Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight falls upon Las Chicas del Can (1981-99), the all-woman merengue ensemble that launched the careers of Miriam Cruz and Belkis Concepción, and served as the model for later ensembles like Chantelle and Kaviar.
French polymath Clémence Royer was born 196 years ago today. Now she is most known for her 1862 translation of On the Origin of Species which pushed Darwin's ideas into the realm of human evolution, but in her day she was celebrated for her encyclopedic knowledge.
tinyurl.com/5cbam92f
#WomenInStEM
Nina Baker is a global treasure in terms of preserving women's engineering, motoring, flying, and scientific history, and any chance to grab a book by her is to be grabbed with both hands!
Saluting the magnificent 6 women prize winners of this key prize @admirablewomen.bsky.social
@carvehername.bsky.social
@wisarchive.bsky.social
@womenenabled.bsky.social
@carolemason.bsky.social
@unep.org
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight we salute Theola Kilgore (1925-2005), who blended the Gospel she performed in the 1950s with popular idioms to transition to Soul music in the 1960s, as in her 1963 hit "The Love of My Man."
#MusicSky #BookSky #BlackSky 🎵
Neurologist Frances Ames was born 106 years ago today. The 1st woman to receive a medical degree from the University of Cape Town, she researched the benefits of cannabis for MS patients, and was awarded the Order of the Star by Nelson Mandela for her anti-apartheid work.
#WomenInSTEM #BookSky ⚕️
On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight, we feature the early 2000s duo Toxic Lipstick, who fused the experimental electronics of the early 1980s with the frenetic energy and performance style of J-Pop to create something delightfully strange and fun.
#MusicSky #BookSky
Celebrating the 170th anniversary of the birth of Anna Sarah Kugler, who spent 47 years developing medical services for women in Guntur, India. She started the 1st dispensary there in 1893, followed by a hospital in 1897, all while working towards women's education.
#WomenInSTEM #MedSky ⚕️
Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight features Anne of Austria (1601-1666), regent of France from 1643 to 1651, who started the Early Modern trend for French Queens to play a key role in musical culture with her devotion to the lute, and gathering of a core of lute enthusiasts to perform for each other. 🎵
Wishing a happy 57th birthday to Sayako Kuroda, who began her research at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in 1992, specializing in kingfishers. She was also, small note, a Princess of Japan, only daughter of Emperor Akihito, until her marriage in 2005 required her to relinquish her title.
On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight we salute Odetta (1930-2008), who in the 1950s brought her operatic training to folk music to create some of the genre's most enduring and powerful creations, perhaps more relevant now than ever.
#MusicSky #BookSky #BlackSky 🎹
Turkish industrial chemist Ayşe Saffet Rıza Alpar was born 123 years ago today. In 1932 she became the 1st Turkish woman to receive a PhD in chemistry (Remziye Hisar earned hers one year later), and the 1st woman university rector in the nation, authoring 5 books as well.
#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky 🧪
On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight we salute Rock and Roll pioneer Bonnie Lou (1924-2015), whose 1955 Rockabilly track "Daddy-O" went to #15 on the charts, one year before Wanda Jackson made her famous Rockabilly turn.
#BookSky #MusicSky 🎸
Marie Maynard Daly, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in chemistry, was born 105 years ago today. Her amazing career featured pioneering work on histones, the first study showing cholesterol's impact on heart disease, and research into creatine uptake by muscle tissues. 🧪
tinyurl.com/md6ch3ay
For today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight, we stop to remember the legendary Loretta Lynn (1932-2022), whose songs spoke to women's lived sorrow and difficult choices in ways that continue to ring true, including "Don't Come Home a Drinkin' (With Lovin on Your Mind)" & "Coal Miner's Daughter"
#MusicSky 📖
Physician May Chinn was born 130 years ago today. In 1926 she was the 1st Black woman to graduate from Bellevue, but then spent 14 years looking for a hospital that would allow her full practicing privileges on account of her race, practicing privately until she found a cancer research position.
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On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight we feature the impossibly gifted Pauline Viardot (1821-1910), gifted with a C3-F6 vocal range, lauded by Liszt, Chopin, and Saint-Saens as one of her age's greatest pianists, and achieving significant international success as an operatic composer.
#WomenComposers
Mary Parsons, Countess of Rosse, was born 213 years ago today. A gifted early practitioner of photography, we primarily know her today through her financing and oversight of the construction of the Leviathan Telescope, which for 70 years reigned as the world's largest.
#WomenInSTEM #AstroSky 🔭
We end our Romance Countdown with the #2 and #1 postings and really, how could it not be these two? Jane Eyre (1847) and Pride and Prejudice (1813). Between them they have established the absolute alphabet of what it means to be a romance, while being evergreen in their appeal. Perfection.
#BookSky
Today we celebrate the induction of Emily Elizabeth Parsons into the Archive. At the start of the American Civil War, she became a nurse, and was dispatched to the western theater, where she worked to provide equal standards of care for Black and White soldiers.
tinyurl.com/338tkshv
#WomenInSTEM ⚕️
Mathematician Ada Isabel Maddison was born 157 years ago today. In 1892 she took the Tripos and would have been 27th Wrangler, but on account of her gender she was not given the degree she had earned. She spent 3 decades at Bryn Mawr as a teacher and admin, retiring in 1926.
#WomenInSTEM #MathSky 🧮
So sad to hear of the passing today of Asha Bhosle. She recorded across numerous dialects, in every imaginable genre, to become perhaps the world's most recorded vocal artist. The world lost a legend today.
#WomenInMusic #RIP
#3 on my Romance Countdown is Beatrice Harraden's 1893 blockbuster Ships that Pass in the Night. It is the heartbreaking, beautiful story of two lost people who find each other in a sanatorium and in so doing, rediscover their humanity. Have a handkerchief ready.
#BookSky #RomanceBookSky #Bookish
Wishing a happy 88th birthday to Fayza Haikal, the Egyptian archaeologist who overcame gender prejudice to become the 1st woman in Egypt to earn a PhD in Egyptology (1965), and then in 1988 was the 1st woman president of the International Association of Egyptologists.
#WomenInSTEM #Archaeology
If ever a figure was deserving of a film feature, it is Kathleen Lonsdale! This is a lovely bit of news, and well worth a few seconds to cast a vote in support of!
#4 on the Entirely Subjective Romance Countdown is Alexandre Dumas fils's 1848 classic Camille. In an age that would soon be known for bloated 3 volume mass market novels, this was a tight and perfectly told story centered on two exquisitely crafted characters and their love.
#BookSky #Romance 📖
Physician Maria Estrela was born 166 years ago today. The first Brazilian woman MD, she traveled to the US in 1875 to get her education. Returning to Brazil in 1882 she set up a medical practice for women and children while also writing against slavery.
#WomenInSTEM #MedSky ⚕️
My #5 favorite Romantic Fiction book of all time in celebration of the launch of A History of Romance Novels is Gustave Flaubert's 1857 classic Madame Bovary - in the great realist tradition of French 19th century romances it is grim, tragic, and deeply true.
#BookSky #Bookish #RomanceSky 📖
Physicist Sonja Ashauer was born 103 years ago today. In 1948 she became the first Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in physics, and she was on her way to a brilliant career in the field of quantum physics when she caught pneumonia and died at the age of just 23.
#WomenInSTEM #PhysicsSky #HistSci ⚛️
Today would have been Gita Ramjee's 70th birthday. Born in Uganda, her family fled during Idi Amin's bloody dictatorship for South Africa, where she spent her career improving HIV prevention in a region savaged by it. She passed away of Covid in 2020 at age 63.
#WomenInSTEM #MedSky ⚕️