National Woman's Day was celebrated in New York, having been organized by activist Theresa Malkiel of the Socialist Party of America. It was the precursor to International Women's Day.
Theresa Serber Malkiel was a Jewish Russian immigrant who had come to the US from Imperial Russia at age 17 with her family, after which she went to work in the garment industry. She was involved in labor union and Socialist politics fairly early on, and was an opponent of US entry into World War One. She was also an opponent of Socialists practicing racial segregation in the South, which they did. She passed away in 1949 in Yonkers at age 75.
International Women's Day is celebrated on March 8.
President Roosevelt had lunch with the Austrian Ambassador at the Austrian Embassy, breaking a 120-year-old tradition of American Presidents not trodding on foreign soil while in office.
Peary's expedition to the North Pole set off from Ellesmere Island. It was Peary's Eighth Arctic Expedition.
The expeditions became famous, of course, for their heroic efforts, if extreme efforts in the Arctic were heroic. Peary and his African American aid Matthew Henson did face extreme conditions and privations, but as became known largely after their deaths, they took some comfort with alternative native paramours, Peary's being only 14 years old at the time of its initiation. These unions outside of marriage produced children, predictably, who were left with their native mothers, which in Henson's case were his only offspring.
If this seems pretty judgmental, well it is. Peary's taking a 14-year-old for sex is appalling. Abandoning the children to fatherless lives was as well. The native women involved doubtless didn't know what they were getting into, at least at first, and in the case of a 14-year-old, probably not at all.
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