Chapter 5 Timeline

 

1700s

1773

Phyllis Wheatley, first African-American poet in America, bought from slave ship as a young child

1775

Thomas Paine proposes civil and political rights for women in Pennsylvania Magazine

1777

Abigail Adams, wife of President John Adams, writes that women "will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice"

1791

French feminist Olympe de Gouges issues Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Citizen

1792

English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft writes A Vindication of the Rights of Women

1793

Ex-slave Katy Ferguson establishes a school for poor children of all races in New York

1800-1850

1819

Emma Hart Willard (1787-1870) writes the classic appeal An Address to the Public: Particularly to the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education; though unsuccessful, it defines the issue of women's education

1820

Susan B. Anthony born

1824

Teacher Sophia B. Packard opens a college for African-Americans in Georgia

1830

Radical labor organizer "Mother" (Mary) Jones born

1833

Oberlin is first U.S. coeducational college

1846

Catharine Beecher publishes An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Women to their Country

1848

Seneca Falls conference on women’s rights is led by American feminists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; not a single woman of color is present, though Frederick Douglass addresses conference

1850

Clara Barton founds one of New Jersey’s first “free,” or public, schools

1850-1900

1851

Sojourner Truth delivers an unplanned fiery address (now known as “Ain’t I a Woman”) at the Women’s Rights Conference in Akron, Ohio

1860

First English‑language kindergarten established in United States

1869

National Woman Suffrage Association is founded by Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

1869

Female lawyers are licensed in United States

1877

Helen Magill White (1853–1944) earns a Ph.D. in Greek from Boston University, the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from an American University

1878

U.S. constitutional amendment to grant full voting rights to women is introduced for the first time in Congress and every year thereafter until its passage in 1920

1900-1920

1903

American educator Celestia Susannah Parish (1853–1918) founds and becomes first president of the Southern Association of College Women

1904

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) founds a school for black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, which eventually becomes Bethune‑Cookman College

See also: Some of My Best Friends are Negro

1904

Susan B. Anthony cofounds the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and is made president of the International Leadership Conference in Berlin

1915

Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt found Women’s Peace Party

1916

Margaret Sanger forms New York Birth Control League

1920

Nineteenth Amendment is passed, giving women in the United States the right to vote