Gregorio Menendez Bustelo, a Spaniard, founded Café Bustelo in the Bronx in 1928. He moved to the United States in 1917 after spending many years in Latin America, including Havana, Cuba. He and his wife bought a roaster with their savings and roasted coffee at home.
A cigarette-smoking, pants-wearing, animal-dissecting painter, Rosa Bonheur spent her life doing exactly as she pleased. 2022 marks the bicentenary of the birth an artist who opened countless doors for female creatives, both in her home country of France and abroad.
Speaking of petticoats. One of the most notable things about Bonheur was her love of wearing pants, a reflection of her personal style as well as her status as a woman who rode horses, visited livestock fairs, and painted on a daily basis, all activities that would be hindered by wearing heavy skirts. She held a permission de travestissement, effectively a legal document from the French government which had to be renewed every six months, allowing her to “cross-dress”.
Rosa took full advantage of the permissions granted by creating something of a trouser-based uniform for herself while she worked. According to the archivist at Château de Rosa Bonheur, it was only really when she posed for the occasional portrait that she’d wear a dress. Not-so-fun fact: Until January 31st of 2013, it was illegal for women in France to wear trousers. It made headlines at the time when the 200 year-old law requiring women to ask police for special permission to “dress as men” or else risk being taken into custody, was finally revoked.
The three women pictured in this incredible photograph taken on this day in 1885 -- Anandibai Joshi of India, Keiko Okami of Japan, and Sabat Islambouli of Syria -- each became the first licensed female doctors in their respective countries.
The three were students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania; one of the only places in the world at the time where women could study medicine.
As Mallika Rao writes in HuffPost, "If the timing doesn't seem quite right, that's understandable. In 1885, women in the U.S. still couldn't vote, nor were they encouraged to learn very much. Popular wisdom decreed that studying was a threat to motherhood." Given this, how did three women from around the world end up studying there to become doctors? The credit, according to Christopher Woolf of PRI's The World, goes to the Quakers who "believed in women’s rights enough to set up the WMCP way back in 1850 in Germantown.”
Woolf added, "It was the first women’s medical college in the world, and immediately began attracting foreign students unable to study medicine in their home countries. First they came from elsewhere in North America and Europe, and then from further afield. Women, like Joshi in India and Keiko Okami in Japan, heard about WMCP, and defied expectations of society and family to travel independently to America to apply, then figure out how to pay for their tuition and board... . Besides the international students, it also produced the nation’s first Native American woman doctor, Susan La Flesche, while African Americans were often students as well. Some of whom, like Eliza Grier, were former slaves."
Kalpana Chawla was an Indian-born American astronaut and aerospace engineer who was the first woman of Indian origin to fly to space. She first flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator aboard.
Chawla's second flight was on STS-107, the final flight of Columbia, in 2003. She was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on 1 February 2003. Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and several streets, universities, and institutions are named in her honor
