1898
England
..... Jane Harrison (1850-1928) became the first woman lecturer in classical archaeology at Cambridge University. In 1900 she was the first woman to be granted a research fellowship
..... Ethel Mary Charles became the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) after being the first woman to pass their stiff exams. She almost lost her membership the following year when half the male members voted to exclude women, but was saved by the president's casting vote
..... Frances Evelyn, Lady Warwick, founded Studely Agricultural College
Ireland
..... women were granted the right to sit on district councils
Norway
..... the National Women’s Suffrage Association was founded, with Frederikke Marie Qvam as chairman
New Zealand
..... women gained equal voting rights
Celebrated women born in this year
..... Berenice Abbott ..... born July 17th, she was a feisty pioneer of Modernism, best known for her black and white portfolio of 1930s New York and her portrait of the novelist James Joyce. She began her career as a photographer in 1928 and for the next decade worked on her most celebrated project, Changing New York, a panoramic perspective of the Big Apple, ranging from its regal skyscrapers to its mundane sidewalks. She then went on to chronicle rural life in California. In the 40s and 50s she also experimented with scientific photography and developed her own equipment and techniques to illustrate scientific laws. She died in 1991
..... Lady Gladwyn neé Cynthia Noble ..... the younger daughter of Sir Saxton Noble, 3rd Bt. and a legendary hostess during her husband’s six years as Ambassador in Paris in the 1950s and later at their chambers in Whitehall Court. In 1929 she married Gladwyn Jebb, as he then was. He worked at the Foreign Office in London and after the Second World War he was instrumental in the founding of the United Nations, serving as its first acting secretary-general. They bought Bramfield Hall in East Suffolk which she set about redecorating and gave an acute and amusing account of her work there in An Englishwoman’s House. From 1954 – 60 he was Ambassador in Paris and during her time there she spent a lot of time and energy haggling the Ministry of Works to have the Embassy restored to its former glory. She died in 1990
.... Doriel Paget (Dorothy Elizabeth Paget) ..... born July 12th she became an actress and adapted her stage name of Doriel from her first two names. During the 1920s and 1930s she delighted audiences with her musical and comedy acts in England and Ireland. She began her career at a concert party to entertain troops in the First World War and for the next 15 years toured the provinces. She was also a founder member of Equity in the 1920s. During the war she worked in the censorship section of Military Intelligence alongside Guy Eden, the playwright and Raphael Sabatini, the historian and novelist. At an early age she married Colin Firth, who had accidentally knocked her down with his bicycle and then fell in love with her. He was badly wounded in the war and invalided out and made a living in the theatre and in journalism as best he could. Their tours included a long stay at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, during the Civil War and it was at this time that he became a temporary and incongruous hero of the Irish Republicans. When out for a stroll one day he spotted his sadistic CO of former days in command of a unit of the Black and Tans, borrowed a gun from a passing rebel and shot him. Doriel also appeared in many early British silent films with such stars as Claude Rains. She retired from the stage before the Second World War but kept in touch with the world of entertainment through her daughter, Anne Valery, the television script-writer. Her last public appearance was in the campaign to retain the Leonardo cartoon for Britain in the late 1960s. Although crippled by arthritis she nevertheless went down to the National Gallery every day, hobbling on two sticks. She died in 1991
..... Dorothy Wood neé Dorothy Fursdon ..... born May 16th the fifth of six children of a draper who later became a Baptist minister. Dorothy became a dedicated missionary in China and Thailand where she travelled and preached for more than 40 years. She joined the China Inland Mission in 1924 after two years Bible training and a year at the London Missionary School of Medicine and spent her first years in Henan Province. In 1931 she married Lawrence Coningsby Wood and later that year they returned to China to Ninxia Province on the border of Inner Mongolia. Their base was on a desolate barren terrain and they travelled either together or separately to hold evangelistic meetings in outlying villages. In 1951 they were finally expelled from China by the Communists and the Mission changed its name to the Overseas Missionary Fellowship. Dorothy and her husband went to South Thailand and then to Brunet where Lawrence died in 1959. She returned to South Thailand and opened a mission in Betong on the Malayan border. She retired in 1965 and died in 1993
..... Eleanor Boardman ..... American silent film star who was born August 19th in Philadelphia and at the age of 24 became a national celebrity as the Eastman Kodak Girl. She worked in the theatre for a while and then went to Hollywood where she starred in Souls for Sale (1923). Other films followed – Stranger’s Banquet, The Silent Accuser, Tell it to the Marines. In 1930 she separated from King Vidor whom she had married in 1926 and made her first ‘talkie’ Mamba, then Redemption(1930) and The Great Meadow (1931). She divorced Vidor in 1933 and in 1940 married the French director Henri d’Abbadie D’Arrast. In the 1950s she became the Paris fashion correspondent for Harper’s Bazaar and William Randolph Hearst’s publication. Her last American film was The Squaw Man in 1931 by Cecil B de Mille. She died in 1991 at Santa Barbara in California
..... Eve Balfour (Evelyn Barbara) ..... born July 16th, she was the founder of the Soil Association and instigator of the organic movement in British farming. She decided to become a farmer at the age of 12 and in 1915 went to Reading University to read for a diploma in agriculture, as she was too young for war work. In the last year of the war, having reached the age of 25, she took over a farm training Land Girls on behalf of the Women’s War Agricultural Committee. In the 1930s she was influential in changing the law on Tithe which ended the tax of one tenth of the value of certain crops and in 1938 she was introduced to the relationship between different agricultural practices. Her subsequent research led to her classic work The Living Soil (1943). In 1939 she initiated the Haughley Experiment at New Bells Farm to compare organic and inorganic methods of farming and published the findings in 1975 as an addendum to the reprint of The Living Soil. In the 1920s she founded a dance band and played saxophone and in the 1930s when flying lessons cost half-a-crown she passed her pilot’s licence. As E B Balfour she wrote 3 detective novels and the most successful one, Paper Moon, was translated into several languages
..... Fausta Cialente ..... at Cagliari in Sardinia. She was a novelist and began to write while living in Alexandria in the early 1920s. Her first novel Natalia appeared in 1927 but the Fascist censors would not allow a second edition unless changes were made. She refused to change a word and wrote another novel Cortale Cleopatra which described life in a squalid Alexandrian suburb. In 1921 she married the composer Enrico Terni and moved with him to Egypt where they organised a club of anti-Fascist intellectuals. From 1940 they worked for an English Army radio station which broadcast to Italian prisoners of war. In 1943, her brother, a well known actor, was killed in mysterious circumstances in Rome. In 1961 she published Ballata Levantina and followed this with five other novels. She returned to Italy after the fall of Fascism where she was beginning to gain recognition as a writer. She then lived in Kuwait for a few years and until her death in 1994 spent her last years in the Berkshire countryside
..... Helene Pons neé Helene Wermichjeff ..... in Caucasus and was educated in Switzerland and at art school in Paris. In 1920 she married George Pons and in 1922 they went to New York. The following year they set up a studio for the design and execution of costumes for the stage. She was in charge of designs and he took charge of the finances. For nearly 40 years she was a leading costume and ballet designer on Broadway where she designed for shows as varied as The Diary of Anne Frank, Our Town and Babes in Arms. Her many other credits include costumes for the celebrated 1956 production of My Fair Lady. She also made costumes for Camelot, Kiss Me Kate and Pal Joey. She died in 1990
..... Countess Fitzwilliam neé Joyce Elizabeth Langdale ..... born April 25th eldest daughter of Lt-Col Philip Langdale of Houghton in Yorkshire. Through birth and marriage she was a member of ancient Roman Catholic families. Her ancestor, Sir Marmaduke Langdale, was a Cavalier general whose loss of £160,000 in the Royal cause was rewarded by a barony. She was educated by governesses and in 1922 married Henry Fitzalan-Howard who was thought to be a suitable match on religious and social grounds. They had two daughters but the marriage did not last and in 1955 she married Thomas Wentworth-Fitzwilliam who became the 10th Earl Fitzwilliam in 1952. She proved a brilliant hostess both at Milton and Wentworth, the great estates, was an excellent conversationalist and an avid reader of books. She died in 1995
..... Judith Anderson neé Frances Margaret Anderson-Anderson ..... born February 10th at Adelaide, South Australia where her father had emigrated. She was both a classical tragedienne and a powerful performer on screen and of her many roles, most were malevolent matriarchs. In 1947 she was Euripedes’s Medea on the Broadway stage and seven years earlier she had triumphed as Mrs Danvers , the stony-hearted housekeeper in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Other films include Blood Money, Spectre of the Rose, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (with Barbara Stanwyck) Pursued (with Robert Mitchum) and Salome ( with Rita Hayworth). She won two Emmy Awards for separate television performances as Lady Macbeth and in 1960 became only the second Australian performer (after Melba) to be appointed DBE. She died in 1992
..... Kathleen Hale ..... born May 24th, she wrote and illustrated the stories of Orlando ( the Marmalade Cat) who made his debut in 1938 in a story about a camping holiday. During the 40s and 50s the books, coming out at a rate of one a year, made Orlando a hero recognised in every middle-class British family. She began making her living as an artist in 1918 and her idea for her books grew when she realised the attraction of big coloured picture books that children could look at on the floor. In 1926 she married Douglas McClean mainly because she had originally fallen in love with his widowed father, but he thought Kathleen was too young for him, and suggested that his son propose to her. She accepted, to be near the father. They bought a large house in the Hertfordshire countryside and later moved to a cottage in Oxfordshire. She also produced other illustrated children's books including Henrietta the Faithful Hen (1943) and Manda (1952). She was also a gardener, involved herself in village affairs and cooked meals in the French style, long before Elizabeth David introduced many British people to continental food
..... Léonie Bathiat ..... born May 15th, and as the French film star Arletty, reached the pinnacle of her acting career in Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945. She began in the chorus line of the Théatre des Capucines and for two decades sang and danced her way through the music halls of Paris. A theatre director chose the name of Arlette from a Maupassant story and anglicised it to Arletty. She made her name during the golden age of French cinema in the 1930s and 1940s appearing in her first film Un Chien Qui Rapporte in 1930 at the age of 32. After the Liberation in the Second World War she was imprisoned at Drancy on charges of collaboration having fallen passionately for a Nazi . She spent two months in prison and her reputation never fully recovered but she gave some memorable stage performances. In the early 1960s she tragically lost her sight after mistaking a bottle of medicine for eye lotion. After an operation she partially recovered her sight and learned her words for her stage parts by tape-recorder. She died in 1992 at the age of 94
..... Margaret Clark (Margaret Bayfield Clark) ..... at Trowbridge, Wiltshire, and spent the best years of her life rescuing little girls destined for a life of temple prostitution in Southern India. The centre for this work was established at Dohnavur in Madras State in 1901 by Amy Carmichael who spent the rest of her life caring for these girls despite being crippled in 1931. Miss Clark joined the organisation in the late 1920s and by then it had grown to a considerable size and was receiving children from all over India, including boys saved from Islamic cult practices. It became a community of some 900 people with its own doctors, dentists, teachers and ancillary staff. Shortly before the Second World War Margaret Clark returned to England to care for her mother but she maintained her contact with the Dohnavur Fellowship and continued to use her needlework to raise money for the cause. She died in 1991
..... Molly Picon ..... Jewish-American actress and the leading exponent of Yiddish drama during its golden age in New York in the early part of the century she was born on June 1st. She was an outstanding performer on the international variety stage between the World Wars and also starred on Broadway and London in the 60s and 70s. She made her stage debut at the age of five and went on to play primarily on the Yiddish stage where she soon became a star. As a teenager she toured America and after several years in rep at Philadelphia she spent three years in cabaret and variety. In her early thirties she was top of the bill at the Palace, America’s leading vaudeville house and had a New York theatre named after her. In the mid-1930s she returned to Broadway after a number of years spent on tours with her husband Jacob Kalich. At the end of the Second World War she spent six months touring concentration camps in Europe and met hundreds of survivors of Hitler’s persecution. In Paris, where they performed for the refugees, the theatre was so crowded that there was no room for the many parties of children who had lost their parents and were in the care of relief organisations. In the end they were invited to sit at the back of the stage. In subsequent years she inclined more towards to the legitimate theatre and one of her major post-war successes was on Broadway in the musical Milk and Honey in 1961. She performed in many shows in the 60s and 70s and also appeared in her one-woman show in Yiddish Hello, Molly. At the age of 81 she wrote and performed in Those Were The Days, a revue which recapitulated her career on new York’s Lower East Side, the home of Yiddish Theatre in America. She also wrote a family biography and co-wrote her own autobiography. She died in 1992
..... Muriel Stuart Walker ..... K’Tut Tantri, journalist, hotelier, guerrilla fighter and aspiring film maker. Throughout her extraordinary career she was known by several names her best known being “Surabay Sue” , the romantic rebel who made propaganda broadcasts on behalf of the Indonesian nationalists in their fight for independence from the Dutch after the Second World War. She was born February 18th in Glasgow and after her father was killed in the First World War she and her mother went to California where Muriel made a living writing about film stars for British magazines. In 1932, after seeing a film about Bali, she packed her supplies of painting materials, left her husband and sailed for the Dutch East Indies. She arrived using the name of Mrs Manx, after her parents birthplace and was adopted by one of the islands rulers, the Raja of Bangli, who gave her the name of K’Tut Tantri. However by 1936 her relationship with him had deteriorated and she then embarked on a business partnership with an American couple. Her account of her time in Indonesia was published in 1960 in Revolt in Paradise. It. was an immediate success and was translated into a dozen languages, attracting almost unanimous critical praise. She spent most of the rest of her life trying to have the book turned into a film but negotiations with Hollywood fell through, mainly because of her fierce determination not to depart from the book’s storyline and her insistence that her relationship with her Balinese prince be portrayed as platonic and decorous. She also demanded that there should be no smoking, kissing or smoking in the film. She spent her last days in Australia where she died in1998 aged 99 years
..... Ninette de Valois ..... stage name of Edris Stannus, Irish ballerina born in County Wicklow. In 1914 she appeared in pantomime and subsequently appeared with the Beecham Opera Company and at Covent Garden. She toured with Diaghilev (1923-25) and partnered Anton Dolin in England. She became director of ballet at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and was a founding member of the Camargo Society and the Vic-Wells Ballet ( which became Sadler's Wells Ballet and The Royal Ballet). Until 1963 she was artistic director at the Royal Ballet. In 1951 she was created DBE. In 1994 the arts world paid tribute to her at the Savoy Hotel in London when hundreds of stars gave her a standing ovations as she received an award in the first London Evening Standard Ballet, Opera and Classical Music Awards. In 1998 the De Valois dance studio was named in her honour in London
..... Rose Chacel ..... born June 3rd at Vallodolid , one of the most important Spanish writers of this century. When she was ten the family went to live in Madrid and at the age of seventeen she entered the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, where she met her future husband. At the age of twenty five she went to study in Rome and for the next five years traveled throughout Europe. In 1930 she completed her first novel Estacion de ida y vuelta (Season of Departure and Return). She then worked on the Argentinian magazine Sur, wrote other novels and also translated into Spanish the works of Mallarme and Racine. In 1971 she returned to Spain but for financial reasons had to leave for Brazil but was finally persuaded to remain in Spain by the offer of an annuity. She received many awards but was never accorded the ultimate accolade of the Premio Cervantes. She died in 1994