June 24, 1936 -- Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Named Director of African-American Affairs of the National Youth Administration

Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth living.

Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.

There is a place in God's sun for the youth "farthest down" who has the vision, the determination, and the courage to reach it.

Faith is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without it, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander.

Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist.

Today, we celebrate the life of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, co-founder and President of Bethune-Cookman College, and the first African-American woman to receive a major appointment from the federal government under the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

June 20, 1905 -- Writer Lillian Hellman is Born.

"It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you."


"Belief is a moral act for which the believer is to be held responsible."


"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion."

"It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it."

"Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?"


"You lose your manners when you are poor."


Today, we celebrate the life of Lillian Hellman, a Jewish writer who, in 1952, refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee regarding the actions of her former Communist associates. A self-described "moral writer," when the moral code conflicted with the law of the land, Hellman had the courage to follow her conscience:

"I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive....to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.

I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbour, to be loyal to my country, and so on. In general, I respected these ideals of Christian honor and did as well as I knew how. It is my belief that you will agree with these simple rules of human decency and will not expect me to violate the good American tradition from which they spring."

June 18, 1873 -- Susan B. Anthony Fined $100 for Voting for President

The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.


I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.


I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.


How can you not be all on fire? ... I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don't wake up --and raise your voice in protest against the impending crime of this nation upon the new islands it has clutched from other folks. Do come into the living present and work to save us from any more barbaric male governments. 


Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.

Today, we celebrate the life of Susan B. Anthony, who paved the way for women's suffrage in the U.S. We thank you, Ms. Anthony, for your work so that we can fully participate in self-governance as citizens of a democratic nation.

June 17, 1928--Amelia Earhart Becomes First Woman to Fly Across the Atlantic Ocean (As a Passenger)

"Never do things others can do and will do, if there are things others cannot do or will not do."

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward."


"Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace, The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things."

"No kind action ever stops with itself. One kind action leads to another. Good example is followed. A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves."

"Adventure is worthwhile in itself."

"The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship."

"...now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done - occasionally what men have not done--thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action. Some such consideration was a contributing reason for my wanting to do what I so much wanted to do."


Today, we celebrate the life of Amelia Earhart, whose courage and sense of adventure literally opened up the skies to women. She reminds us that we have the power to choose our own paths in life, and encourages us to make paths of our own for others to follow.

June 16, 1917--Birth of Katharine Graham (d. 2001), publisher of The Washington Post

"The thing women must do to rise to power is to redefine their femininity. Once, power was considered to be a masculine attribute. In fact, power has no sex."

"To love what you do and feel that it matters; how could anything be more fun?"


"Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn."

Today, we celebrate the life of Katharine Graham, the first woman to serve as publisher of a prominent publishing company. Graham is often remembered for her firm support of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as the two Post reporters unveiled the Watergate scandal. In spite of being threatened publicly by President Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, Graham's decision to "pursue the facts as far as they led" clearly demonstrates that "power has no sex." 

June 15, 1994 - Ruth Bader Ginsburg Named to Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton

"My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent."

"We live in an age in which the fundamental principles to which we subscribe -- liberty, equality and justice for all -- are encountering extraordinary challenges, ... But it is also an age in which we can join hands with others who hold to those principles and face similar challenges.”

"Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation."

It is not women's liberation, it is women's and men's liberation."  

"Every constitution written since the end of World War II includes a provision that men and women are citizens of equal stature. Ours does not."

Today, we celebrate the life and work of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman ever to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. A long-time women's rights advocate, Justice Ginsburg suggests to us that to be a "lady" is to be an independent thinker and an activist committed to equality. This contrasts sharply with the traditional definition of lady as a genteel (and generally subdued) woman of a respected social position, yet is a more apt definition for the twenty-first century, suggesting that the true measure of "class" is the degree to which a woman follows her own internal compass rather than conforming to society's norms.

June 14, 1992--Mona Van Duyn is named first female U.S. Poet Laureate

"I believe that good poetry can be as ornate as a cathedral or as bare as a pottingshed, as long as it confronts the self with honesty and fullness. Nobody is born with the capacity to perform this act of confrontation, in poetry or anywhere else; one's writing career is simply a continuing effort to increase one's skill at it."

Today, we celebrate the life and work of Mona Van Duyn, our first female U.S. Poet Laureate, whose accolades also included receiving the Bollingen Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Loines Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize and the Eunice Tietjens Award from Poetry magazine, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Van Duyn's quest to "confront...the self with honesty and fullness" is a goal to which we, too, can aspire as we strive to live meaningfully and to pursue deep gladness and fulfillment. Her oeuvre includes the following poem, The Delivery, which stands out to me for its honesty and its awfulness, as it describes in narrative form an example of this self-confrontation.

I'm five. The petals of my timeless play
can unfurl while Mother hoes out other gardens.
the next-door child and I, alone with my toys,
confine to the dining room our discreet noise.
From the doorway: "Betty, come here!" The uprooted flower
falls dead with no warning. What had my friend done,
rolled a dimestore car over the table top,
stood on a chair to wave the little dustmop?
I will never know. She is tethered to Mother's hand
and Mother's voice begins the long scolding.
I start a soldier's march around and around
the table, stomping each foot to stomp out her sound.
Faster around I stomp until it is over,
Betty is gone and Mother takes hold of me.
"What's the matter' with you? Why is your face so red?
Why you're crying, your whole face is dripping wet!
Well, if that isn't silly, I'd like to know what is!
I wasn't scolding  you, I was scolding Betty."
She laughs. "Go wash your face." The room blears.
My hand wipes and finds all the unfelt tears.

Soon it is supper time. In the kitchen they feed
and talk, while I, invisible as I was
in high-chair days, silently sit on Sears,
wearing the weight of my big and bigger ears.
"Well, you'll never guess what your crazy kid did today--
if that wasn't the limit!" The story swells
into ache in my stomach, then Dad's laughter and hers
slice and tear like knives and forks and a worse
hurt is opening in my middle, in familiar
smells and muddle of voices, mashed potatoes,
dimming light, hamburger, thick creamed corn,
the milk-white chill, a self is being born.

And is swept away through seething clots of minnow
in the nearly hidden creek that weeps through the meadow,
smeared with mud from its suckling roots of willow,
to tributary, to river, deep and slow,
whose sob-like surges quietly lift her and carry
her unjudged freight clear to the mourning sea.
And there they are, all of the heavy others
(even Mother and Father), the floundering, floating or
sinking
human herd, whose armstrokes, frail, awry,
frantic, hold up their heads to inhale the sky,
which gilds the tongues of water or soothes them to stillness
with white silk covers strewn with onyx and pearl.
She is with them, inept dog-paddler that she is.
The heavens whirl and drift their weightless riches
through streaky splendors of joy, or bare unending
lodes of blazing or ice-blue clarity.
With them all, all, she is scraped by crusted rock,
wrenched by rides untrue to heart or to clock,
fighting the undertow to shapelessness
in smothering deeps, to what is insufferable.
If those she can reach go under she cannot save them--
how could she save them? Omnipotent dark has seized them.
She can only sink with each one as far as light
can enter, meet drowning eyes and flesh still spangled
with tiny gems from above (a sign of the rare
her watered eyes never need), pointing to where,
up, in the passionate strain, lives everything fair
before she flails back to the loved, the illumined, air.

Mona Van Duyn, 
Firefall, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993