1837 – Louisa Lee Schuyler was born in October the 26, 1837.
| During the Civil War, at the relatively young age of 24, Schuyler was appointed as the corresponding secretary in the Woman’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR) in New York City. The mission of WCAR was to coordinate the efforts of the volunteers on the home front, including distribution of millions of dollars of supplies, and providing training materials.
In 1873 she organized the New York State Charities Aid Association and in the following year established the first training school for nurses in the United States in connection with Bellevue Hospital. She also worked on projects to address tuberculosis and blindness. In 1907 she was appointed one of the original trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, founded by Margaret Olivia Slocum Sage In recognition of her 40 years of activity in charitable work, she received in 1915 the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Columbia University. In 2000, the State Charities Aid Association was renamed the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy in her honor. |
| 1902 – Beryl Markham (26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986) was a British-born Kenyan aviator (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. During the pioneer days of aviation, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She is now primarily remembered as the author of the memoir West with the Night.
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| 1879 – Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (February 20, 1805 – October 26, 1879) was an American political activist, abolitionist, women’s rights advocate, and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. While she was raised a Southerner, she spent her entire adult life living in the North. The time of her greatest fame was between 1836, when a letter she sent to William Lloyd Garrison was published in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a courageous and brilliant speech to abolitionists gathered in Philadelphia, with a hostile crowd throwing stones and shouting outside the hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that two-year period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women’s rights.
Drawing her views from natural rights theory (famously set forth in the Declaration of Independence), the Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own experience of slavery and racism in the South, she argued for the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman, and was particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice. When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she, along with her sister Sarah Moore Grimké fiercely defended women’s right to make speeches and more generally be fully political beings. In May 1838, Grimké married Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist. They lived in New Jersey with her sister Sarah Moore Grimké, and raised three children, supporting themselves by running two schools, the latter located in the Raritan Bay Union utopian community. After the Civil War ended, the Grimké–Weld household moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they spent their last years. Angelina and Sarah were active in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in the 1870s. |
