A Feminist Timeline
by KARA VANDERBIJL
Had I the mind to do it, I would dedicate the following to Susan Sontag. Or perhaps to Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, or really to any of the women represented here. What is wonderful about them is not that they stand alone in history - although many of them deserve to - but that they stand together, that each one leans in some small way on the last. No matter what their intentions, the passing of time and Wikipedia have allowed us to pretend, at least for today, that these women were all trying to say the same thing.
1458 BC – Queen Hatshepsut dies
1330 BC – Nefertiti dies
610 BC – Sappho born
69 BC – Cleopatra born
29 – Livia Drusilla dies
246 – Empress Helena of Constantinople born
350 – Hypatia of Alexandria born
705 – Wu Zetian, the only female ruler in the history of China, dies
1098 – Hildegard of Bingen born
1137 – Eleanor of Aquitaine disagrees with her husband Louis VII over the correct pronunciation of “vase”
1253 – Clare of Assisi dies
1303 – Bridget of Sweden born
1347 – Catherine of Siena born
1381 – Catherine of Vadstena dies
1388 – Juliana Berners born
1416 – Julian of Norwich dies
1432 – A year after her execution, Joan of Arc returns to earth as an alien endowed with a vagina dentata
1438 – Margery Kempe completes her autobiography, arguably the first to be written in the English language
1559 – Realdo Colombo, an Italian professor of anatomy, discovers and names the clitoris, describing it as "the love or sweetness of Venus"
1564 – Elizabeth I finds a gray hair
1607 – Pocahontas saves John Smith’s life
1630 – Ann Bradstreet, New England's first published poet, lands on American soil
1651 – Juana Ines de la Cruz, self-taught scholar and one of the earliest literary figures in Mexico, born
1729 – Catherine the Great born
1786 – Jane Austen’s needlework meme goes viral at boarding school
1789 – French women propose that a decree be added to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen ensuring, among other things: the right of all to wear pants, the end of degrading soldiers by having them wear women's clothing, and the equality of the sexes in French grammar
1792 – Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women published
1793 – Marie Antoinette executed
1820 – Susan B. Anthony born
1840 – Elizabeth Cady Stanton castrates a bald eagle
1843 – Margaret Fuller becomes the first woman allowed in the library at Harvard
1855 – Florence Nightingale’s primitive Jell-O shots vastly improve conditions in the Crimea
1867 – Marie Curie born
1880 – Helen Keller born
1884 – Eleanor Roosevelt born
1899 – Kate Chopin and Willa Cather stage a pagan fertility dance somewhere in the American South
1901 – Queen Victoria dies
1908 – Simone de Beauvoir born
1910 – Virginia Woolf dresses as an Abyssinian royal, beard included, to gain access to the Royal Navy’s flagship
1913 – Rosa Parks born
1916 – Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY
1920 – The 19th Amendment of the US Constitution, granting women the right to vote, is signed into law
1925 – Margaret Thatcher born
1928 – Amelia Earhart embarks on her first transatlantic flight
1931 – Jane Addams becomes the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
1936 – The government rules that birth control information is no longer obscene
1942 – Ms. Sanger’s American Birth Control League becomes Planned Parenthood
1943 – Rosie the Riveter born
1954 – Angela Merkel born
1958 – bell hooks skips an important grammar lesson to picket outside her segregated elementary school
1960 – The FDA approves the pill
1963 – Sylvia Plath goes domestic: mixes up a pie crust, sets her oven to preheat
1963 – Gloria Steinem lands a job as a Playboy Bunny
1963 - Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, orbits the earth 48 times
1966 – Betty Friedan founds the National Organization for Women
1969 – California is the first state to approve a divorce on the basis of “mutual consent”
1973 – Roe vs. Wade establishes a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion
1976 – The state of Nebraska becomes the first to condemn marital rape
1976 - Shirley Temple serves as the first female Chief of Protocol of the United States
1979 – Hermione Granger born
1992 – Camille Paglia bares pierced nipples at a Madonna concert
1994 - Oprah freezes briefly during her morning show, later attributing the attack to a "disturbance in the force"
1995 - Octavia Butler becomes the first science fiction writer to win the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant
2000 – Mattel widens Barbie's waist
2004 – January Jones mimes the “pow-pow” motion of a handgun while staring down at an 8-year-old girl who cut her in line at a hot dog stand
2007 – Construction begins in Chicago on Jeanne Gang’s 82-story skyscraper “Aqua”, the tallest building in the world to be designed by a woman
2009 – Zooey Deschanel outquirks Phoebe Buffay
2011 – HelloGiggles.com founded
2013 – Meryl Streep plays Hillary Clinton, Bathsheba, Ann Bradstreet, Yoko Ono, herself, Amelia Earhart, and Laura Ingalls Wilder in various films
2015 - Roughly 75% of Tumblr's content is devoted to complaints about misogyny in sitcoms
2027 - Scientists concur that Jennifer Lawrence was composed entirely of a clay-like substance
Kara VanderBijl is the senior editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about relics. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.
"In Love" - Carly Simon (mp3)
"Let the River Run" - Carly Simon (mp3)
