Welcome to Infinite Women

This Day In History

Arts

2009 Barbara Mandrell was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Espionage

2018 Gina Haspel won US Senate confirmation to become the first woman to serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on a permanent basis.

Inventor

1824 Diana H. Tuttle became one of the first women to secure a US patent in her own name, for "spinning-wheel heads, accelerating."

Law

1954 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. Plaintiffs in the historic case included Katherine Carper Sawyer, Linda and Saundria Brown,Vicki Henderson, Victoria and Carol Lawton, Martha and Frances Lewis, Ruth Scales and Nancy Todd.

2004 Marcia Kadish, 56, and Tanya McCloskey, 52, of Malden, Massachusetts, marry at Cambridge City Hall in Massachusetts, becoming the first legally married same-sex partners in the United States. Over the course of the day, 77 other same-sex couples tied the knot across the state, and hundreds more applied for marriage licenses.

Military

2017 US Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the soldier who was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison for giving classified materials to WikiLeaks, walked free after serving seven years behind bars, her sentence having been commuted by President Barack Obama.

Politics

1536 Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declared the marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn invalid after she failed to produce a male heir; Boleyn, already condemned for high treason, was executed two days later.