While most everyone seems to agree that actress Alyssa Milano's proposal was an undercooked failure, sex strikes have a long and successful—though not uncontroversial—history as a tool of women's protest and solidarity. Some anthropologists even identify sex strikes as playing a fundamental role in organizing the earliest human societies, and helping to create symbolic language and morality
A major part of the suffragettes' strategy, and one that Kitty Marion helped organize, involved a carefully plotted regime of "unwomanly" destructive violence—not to kill people but to prompt terror, so that the English public might fear for its safety until women were awarded the right to vote. However, British authorities didn't really take seriously these women's acts of terror at the time and they have been largely edited out of feminist history in favor or a less violent image.
Mitchell became both the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the first to enter the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was later appointed as the official computer for the orbit of Venus for the United States Nautical Almanac, which provides the U.S. Navy with a convenient form of the astronomical data needed for celestial navigation.