2009 – Mass arrest of Mothers of Laleh Park
Hundreds of mostly young men and women were viciously killed or imprisoned by the ruling mullah regime in Iran in the course of the six-month uprising from June 20, 2009 to February 11, 2010. The mothers of these victims held weekly gatherings at Tehran’s Laleh Park to demand freedom of their children and voice their grievances against the dictatorial regime. These gatherings soon led to the formation of a group called the Mothers of Laleh Park whose activities had a great impact on Iranian society.
To clamp down on this movement, the clerical regime arrested 30 members of the Mothers of Laleh Park on November 5, 2009. The arrests, however, fueled further protests and the regime was forced to free the women it had arrested.
1921 – Antoinette Brown Blackwell (May 20, 1825 – November 5, 1921), was the first officially ordained female minister in the United States and a women’s rights activist.
Brown was recognized as highly intelligent as early as three years old. In 1841 at the age of 16, after completing her requisite early schooling at Monroe County Academy, Brown taught school herself. She did not intend to spend her life teaching and so she set her sights on a degree in theology from Oberlin College and a career in the pulpit.
She gave a speech in 1850 at the first National Women’s Rights Convention that was well received and served as the beginning of a speaking tour in which she would address issues such as abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. Brown spoke at many of the subsequent annual National Women’s Rights Conventions. In 1878 she returned to organized religion, becoming a Unitarian. She applied to the American Unitarian Association and was recognized as a minister. She spoke in Unitarian churches and resumed her lecture touring. In 1920, she was the only participant of the 1850 Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. She voted for Warren G. Harding in the 1920 presidential election. She died in 1921, at the age of 96.
