International Day of the Girl Child - 11 October

International Day of the Girl Child, 11 October

The world’s 1.1 billion girls are part of a large and vibrant global generation poised to take on the future. Yet the ambition for gender equality in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlights the preponderance of disadvantage and discrimination borne by girls everywhere on a daily basis. Only through explicit focus on collecting and analyzing girl-focused, girl-relevant and sex-disaggregated data, and using these data to inform key policy and program decisions, can we adequately measure and understand the opportunities and challenges girls face, and identify and track progress towards solutions to their most pressing problems.

With this in mind, the theme for this year's International Day of the Girl (11 October) is Girls' Progress = Goals' Progress: What Counts for Girls. While we can applaud the ambition and potential of the SDGs for girls, and recognize how girls’ progress is good not only for girls, but also for families, communities and society at large, we must also take this opportunity to consider how existing gaps in data on girls and young women, lack of systematic analysis, and limited use of existing data significantly limit our ability to monitor and communicate the wellbeing and progress of half of humanity.

Much more can and needs to be done to harness the data required to ensure programs, policies and services effectively respond to the specific needs of girls. When we invest in girls’ health, safety, education and rights - in times of peace and crisis - we empower them to reach for their dreams and build better lives for themselves and their communities. Only when investments in programs for girls on issues that particularly affect them - due to both their age and gender - are complemented with corresponding investments in data on girls, can we make real progress towards greater accountability in domains of critical importance to them.

Read More Here @ UN dot Org

The remains of Amelia Earhart may have been found on an island

The remains of Amelia Earhart may have been found on an island

Ric Gillespie of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) says that the fate of Amelia Earhart may be much more saddening than first thought. He believes she died as a castaway on a different Pacific island.

Four months into her trip around the world, Earhart began to run low on fuel while trying to find Howland Island. Both the engineer onboard and Amelia herself were last seen on radar on June 2.

It is unknown what actually happened to the pair, but Gillespie says that they did not die in a watery crash. He says that both Earhart and Noonan landed on an island called Nikumaroro, which is around 400 Miles southeast of Howland Island.

Continue reading article courtesy of The Vintage News

No Scrubs: How Women Fought To Become Doctors

No scrubs: how women had to fight to become doctors | Farrah Jarral | Life and style | The Guardian

Women have always been intimately involved in medical matters – and not only through their familiarity with the act of expelling oversized babies from undersized pelvises. In the Middle Ages and beyond, women worked as midwives, nurses, apothecaries, bone-setters and surgeons. Yet, as the study of medicine became formalised, women were increasingly excluded. Henry VIII made a point of this in his 1540 charter forming the Company of Barber Surgeons, forerunner of the Royal College of Surgeons, in which it was decreed “No carpenter, smith, weaver or women shall practice surgery.”

By the mid-19th century, more women were demanding entry to medical school. The British Medical Journal at the time declared: “It is high time that this unnatural and preposterous attempt ... to establish a race of feminine doctors should be exploded.” Men expressed concerns that exposure to gore might pose a risk to delicate female health, apparently oblivious that women deal with blood on a monthly basis.

The first world war allowed women to take up posts in hospitals that would ordinarily have been occupied by men. But despite their competence, female physicians still faced major career obstacles in the interwar period, including discrimination on the basis of their marital status. In 1948, the educational reforms that came with the inauguration of the NHS required that a “reasonable proportion” of medical students were female.

Continue reading article by Farrah Jarral here at The Guardian

Australian Woman Head of Knighthood Order

The Record » First Australian woman installed as head of knighthood order

After 20 years as a dame of the Queensland chapter of the legendary Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, Dr Monica Thomson adds a black cape and a gold mantilla to her hooded robes to distinguish herself as the new chapter leader.

Her robes were blessed during the installation by Brisbane Archbishop Mark Coleridge. “I am very proud to be the first woman in Australia, and the seventh worldwide,” Dr Thomson, 65, mother of three sons and grandmother of eight, said. “I was one of the original members when our chapter was formed and I hope to carry on the good work during my term as lieutenant.”

Knights and dames of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre are devoted to building up the faith and practice among members, and sustaining the spiritual, charitable, and social works of the Church in the Holy Land including Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.

In 1888, Pope Leo XIII authorised the order to give women similar honours to men.

Read rest of article here at The Record

Victoria Woodhull - Candidate For US President

From: The Times Leader:

Nearly a century and a half before Hillary Clinton, a fiery activist from Ohio became the first woman nominated for U.S. president.

Victoria Woodhull’s varied and colorful life makes her difficult to pigeonhole. The suffragist, medium, businesswoman, stockbroker and newspaper publisher was “Mrs. Satan” to some, a visionary champion of women’s and children’s rights to others.

She rode motorcycles, preached “free love” and followed the guidance of an ancient Greek orator she believed had presented himself to her as a spirit guide.

The Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull to face incumbent Republican Ulysses S. Grant in 1872 and Democrat Horace Greeley, nearly 50 years before women had the right to vote. At 34, she was a few months shy of the required age, but most historians still view her nomination and run as the first.

Woodhull lost, of course, but by how much is unclear.

Read rest of article here at The Times Leader

Ancient tombs in Peru hint at human sacrifice

Archaeologists find ancient tombs in Peru hinting at human sacrifice | Science | The Guardian

Archaeologists in Peru have found more than a dozen tombs suggesting human sacrifice at sprawling ruins on the northern coast, a seat of power for three ancient cultures and the possible center of a pre-Inca legend.

At Chotuna-Chornancap, a coastal ruin complex in the arid valleys far north of Lima, archaeologists with Peru’s ministry of culture found more than 17 graves dating to at least the 15th century.

“There is at least one fairly high-status tomb,” said Haagen Klaus, a bioarchaeologist at George Mason University has worked at Chotuna-Chornancap before. Klaus told the Guardian that he hopes to analyze the new finds, discovered by the ruins of a temple, to confirm whether the victims were sacrificed.

“It’s not unusual that sacrifices are made to those individuals, sometimes during the funeral or even years or generations afterward,” he said. “But we can see that a number of the individuals that were buried were children – and that does fit into the larger pattern of ritual sacrifice.”

Continue reading article here at The Guardian and also at Seeker

An obituary 1,700 years old has been translated

An obituary 1,700 years old has been translated - CNN.com

A 1,700-year-old obituary, which is unlike anything researchers say they have seen before, has finally been translated. The inscription, written in ancient Greek on a small limestone tablet reveals a woman's name, her religion and what she was like as a person.

Lincoln H. Blumell, who specializes in ancient scripture at Utah's Brigham Young University, translated the epitaph. Plucked from Egypt, the document had been sitting in the Rare Books Department at the University of Utah's J Willard Marriott Library since it was donated in 1989. It commemorates a woman named Helene who cared for and loved orphans.

In peace and blessing Ama Helene, a Jew, who loves the orphans, [died]. For about 60 years her path was one of mercy and blessing; on it she prospered.

Read more here at: CNN online edition

Women in History - All China Women's Federation

Women in History - All China Women's Federation
Series of articles of women who have made an impact on the history of China throughout the ages.  Link forms part of the Women of China website.

What Not To Wear: A Short History Of Regulating Female Dress

What Not To Wear: A Short History Of Regulating Female Dress From Ancient Sparta To The Burkini

 “Let’s keep in mind that it is no more freeing to tell a woman what she can wear than to tell her what she can’t.”

Few can deny that the various burkini bans put in place by towns on the French Riviera this summer have become symbolic of thecountry’s struggle over “secular identity.” The bans have seemed particularly odd to Italian beachgoers and others around the world, who have pointed out that nuns are often seen on Italian beaches in their habit. Despite the French Conseil d’Etat’s suspension of the burkini ban, local mayors continue to say they will enforce the dress code. Cogolin Mayor Marc Etienne Lansade told CNN, ”if you don’t want to live the way we do, don’t come...If you are accepted in Rome — do like Romans do.”  As it turns out, there is an ancient history of telling women what they can and cannot wear as a means of controlling a community’s political message.

Continue reading article here at Forbes dot com