at Aachen and then moved to Hanover where she remained as leading soprano. Before the Second World War she was a favourite at Covent Garden but most of her career was spent with the Berlin State Opera which she joined in 1934 was leading soprano there until her retirement in 1957. She died in 1994