Important Dates in Women's History
by Susan G. Butruille

• July is the month of Ishtar, Babylonian goddess of resurrection.

• July 1 Canada Day. In 1867 the British North America Act created the Dominion of Canada.

• July 2, 1937 Amelia Earhart's plane disappeared over the South Pacific on what was supposed to be her around-the-world flight.

• July 3, 1860 Birth of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of Women and Economics and the dramatic chronicle of her own depression, The Yellow Wallpaper.

• July 4, 1776 Signing of the Declaration of Independence. Mary Katherine Goddard, Baltimore [Maryland] newspaper woman and the first American woman postmaster, printed the first official copies of the radical document in 1776.

• July 5, 1884 Congress awarded Sarah Emma Edmonds a pension for her service as a soldier in the Civil War, in which she fought dressed as a man.

• July 6, 1957 Althea Gibson became the first black person to win the British tennis championship at Wimbleton.

• July 8 Feast of Sunna, Norse solar Goddess.

• July 10 Lady Godiva rode naked on her horse leading a procession through Coventry [England]. Legend says that she was protesting high taxes. But the event probably derived from ancient harvest rituals to the Great Mother.

• July 10, 1865 Birth of Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women.

• July 13 Celebration of Our Lady of Fatima, Portugal.

• July 14, 1789 Bastille Day (France) liberation of Bastille prison in Paris.

• July 19, 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott launched the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.

• July 19 Independence Day, Nicaragua, commemorates the Sandinista Revolution of 1979.

• July 20, 1889 Lynching of Wyoming rancher Ella "Cattle Kate" Watson on false charges of cattle rustling.

• July 20, 1939 Birth of feminist artist Judy Chicago, creator of The Dinner Party and other groundbreaking works.

• July 22 Feast of Mary Magdalene, formerly billed as the repentant prostitute in the Bible, now recognized by scholars as an early and enduring leader of the Christian church.

• July 22, 1849 Birth of Emma Lazarus, author of the verse on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."

• July 24, 1897 Birth of Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air.

• July 26 Feast of the Virgin Mary's mother, St. Anne.

• July 30, 1818 Birth of Emily Bronte, author of Wuthering Heights.