“My father was a physicist and also an activist. My first public protest was with my dad at Stanford. I came by all that honestly.”
– Joan Baez, Singer-Songwriter, Peace and Social Justice Activist, Daughter of a Mexican-American Activist
WOW2 is a four-times-a-month sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from September 16 through September 23.
The next installment of WOW2 will be on Saturday, September 24, 2022.
“Suppose there was an awful big snake down there on the floor. He bites you. Folks all scared, because you may die. You send for doctor to cut the bite; but the snake rolled up there, and while doctor is doing it, he bites you again. The doctor cuts out that bite; but while he’s doing it, the snake springs up and bites you again, and so he keeps doing it, till you kill him. That’s what Master Lincoln ought to know.”
– Harriet Tubman, Black Underground Railroad Conductor, Abolitionist, and Feminist
“I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade – or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.”
– Belva Lockwood, The National Equal Rights Party’s 1884 C andidate for U.S. President
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.
has posted, so be sure to go there next, and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
Many, many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s Librarian Emeritus.
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer.
A rarity among reptiles, American Alligators are ferociously devoted mothers who spend a lot of their time and effort looking after their young. Mother gators build nests, which can be up to 10 feet wide and three feet tall. Then they lay their eggs, usually between 35 and 50, and carefully regulate the temperature of the nest. Using vegetation, the mother can insulate her nest and control how hot or cold her eggs are. This is very important, because temperature determines a baby’s sex; warmer eggs are more likely to produce males, while cooler eggs tend to produce females.
After birth, baby alligators all live together with their mothers, who viciously defend their young for the first few years of their lives. American alligators live between 30 and 50 years.
American alligators are currently listed as least concern by the IUCN Red List, even though from the 1800s to the mid-1900s, they were being hunted and poached by humans unsustainably. In 1987, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pronounced the American alligator fully recovered.