On this day in 1797, André-Jacques Garnerin made the first recorded parachute jump from 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) above Paris but caused controversy when he announced that his next flight would include a woman as a passenger. Pass the smelling salts! The public and the press were in favour but officials were not. Reduced air pressure, they maintained, would - get this! - compress the organs of the delicate female body and cause loss of consciousness. And that’s before anyone could even consider the sheer immorality of a man and a woman being in such close proximity. The police issued an injunction against him, forbidding the ascent on the grounds that the young woman would be committing herself to the venture without any idea of the terrible risks. After further consultation with both the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of the Police, the injunction was overturned on the grounds that "there was no more scandal in seeing two people of different sex ascend in a balloon than it is to see them jump into a carriage." No mention of compressed female organs but this ridiculous notion took a long time to fade away. The following year, 1798, a young woman known as Citoyenne Henri agreed to be Garnerin’s first female passenger and the ascent of the balloon took place to great public acclaim. You will be relieved to learn that miraculously, Citoyenne Henri’s organs did not collapse, she did not lose consciousness, and her reputation remained unsullied. If you think the reasons for the objections were of the time, I would point out that women were only allowed to compete in Olympic ski jumping from 2011 onwards because until 2005, the president of the International Ski Federation maintained our uteruses would fall out. Honestly, I wish I were making this up. Carina Vogt finally took the first gold in the women’s ski jump at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I’d also like to point out that the 2012 London Olympics was the first time ever in history that every single participating country sent a women’s team. In the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, a man who said he was a woman was allowed to compete in women’s weightlifting. Two Olympiads — that’s all we had. Two Olympiads. And the 2024 Paris Olympics went further and made MVAWG an Olympic sport. Women, nail your colours to the mast, secure those untethered uteruses, and keep doing whatever you can to save the rest of #SaveWomensSport.

On this day in 1958, the first women life peers were introduced into the House of Lords: Baroness Wootton of Abinger and Baroness Swanborough. First, though, a little history of the House of Lords’ leisurely stroll towards equality for women. The Upper House is one of the oldest institutions in the world, with origins in the 11th century, but the system of bicameralism (a Parliament consisting of two distinct chambers) really only emerged during the reign of Edward III from 1327 until 1377, so I’m taking the midpoint of 1352 as a rough birthdate. Abbesses and countesses were occasionally permitted to attend the House of Lords but only as observers, of course. They could be seen but not heard. That’s pretty much the history of womankind in a nutshell, but I digress. All of that changed on 21 October 1958 as a result of the Life Peerages Act 1958. It was prompted by declining numbers of active members in the Lords and, unusually for the time, made specific provision for life peerages to be conferred on women. The Earl of Home said, “I cannot see any argument in logic or in reason, why, if women are in another place, they should not be here”. Viscount Alexander said, “I would not wish for better parliamentary colleagues, or more able parliamentary colleagues than Margaret Bondfield, Susan Lawrence, Ellen Wilkinson and Mrs Wintringham, one of the ablest persons I ever had the pleasure of associating with in parliamentary comradeship in the Other Place. Therefore, I feel convinced that the government, in their proposal for the appointment of life peers, are right in granting women the same privilege as men.” Criminologist Barbara Wootton and Stella Isaacs, founder of the Women’s Royal Voluntary Service, were sworn in on 21 October 1958 as Baroness Wootton of Abinger and Baroness Swanborough, followed the next day by politician Katherine Elliot (an "unrepentant defender of votes for women") and philanthropist Irene Curzon. Job done then, right? Well not quite. Hereditary peeresses were still excluded until the Peerage Act 1623. The first to take her seat was Baroness Strange of Knokin, but only after she petitioned for her right as a descendant to inherit the title and then quite separately, had to petition again to be appointed to the Lords. Finally, Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester, took her seat in the Lords in 2015 but only after the Church of England finally got around to permitting women to become priests in 1992, and then after mulling over the matter for another 22 years, said, “Oh all right, we suppose we’d better open up the College of Bishops to them as well”, thus paving the way for the Lords Spiritual (Women) Act 2015. Notice how both women had to overcome TWO very special women-only barriers before they were achieved equality with their male counterparts? That’s pretty much the history of womankind in a nutshell too — but I digress again. It took 606 years for the House of Lords to make the first step and 57 years to reach the last logical step (held back, naturally, by the Church of England which prides itself on its commitment to inclusion) but it was slightly ahead of its counterpart, the House of Commons, which took 623 years before it permitted women to vote and to become MPs. However, even if you don’t agree with the concept of an upper chamber, let me give you four very good reasons why the House of Lords has been a far better defender of women and children than the House of Commons. The first is The Famous Five’s 1929 landmark ruling of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, a-k-a the Law Lords, that in Canada, a woman is indeed legally a “person”, thus allowing her to be appointed to the Senate. (And yes, if you worked out that it was a full 29 years before the Upper House of our own Parliament accepted the very same principle it had set for the Upper House of Canada, and asked yourself why it took so long, congratulations! You have mastered Snakes and Ladders: the special Women Only version. But I digress a third time…) The second is the famous 1991 ruling R v R [1991] UKHL in which five Law Lords unanimously ruled that rape within marriage is unlawful, thereby putting the final nail in the coffin of coverture, the common law concept of woman as chattel (property). The third is the historic 2024 Supreme Court clarification of the Equality Act 2010 that “woman” means a biological woman, and that transwomen are men and have no right to be in female-only spaces, services or sports. The message is slowly filtering through to all of those organisations that gleefully paraded their “progressive” credentials by throwing out all of our hard-won rights and actively putting women and girls at risk. And the fourth is the way the House of Lords keeps shredding into a thousand tiny pieces every attempt by the Commons to pass the latest iteration of the conversion therapy bill. We’d be in a far worse state without them.