WOW2: August’s Trailblazing Women and Events in Our History

“… the right to terminate a pregnancy arose straight out of the right to purchase and use contraception. In turn, those rights
led, more recently, to rights of same-sex intimacy and marriage. They are all part of the same constitutional fabric, protecting  autonomous decision making over the most personal of life decisions.”
– from dissenting opinion of Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer in Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization

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WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from August 9 through August 16.

The next installment of WOW2 will be on August 20, 2022.

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“You cannot be neutral. You must either join
with us who believe in the bright future or
be destroyed by those who would return us
to the dark past.”

– Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin,
African-American suffragist, civil rights
activist, and community practitioner

_________________________

“I was the only female in my class. I sat
on one side of the room and the guys
on the other side of the room. I guess
they didn’t want to associate with me.
But I could hold my own with them,
and sometimes did better.”

– Mary G. Ross, American Cherokee engineer
and mathematician; the first Native American
woman engineer

_________________________

“Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run
for I was the first to win. First person
of color. First woman. First woman of
color. Every time.”

– Kamala Harris, first woman to be
Vice President of the United States

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The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.

These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.

THIS WEEK IN THE WAR ON WOMEN

will post shortly, so be sure to go there next, and
catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.