Wikipedia:Main Page history/2020 March 8

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From today's featured article

Participants at the Inter-Allied Women's Conference

The Inter-Allied Women's Conference opened in Paris on 10 February 1919, several weeks after the start of the Paris Peace Conference, the meeting of the victorious Allies of World War I to set peace terms for the Central Powers. The women's conference was convened after the war to introduce women's issues to the process. On 18 January Marguerite de Witt-Schlumberger, vice-president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, asked Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president, to allow women to participate in the discussions that would inform the treaty negotiations. After first being rebuffed, suffragists were allowed to make a presentation before the Commission on International Labour Legislation, and on 10 April a resolution was presented to the League of Nations Commission. Though the women failed to achieve many of their aims, they gained the right for women to serve in the League of Nations organisation. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Marie Rennotte

... that Belgian teacher and physician Marie Rennotte (pictured) became a women's rights activist in Brazil?
... that the 2005 BBC documentary Dead Mums Don't Cry follows Grace Kodindo's efforts to stem the maternal mortality rate in Chad, where pregnant and childbearing women had a 9 per cent chance of dying?
... that neuroscientist Cristina Alberini uses both mammals, and invertebrates such as sea slugs, to study memory?
... that Heidi Cruz, wife of U.S. senator Ted Cruz, is the primary breadwinner of the family?
... that Angelina Atyam was awarded the 1998 UN Prize in the Field of Human Rights for campaigning for the release of captive children, including her own daughter kidnapped by Ugandan guerrillas?
... that Judith Liberman learned storytelling in a French commune at the age of 14, and has gone on to reintroduce the telling of Anatolian fairy tales in Turkey?
... that Frieda Nadig, one of the four "mothers" of the German constitution, proposed to include the sentence "men and women have equal rights", but was initially voted down?
... that boxing World Youth champion Caroline Dubois pretended to be a boy named Colin when she started training?

In the news

Yvonne Farrell

Yvonne Farrell (pictured) and Shelley McNamara win the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
In the United States, a tornado outbreak hits four counties around Nashville, Tennessee, killing twenty-five people.
Muhyiddin Yassin becomes the prime minister of Malaysia following a political crisis which led to the resignation of his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad.
The United States and the Taliban sign an agreement which establishes a framework for ending the War in Afghanistan.

On this day

March 8: International Women's Day; Ali's Birthday / Father's Day in Iran (2020)

Maya ruins at Copán

1576 – A letter was written to King Philip II of Spain, containing the first European mention of the Maya ruins of Copán (pictured) in present-day Honduras.
1655 – The court of Northampton County, Virginia, issued a ruling that made John Casor the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared a slave for life as a result of a civil suit.
1963 – The Ba'ath Party came to power in a coup d'état by a clique of quasi-leftist Syrian Army officers calling themselves the National Council for the Revolutionary Command.
1978 – BBC Radio 4 began broadcasting Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction radio series that was later adapted into novels, a television series, and other formats.

Adela of Normandy (d. 1137) · Simon Cameron (b. 1799) · Petra Kvitová (b. 1990)

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Today's featured picture

The Portrait of Comtesse d'Haussonville is an 1845 oil-on-canvas painting by French Neoclassical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Although more interested in depicting historical scenes, Ingres received few commissions for them, and found that he could better support his family if he painted portraits instead. By 1845, he was at the height of his fame as a portrait painter, and accepted a commission to paint Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville. She was 27 at the time; Ingres had sketched her with black chalk as a preparatory drawing two or three years earlier, and begun an oil-on-canvas painting, but that was abandoned when she became pregnant with her third child and was thus unable to pose further. Ingres's new portrait differs from the original in showing her facing the opposite direction and introducing her reflection in a mirror. The countess found the long and slow sittings wearisome, at one stage complaining that "for the last nine days Ingres has been painting on one of the hands". The painting is now part of the Frick Collection in New York City.

Painting credit: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

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