• 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 2, 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act containing Title VII, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment.

• July 3, 1860 Birth of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of Women and Economics and the short story The Yellow Wallpaper based on her own experience of depression. "To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind."

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

• July 4, 1876 Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and other suffragists presented the Acting U.S. Vice President with their "Declaration of the Rights of Women of the United States," crashing the nation's Centennial Celebration in Independence Hall.

• July 4, 1911 Birth of Elizabeth Peratrovich, activist who fought for Alaska's indigenous people's rights and was instrumental in passing the Territory's Anti-discrimination Act of 1945. In reply to a legislator who demanded, "Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?" Peratrovich said: "I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights."

• July 5, 1857 Birth of Clara Zetkin, German socialist and a founder of International Women's Day. "A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water."

• 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 5, 2011 Christine Lagarde became the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund after serving as France's finance minister.

• July 5, 2017 Opening of Director Patty Jenkins' film Wonder Woman, which earned more than $103 million during its first weekend alone.

• July 6, 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, "We [women] are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation." John laughed.

• July 6, 1907 Birth of Frieda Kahlo, Mexican artist inspired by her country's popular culture. "Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away."

• July 6, 1957 Althea Gibson became the first African American tennis star, winning titles at Wimbledon, and the French and U.S. Opens.

• July 8 Feast of Sunna, Norse solar Goddess.

• Birth of Käthe Kollwitz, Prussian communist, socialist, pacifist painter and sculptor who expressed in her art the anguish of poverty and war. "While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate."

• June 9, 1868 Ratification of the 14th Amendment which granted the vote to male citizens, introducing male into the U.S. Constitution.

• June 9, 1936 Birth of June Jordan, Jamaican-American poet, playwright, essayist and activist. "To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way."

• July 9, 1893 Birth of Dorothy Thompson, journalist, war correspondent, New York Times columnist, kicked out of Germany by Hitler for her reporting on Nazi Germany. "There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings."

• July 10, 1040 Lady Godiva, Countess of Mercia, rode naked on her horse leading a procession through Coventry, England. Legend says that she was protesting high taxes, but the event may have derived from ancient harvest rituals to the Great Mother.

• July 10, 1865 Birth of Mary McLeod Bethune, a founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and Minority Affairs Advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his [or her] worth."

• July 10, 1999 Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain clinched the World Cup victory for the U.S. Soccer team.

• July 11, 1960 Publication of the beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

• July 12, 1972 Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to run for a presidential nomination, received 152 votes at the Democratic National Convention. Her campaign slogan was "Unbought and Unbossed."

• July 12, 1984 Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman vice-presidential candidate of a major political party in U.S. history.

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

• July 13, 2013 Founding of the Black Lives Matter movement by Alicia Garcia, Patrice Cullors and Opal Tometi.

• July 14, 1789 Bastille Day (France) liberation of Bastille prison in Paris, leading to the 1789 French Revolution and to wider and angrier demands for the rights of women. Few of the women's demands were met.

• July 14, 1917 Arrest of sixteen women from the National Woman's Party, charged with obstructing traffic while picketing the White House to demand the vote.

• July 15, 1907 Qui Jim, Chinese poet and feminist who experienced and exposed oppression in China, was executed for her part in a secret society's plot to overthrow the Qing Dynasty.

• July 15, 1864 Birth of Maggie Walker, whose mother had been enslaved, the first woman president of a U.S. bank. "Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people-loving freedom come to growth."

• July 16, 1821 Birth of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist. "Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal."

• July 16, 1862 Birth of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, teacher, civil rights activist, publisher, and teller of the truth about the scourge of lynching. "The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American."

• July 16, 1907 Birth of Barbara Stanwyck, who began her career as a Ziegfeld Follies dancer and became an actor on stage, screen, and TV. In 1944, Stanwyck was the highest-paid woman in the U.S., earning more than $400,000 in one year. "Egotism - usually just a case of mistaken nonentity."

• July 17, 1898 Birth of Carmelita Maracci, dancer, teacher, choreographer, and creator of a style of dancing that blended Spanish dance with ballet."I think that a technique should be subordinated to the idea."

• July 18. 1908 Mildred Ryder, aka "Peace Pilgrim," walked more than 28,000 miles over 25 years promoting peace in the United States and Canada. "I own only what I wear and carry. I just walk until given shelter, fast until given food. I don't even ask; it's given without asking. I tell you, people are good. There's a spark of good in everybody."

• July 19, 1921 Birth of Rosalyn Yalow, medical physicist and co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, for developing radio-immunoassay (RIA)-, a technique to measure tiny concentrations of biologically active substances. "There is at present in the United States a powerful activist movement that is anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-technology. If we are to have faith that [humanity] will survive and thrive on the face of the Earth, we must depend on the continued revolutions brought about by science."

• July 19-20, 1848 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott launched the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.

• 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 groundbreaking works, including The Dinner Party, a massive monument to women's history on a triangular-shaped table featuring porcelain plates and needlework place settings. The Brooklyn Museum houses this popular and historic work. "Because men have a history, it is difficult for them to imagine what it is like to grow up without one, or the sense of personal expansion that comes from discovering that we women have a worthy heritage. Along with pride often comes rage - rage that one has been deprived of such a significant knowledge."

• July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the moon, with a lot of help from a lot of women. (See the story following these dates.)

• July 21, 1938 Birth of Janet Reno, first woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General, under President Bill Clinton. "I made the decision long ago that to be afraid would be to diminish my life."

• July 22 Feast of Mary Magdalene, Gnostic teacher and companion of Jesus. Formerly characterized by the Catholic Church as the repentant prostitute, she is now recognized by scholars as the "Apostle to the Apostles."

• 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. . .." Lazarus, born into wealth, became an advocate for Jewish refugees fleeing Russia. The 34-year-old Jewish poet and activist joined other writers to honor the 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty, but her work was not noted at the time. She died a year later. In 1903, the words of Emma Lazarus were inscribed on a plaque and affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. "Until we are all free, we are none of us free."

• July 22, 1898 Birth of Miriam Underhill, author of Give Me the Hills, lifetime mountaineer and environmentalist who audaciously pioneered "manless climbing," leading all-female mountain climbing teams. "I saw no reason why women . . . should be incapable of leading a good climb. . . . I decided to try some climbs not only guideless, but manless."

• July 23, 1890 Wyoming, the "Equality State," admitted to the Union, the first state to grant the vote to women. When Congress threatened to withhold statehood if women could vote, the men of the Wyoming Legislature responded, "We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women." Along with the vote, women gained the right to serve on juries (later rescinded, and much later restored) and to hold public office.

• July 24, 1897 Birth of Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air. "Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others."

• July 24, 1920 Birth of Bella Abzug, lawyer and Congresswoman from Brooklyn and feminist activist for human rights, the environment, ending the Viet Nam war, and numerous other causes. After her beloved father died when she was 12, Abzug challenged Jewish law by going to Synagogue every day and reciting the mourning prayer in honor of her father - a practice reserved for males. She went on to challenge unfair laws and practices for the rest of her life, wearing her famous hats and founding the National Political Women's Caucus and other groundbreaking organizations. "Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams."

• July 25, 2007 Pratibha Patil became India's first female president and actively worked for the welfare of women and children and the underprivileged in her country.

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

• July 28, 1929 Birth of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, book editor, photographer, author, founder of the White House Historical Association, and first lady of the United States. "The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse."

• July 27, 1990 Founding of Fuerza Unida, a workers' activist group that began with Latina protests against Levi Strauss & Co., which shifted production plants in San Antonio to Costa Rica. Fuerza Unida is active in environmental and trade issues.

• July 28, 1869 Founding of the Daughters of St. Crispin, representing shoe workers, one of the earliest national women's unions, in Lynn, MA.

• July 29, 1974 Eleven women became the first female priests in the Episcopal Church. Ordained in a Pennsylvania church, the "Philadelphia Eleven" were met with backlash from the official church, but were ordained before a general church convention two years later.

• July 30, 1818 Birth of Emily Bronte, English author. The "Place des Soeurs Brontë," a square in Brussels, now honors Emily and her two sisters who studied French in Belgium. "Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies." --Wuthering Heights

• July 30, 1940 Birth of Patricia Schroeder, congresswoman who served her state of Colorado for 24 years. An unapologetic liberal, Schroeder took on issues from arms control to reproductive rights, laid the groundwork for women to be allowed to fly combat missions, cofounded the Congressional Women's Caucus. and briefly ran for President in 1987. Asked by a colleague how she could be a mother of two small children and a member of Congress at the same time, Schroeder replied, "I have a brain and a uterus and I use both."

When she was in the fourth grade, JoAnn Morgan's favorite birthday gift was a chemistry set from her dad. After she blew up the patio, all JoAnn's dad wanted to know was, "How did you do that?"

The girl learned her science lessons well and became an engineer and instrumentation controller for the Apollo 11 mission. Morgan was the only "girl" allowed in the Kennedy Space Center's firing room to watch Neil Armstrong become the first person to set foot on the moon and announce "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." JoAnn Morgan was just one of many women who made that moon landing possible for humankind.

On July 20,1969, Morgan and all the men in the room held their breaths as, just three minutes before landing, an alarm went off, signaling to abort the landing. The computer (which had little memory compared with today's computers) was on overload. Thanks to the computer software's design, the spacecraft's computer was able to override all other functions. With seconds remaining before the lunar module ran out of fuel, Neil Armstrong announced, "The Eagle has landed."

The Eagle's computer software designer, Margaret Hamilton, watched the landing and communicated with mission control from her office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she directed software technology. Hamilton's work in software engineering, a term she originated, went on to be used in the remaining Apollo missions as well as the first U.S. space station. Hamilton, known for her fearlessness, became the Kennedy Space Center's first woman senior executive, started two companies of her own, and received NASA's Exceptional Space Act Award in 2003. President Barack Obama presented the Medal of Freedom award to Margaret Hamilton in 2016.

Women have played critical roles in aeronautics and space exploration since 1943, before the 1958 beginning of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Their path has not been easy, marked by discrimination, threats, lack of access to bathrooms, and delay. Moreover, the Eisenhower-era requirement that astronauts be career military pilots excluded women since only men could train as military pilots. Although a number of women passed all the other requirements for selection as astronauts, they couldn't pass the gender requirement to be military pilots, which was not dropped until 1993.

In 1978, NASA selected the first class of astronauts to train for the Space Shuttle program as mission specialists who did not have to be career military pilots. That class included Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space as a mission specialist on the space shuttle Challenger. Ride was the third woman in space following Soviets Valentina Tereshkova in 1962 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982.

"The fact that I was going to be the first American woman to go into space," Ride remembered, "carried huge expectations with it." She knew what many path breaking women know: that if she made a mistake, that's all that would be remembered about her historic ride into space.

The book Hidden Figures: the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, and the movie that followed, featured the team of women called "computers" or "computeresses" (rather than the mathematicians they were) who made space flight possible. Katherine Johnson, the most recognized of these women, calculated orbital equations that ultimately led to John Glenn's 1958 flight into space. A building on the campus of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia now bears Katherine Johnson's name, and the street in front of NASA headquarters is now "Hidden Figures Way."

At least one woman's computer savvy was evident in the 19th Century. Ada Byron King, Countess of Loveless, better known now as Ada Loveless (1815-1852), grew up steeped in math and science. It was Ada's mother, mathematician Annabella Milbank Byron, who believed that rigorous study rooted in reason and logic would save her daughter from following in the footsteps of Ada's abusive and erratic father, the poet Lord Byron.

Ada Loveless became a protegé of Charles Babbage, "father of the computer," who shared with Loveless the workings of his "difference machine." Her prolific writing and analysis went beyond Babbage's numerical calculations to foresee computer operations translated to digital forms of language, music, text, pictures, and symbols. The computer language called Ada, used today by the U.S. Department of Defense, honors the woman now considered the first computer programmer and "prophet of the computer age." Ada Loveless, unrecognized for her work in her brief lifetime, could not have imagined that her groundbreaking insights would contribute to laying the foundation for women and men to reach for the moon and beyond.

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