“I expect this will be the making of me.”

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1927, Mae West is convicted on obscenity charges for her play 'sex', and starts a ten day jail sentence.

She's released two days early for good behaviour.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #LiteraryWomen #AmericanHistory

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Katherine Switzer becomes the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner, despite the organiser physically trying to stop her.

She ran it again in 2017, 50 years later.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory

#OnThisDay, 17 Apr 1964, Jerrie Mock touches down in Ohio to become the first woman to fly solo around the world. Press coverage of the time made much of her being a “housewife”. 🙄

Watch a newsreel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Pz2zGZ3To

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AviationHistory #AmericanHistory

#OnThisDay, 16 Apr 1912, Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly a plane across the English Channel.

Quimby was the first American woman to receive a pilot’s licence and made her living doing exhibition flights in the US. She also made money as the advertising face of a grape juice. She died in July 1912 when her plane pitched forward at 1,000 feet and she was thrown out.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AviationHistory #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 15 Apr 1960, Ella Baker convenes a conference of 126 independent student protest groups. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) forms as a result. SNCC coordinated and assisted direct-action challenges to segregation in the USA.

Baker was a civil rights activist for five decades, and advocated grassroots activism. She also criticised the misogyny she encountered within the movement.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory #Histodons

"I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own."

#OnThisDay, 10 Apr 1864, army surgeon Dr Mary Edwards Walker is captured by the Confederates during the US Civil War. She later receives the Medal of Honor.

As well as serving in the Civil War, and being a dress reformer who preferred to wear trousers, she was also a suffragist who declined to take her husband’s name when they married.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 3 Apr 1979, Jane Byrne wins the Chicago mayoral election. She is the first woman to be mayor of the city and is sworn in on 16 April. She hires the first black woman to be a school superintendent in the city, and stops the police raiding gay bars.

Lori Lightfoot was the second woman to hold the post, from 2019 to 2023. She’s the first black woman and the first LGBT+ mayor since the post was created in 1837.

#WomenInHistory #History #OTD #AmericanHistory #Histodons