Dorothy Pitman Hughes, pioneering feminist who co-founded Ms. Magazine, dies at 84

From NBC News:

Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneering Black feminist, child welfare advocate and activist who co-founded Ms. Magazine with Gloria Steinem, formed a powerful speaking partnership with her and appeared with her in one of the most iconic photos of the feminist movement, has died. She was 84.

Hughes died Dec. 1 in Tampa, Florida, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, said Maurice Sconiers of the Sconiers Funeral Home in Columbus, Georgia. The home said it did not know the cause of death.

Hughes was not as well known as Steinem, but the two forged an important partnership at a time when feminism was viewed as a very white, middle-class movement. Steinem credited Hughes with helping her become comfortable speaking in public.

In one of the most famous photos of the movement, taken in October 1971, the two raised their right arms in the Black Power salute.

Hughes, a pioneering voice in child care, organized the first shelter for battered women in New York City and co-founded the New York City Agency for Child Development.

She met Steinem in 1968, according to a biography on the Ms. Magazine website, when Steinem, then a journalist, was writing a story for New York Magazine about Pitman Hughes’ child care center. From 1969 to 1973, they spoke across the country at college campuses, community centers and other venues on gender and race issues.

Hughes was born Dorothy Jean Ridley on Oct. 2, 1938, in Lumpkin, Georgia, her family wrote in an obituary posted by the funeral home.

Obit: Professor Halet Çambel

From Hurryet Daily News:

One of the most important figures in the archaeology world, Istanbul University’s retired academic Professor Halet Çambel, has died aged 98. Turkish archaeologist and writer Çambel was found dead in her house on Jan. 12. 

After a ceremony to be held tomorrow at 10 a.m. at the Bosphorus University, Çambel will be buried next to the grave of her husband in the western province of Muğla. 

She played a key role in the understanding of Hittite hieroglyphics by discovering a tablet with the Phoenician alphabet, which allowed philologists to decipher the inscription. 

Obits For Notable Women

From Philly dot com:

Maria Rosa Menocal, 59, formerly of Philadelphia, a Yale University professor and scholar who studied the interactions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain, died Monday, Oct. 15, at the home of a friend in Killingworth, Conn., after a three-year battle with melanoma.

Dr. Menocal was born in Havana. When she was 7, a year after the Cuban revolution, she came to Philadelphia to join relatives.

Her family eventually settled in Wayne, and she graduated from Radnor High School. She earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1973; a master's degree in French from Penn in 1975; and a doctorate from Penn in 1979 in philology, the study of language as used in literature.

Early in her career, Dr. Menocal lived in Cairo and studied Arabic. She also lived in Spain and France, her husband, R. Crosby Kemper III, said.

A fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, she was a visiting lecturer or professor at Bryn Mawr College, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, and the American University in Cairo, among others.

From the Irish Times:

At a time when it was very unusual for people in their 50s to enter university for the first time, Sheelagh Harbison undertook an undergraduate degree in general studies at Trinity College Dublin, which included history.

Her talent was spotted by the great professor of medieval history Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven, who arranged for her to have special tuition in Latin so she could enter the honour school, and study for a moderatorship BA degree in history and political science.

She took her degree in 1972 and went on to complete an M Litt on William of Windsor, an English justiciar of Ireland in the later Middle Ages, subsequently published in a festschrift for Prof Otway-Ruthven.

She continued to work in TCD as a tutor until the 1990s, working also under Prof Jim Lydon. When he retired, she contributed also to his festschrift an essay on Colony and Frontier in medieval Ireland.

Another important work was her study of Rinndoon Castle on Lough Ree for the Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society.

Obit: Marjorie Chibnall

From the Telegraph:

She was known for her many studies of Anglo-Norman history, including, most notably, her mighty six-volume edition and translation of the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History, published between 1969 and 1980 — the product of 30 years of painstaking work.

Her first publications, a series of papers on alien priories (English religious houses under the control of a mother house abroad) began before the Second World War, and she continued to publish into her 90s. Her last book The Normans, published in 2006 when she was 91, won praise from a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement as “a masterly work, the most elegant and concise account of Norman history currently in print”.

Notable Passing: Paula Hyman

From JTA:

Noted Jewish feminist Paula Hyman, who served as the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has died.

Hyman died Thursday at the age of 65.

She was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, a position she held for 25 years, including more than a decade as chair of the Jewish studies program.

Hyman served as dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies from 1981 to 1986, as well as an associate professor of history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Prior to that she was an assistant professor of history at Columbia University for seven years; she received a doctorate from the school in 1975.

She published extensively on topics including Jewish gender issues, modern European and American Jewish history, and Jewish women's history as well as feminism. She wrote several books on French Jewry.

Hyman was a founder in 1971 of Ezrat Nashim, a group of Conservative Jewish women who lobbied extensively for changes in the Conservative movement's attitude toward women, including ordaining them as rabbis and inclusion in a minyan.

She was awarded a National Jewish Book Award in 1999 and received honorary degrees from The Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Hyman regularly spent time in Israel, lecturing in Hebrew and English at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University.

Diane Cilento

From the Telegraph:

Diane Cilento, the actress, who died on Thursday aged 78, appeared in films, television shows and stage productions, but was perhaps best known as the first wife of the actor Sean Connery.

Her heyday came in the late 1950s and 1960s, with her most memorable film part being that of Molly Seagrim, the lewd gamekeeper’s wench in Tony Richardson’s 1963 production of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Throughout her life, one Australian newspaper noted in 2006, Diane Cilento was sustained by a mix of rebelliousness, humour, independence and spirituality. Her try-anything-once approach included an early job modelling sports clothes in a Brisbane shop, playing bit parts in films and on television, and riding an elephant in a circus. “I wore the traditional fishnet stockings, incredibly high heels, a bum-revealing little green flared skirt, a pillbox hat and gloves that were shocking pink and sequinned,’’ she recalled of the circus gig.

In 2001 she was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for “distinguished service to the arts, especially theatre”.

Farewell Cha Cha

From Christian Post:

Annette Charles, best known for her role as Cha Cha DiGregorio in “Grease,” has died at the age of 63. Her death comes just two months after “Grease” star Jeff Conaway died of an overdose at the age of 60.

Charles’s character Cha Cha was girlfriend of the T-Birds rival gang The Scorpions. Conaway’s character Kenickie was second in command to leader of the T-Birds Danny Zuko, played by John Travolta.

In a move to spark jealousy, Conaway’s character Kenicki takes Charles’s character Cha Cha to Rydell High’s school dance. Charles most memorable scene, however, was her sultry dance with co-star Travolta.

In addition to her role in “Grease,” Charles appeared on various television shows throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, including “The Mod Squad”, “Bonanza”, “Magnum P.I.”, “Baranby Jones”, “The Incredible Hulk”, and "The Bionic Woman.”

Obituary: Nan Robertson

From LA Times:

Nan Robertson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who brought distinction and change to her newspaper through highly publicized professional and personal battles -- one against sex discrimination at her newspaper, the other against toxic shock syndrome, which nearly killed her -- died Tuesday at a nursing home in Rockville, Md. She was 83.

A reporter for the New York Times for 33 years beginning in 1955, Robertson was known for her role in a drive to improve pay and career opportunities for women writers and editors, which culminated in a class-action lawsuit settled in favor of the women plaintiffs in 1978. She chronicled the fight and the paper's long history of discrimination against women in the 1992 book "The Girls in the Balcony."

Neera Desai [Neeraben]

Wonderful tribute to a woman who did much to pioneer the study of women in India.

Obituary @ Foreign Policy Association website:

Dr. Neera Desai [Neeraben] one of the pioneers of Women’s Studies in India, died on June 25, 2009 after a long struggle with cancer. Neeraben, born Neera Druv in Ahmedabad in 1924, lived most of her life in Bombay/ Mumbai where she founded India’s first Research Centre for Women’s Studies, called the Research Unit for Women’s Studies, at S.N.D.T. Women’s University in 1974. As the founder director of the Research Centre, she played a major role in designing and guiding research projects on women, linking academic Women’s Studies with women’s real-life issues, and introducing Women’s Studies to the curriculum. Trained as a Sociologist, she was also a pioneer in pushing her discipline to include women and gender in the analysis.

Obituary: Ruth Ford

From the Times Online:

The life of the actress Ruth Ford might aptly be called Upper West Side Story. During her long residence in the Dakota building near Central Park, New York in 72nd Street she created a fabled salon. Among its denizens were Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, whose encounter there led, thanks to a chance remark, to collaboration with Leonard Bernstein on his musical about romance amid the city’s street life.

She studied philosophy for five years at the University of Mississippi and became lifelong friends with William Faulkner. On visiting her brother in New York, however, she realised that, rather than continue in the South, she too would thrive in a more cosmopolitan world. She turned her looks to modelling in New York, caught by the lenses of such people as Man Ray and Cecil Beaton before she joined Orson Welles’s fabled Mercury Theater troupe later in the Thirties.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver

The New York Times notes the passing of this amazing woman:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a member of one of the most prominent families in American politics and a trailblazer in the effort to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, died early Tuesday morning at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. She was 88.

A sister of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy and the mother-in-law of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, Mrs. Shriver never held elective office. Yet she was no stranger to Capitol Hill, and some view her work on behalf of the developmentally challenged, including the founding of the Special Olympics, as the most lasting of the Kennedy family’s contributions.

The first Special Olympics brought together 1,000 athletes from 26 states and Canada for competition. In December 1968, Special Olympics Inc. was established as a nonprofit charitable organization. Since then, the program has grown to almost three million athletes in more than 180 countries.

Recent Losses

Some recent losses of notable women as appeared @ Times Online:

Jean Lawrie: "Jean Lawrie campaigned for improved working conditions for medical women during a career which spanned 50 years. Lawrie pushed for key reforms to ensure that female doctors were able to pursue successful careers as well as assuming the responsibilities of family life."

Carmen Blacker: "Carmen Blacker was an outstanding scholar of Japanese culture. Throughout her life she did all she could for closer understanding between Britain and Japan. Japanese studies would not have survived at the University of Cambridge, where the bulk of her academic life was spent, without her efforts to attract support and students."

Anne Boutwood: "Anne Boutwood was the distinguished consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist who helped to lead the campaign to fight to save the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) Hospital, London, in the mid-1970s."

Patricia Crawford

From The Age:

Patricia Crawford, a pioneering historian and author whose seminal work in revealing fresh insights into 17th-century England won her the Royal Historical Society's prestigious Whitfield prize in 1979, has died in Western Australia after an eight-year battle with breast cancer. She was 68.

Crawford, emeritus professor of history at the University of Western Australia's school of humanities, illuminated life in that extraordinary period — in particular women in 16th and 17th century England— and opened up a whole new field of investigation and revelation from archival documents.

There was almost nothing in print about women of that period when she started writing on the subject in 1980; now, almost every aspect of ordinary women's lives has been written about, and in many cases, the groundwork was done by Crawford.

Kamala Das

From the Times Online:

Kamala Das was one of India’s finest authors, the mother of modern English Indian poetry, and the first Hindu woman to write frankly about sexual desire. Admired by those seeking better living conditions and human rights for women, Das was a writer who could be tender and biting, sometimes in the same sentence.

Das died in Pune, in northwestern India, where she had lived since 2007 near the family of her youngest son, Jaisurya. Her body was flown to her home state of Kerala, where thousands of mourners of all ages paid homage, weeping and placing flowers on her hearse during her funeral procession. The proceedings were covered live on television, and the procession stopped at public halls in Trichur, Cochin, Alleppey, Kollam and Trivandrum.

Notable Passings - January 2009

A number of notable women passed this January. Here are just a few:

• Helen Suzman - anti-apatheid activist
• Maria de Jesus - world's oldest person
• Inger Christiansen - poet
• Betty Freeman - philanthropist
• Cheryl Holdridge - actress
• Maria Dimitriadi - Greek songstress
• Vivian Della Chiesa - soprano
• Analia de Victoria Pereira - Angolan politician
• Deborah Riedel - Australian soprano
• Cornelia Wallace - First Lady of Alabama
• Elzbieta Zawacka - WWII resistance fighter
• Nancy Bird Walton - Australian pioneering aviator
• Angela Morley - British conductor and composer
• Lillian Willoughby - Quaker - founder of "Take Back The Night"
• Dorothy Brant - British Suffragette
• Anastasia Baburova - journalist
• Constance E Cook - politician
• Susan Hibbert - typed German surrender document in WWII
• Veronica Dudarova - Russian composer
• Daphne Rook - South African author
• Anna Radziwill - Solidarity leader
• Helen Maksagak - Inuit politician
• Astrid Folstad - Norwegian actress
• Mariana Bridi da Costa - Brazilian model
• Marguerite, Baroness de Reuter - aristocrat
• Lucille Mair - Jamaican diplomat
• Shirley Rickert - actress