April Highlights in US Women’s History 

• April 2, 1931 – 17-year-old Jackie Mitchell, the second woman to play baseball in the all-male minor leagues, pitches an exhibition game against the N.Y. Yankees and strikes out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The next day, the Baseball Commissioner voided her contract, claiming baseball was too strenuous for women. The ban was not overturned until 1992 

• April 5, 1911 – 100,000 to 500,000 people march in New York City to attend the funeral of seven unidentified victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in late March 

• April 7, 1805 – Sacagawea begins helping the Lewis and Clark Expedition as an interpreter 

• April 7, 1987 – Opening of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the first museum devoted to women artists 

• April 9, 1939 – Marian Anderson sings an Easter Sunday concert for more than 75,000 at Lincoln Memorial 

• April 13, 1933 – Ruth Bryan Owen is the first woman to represent the U.S. as a foreign minister when she is appointed as envoy to Denmark 

• April 16, 1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel 

• April 19, 1977 – Fifteen women in the House of Representatives J^ACKIE M^ITCHELLform the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues 

• April 22 – Earth Day, honor Rachel Carson today, a woman who changed America and greatly influenced the environmental movement with her revolutionary book, Silent Spring 

• April 23 – Barbara Johns Day in Virginia. Barbara Johns as a high school  led a walk out to of Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, to protest unequal conditions. Hers was one of the cases that led to the 1954 Brown v.  Board of Education Supreme Court decision that called for integration of public schools.  

• April 26, 1777 – American Revolution heroine Sybil Ludington, 16 years old, rides 40 miles on horseback in the middle of the night to warn the American militia that the British were invading 

• April 28, 1993 – First “Take Our Daughters to Work” Day, sponsored by the Ms. Foundation, in 2003 it became “Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work” Day