8 Little-Known Women's History Month Facts

In 1756, long before the women’s suffrage movement gained any traction, Lydia Taft was legally allowed to vote. Her husband Josiah Taft was a prominent member of their community in Uxbridge, Massachusetts; he served several terms as a legislator and presided over town hall meetings. When he died, the townspeople agreed to permit Lydia to vote in her husband’s place. The decision was made in keeping with the tradition of “no taxation without representation”, since Josiah Taft was the town’s largest taxpayer. Lydia went on to cast several more votes, contributing to the town’s stance on important matters like financial contribution to the French and Indian Wars.

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Though women gained the vote in 1920, there were still many barriers to true equality. Congress addressed the issue of inequality in education with the 1972 passage of Title IX, which states that schools receiving federal assistance cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. At universities, the resulting benefits of Title IX included an increase in female athletes, greater protection for victims of sexual assault, and increases in women’s enrollment. In fact, the majority of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, a trend that began in 1980 and has steadily continued.

You may know Marie Curie as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, but Curie was also the first person - man or woman - to ever win a second Nobel Prize, and remains the only person to date who’s won the coveted prize in two different science categories, physics and chemistry. Curie struggled throughout her lifetime to overcome gender discrimination and be taken seriously. Born and raised in Poland, she moved to Paris and enrolled at the Sorbonne–higher education for women was illegal in Poland. Her lasting achievements include the discovery of two elements, polonium and radium, and founding two medical research centers. Curie also developed mobile X-rays to assist wounded soldiers in World War I. Curie’s devotion to scientific exploration eventually cost her her life. She died of aplastic anemia caused by frequent exposure to radiation. Over 80 years after her death, Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive.

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In 1869, the territory of Wyoming made history when it passed a law granting women aged twenty-one and older the right to vote. That law was threatened two decades later when Wyoming applied for statehood. Congress stated that it wouldn’t allow the territory to join the union unless women were disenfranchised. Wyoming called Congress out on its bluff, replying via telegram, “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.” Congress relented and Wyoming became a state in 1890, with women’s right to vote intact. True to its past, Wyoming’s state motto today is simply, “Equal Rights.”

Jackie Mitchell took an early interest in baseball; her dad began teaching her the sport as soon as she was old enough to walk, and her next-door neighbor was Dazzy Vance, the major league pitcher and Baseball Hall of Fame inductee. At just 17 years old, Mitchell was signed to the Chattanooga Lookouts, becoming the second woman ever to participate in professional baseball. During an exhibition game against the Yankees in 1931, Mitchell struck out baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Despite this impressive feat, Mitchell found herself facing more obstacles than ever. Babe Ruth was quoted as saying that women “are too delicate” to play baseball, and the presiding baseball commissioner barred Mitchell from the sport a few days after her record-breaking game.

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Campaigning for women’s enfranchisement was a dangerous act back in the early twentieth century. Many suffragettes in the U.K. were incarcerated, and some were even force fed in jail as punishment for their self-imposed hunger strikes. To protect women from going to jail and facing this abuse, which could have disastrous health consequences, one suffragette had the bright idea to teach her fellow protesters jiu jitsu. Edith Margaret Garrud used her martial arts background to secretly train a unit of 30 members of the Women’s Social and Political Union in self-defense. The group was alternately known as “the Bodyguard” and “the Amazons,” and was highly effective at resisting arrest.

The rumor that feminists were burning bras originated at the Miss America Protest of 1969. About 200 feminists organized a protest of the Miss America pageant, which they argued was a patriarchal contest that degrades and objectifies women. Feminists gathered on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, where they threw bras, lipstick, corsets, and other items into a “Freedom Trash Can” to denounce oppressive standards of feminine beauty. Though no one actually set this trash can on fire, media coverage of the event made a connection between the Miss America protest and Vietnam War protests, in which participants burned their draft cards. People took this metaphor literally, resulting in the belief that feminists were actually burning their bras, not just doing so symbolically. The trope of “bra burning feminists” was forever conflated with the protest, and attached to the feminist movement in general.

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Featured photo of Women’s Social and Political Union leaders meeting: Wikimedia Commons