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February Dates in Women's Herstory
brought to you by
Susan
Butruille
edited by
EducatingJane.com
- Feb 1 Wives’ Feast, Ireland. Women homemakers
celebrate their work by sharing lavish feasts with one
another.
- February 2 Feast of the Triple Goddess Brigid, Ireland;
Imbolc (time of the first ewes’ milk). Healer, fire tender,
and poet, Brigid welcomes the first hint of spring.
- February 3, 1821 Birth of
Elizabeth Blackwell, first
certified woman doctor.
- February 4, 1913 Birth of
Rosa Parks, whose protest
at giving up her seat on the bus simply because she was black,
sparked the 1960s Civil Rights movement.
- February 4, 1921 Birth of Betty
Friedan, whose book The Feminine Mystique
triggered the third wave of feminism in the US.
- February 9, 1944 Birth of
Alice Walker, African
American activist and Pulitzer Prize novelist, author of
The Color Purple.
- February 11, 1858 The Virgin Mary is said to have
appeared to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in
Lourdes, France.
- February 14 St. Valentine’s Day, festival of love,
named after an obscure Christian saint. The festival’s roots
are in the Roman Lupercalia, when young women would put their
names on papers in a box for young men to draw as their
partners.
- February 15, 1820 Birth of
Susan B. Anthony, who in
1850 teamed with Elizabeth
Cady Stanton to lead the movement for woman suffrage and
women’s rights for the rest of their lives. Called the
"Napoleon of the women’s rights movement," Susan
B. went to trial for voting as a US "citizen" in
1873. Her last public words were "Failure is
impossible."
- February 17, 1914 Birth of Julia De Burgos, Puerto
Rican poet and journalist.
- February 18 Festival of women as cultivators
(Persian).
- February 18, 1934 Birth of poet and essayist Audre Lorde.
- February 19, 1942 120,000 Japanese-Americans were
taken from their homes and sent to internment camps.
- February 20, 1805 Birth of abolitionist and writer
Angelina Grimke Weld.
- February 21, 1936 Birth of
Barbara Jordan, African
American legislator, teacher, lover of the law.
- February 25, 1896 Birth of
Ida Cox, jazz pioneer who
wrote and sang "Wild Women Don't Have the Blues."
- February 27, 1897 Birth of
Marian Anderson, African
American singer and humanitarian.
- February 28, 1797 Birth of Mary Lyon, founder in 1837
of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, the first women's college.
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