Welcome to Infinite Women

This Day In History

Activism

1992 Irish musician Sinéad O’Connor stuns audiences when she tears up a photo of Pope John Paul II during a performance on Saturday Night Live. Singing an a capella version of the Bob Marley song “War” instead of a song from her recent album, she gave a stark, intense performance of the song, which decries “ignoble and unhappy regimes” that hold people in “sub-human bondage,” changing some of the lyrics to specifically mention child abuse. At the conclusion, O’Connor held a picture of the pope to the camera and tore it to pieces, saying “Fight the real enemy.” It would be years before most Americans would grasp the extent of abuse in the Irish Catholic Church and connected institutions, but the topic was all too personal to O’Connor. As a teenager, she had spent 18 months in a Magdalene asylum (also known as a Magdalene laundry), an institution nominally meant to house wayward or promiscuous youth but which, in a number of cases, were sites of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children at the hands of clergy. The year after O’Connor’s SNL appearance, a mass grave was discovered on the grounds of one such institution, prompting an investigation from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. As these abuses and thousands of other cases of child abuse across Ireland and the U.S. finally came to light in the 2000s, the real target of O’Connor’s shocking protest became increasingly clear.

Arts

1996 Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues premiered at HERE Arts Center in New York City.

Education

1904 Mary McLeod Bethune opens her first school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Sports

1926 Violet Stewart Louisa Piercy was an English long-distance runner who is recognized by the International Association of Athletics Federations as having set the first women's world best in the marathon on 3 October 1926 with a time of 3:40:22.