Date

Event

1587

Virginia Dare is the first person born in America to English parents in Roanoke Island, Virginia.

1607

Pocahontas saves Jamestown, Virginia colonist Captain John Smith from execution by Algonquian Chief Powhatan.

On November 21, when the Mayflower arrived, 13 year-old Mary Chilton was the first European to set foot at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

1638

Anne Hutchinson, who has challenged the teachings of the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, is tried for heresy and banished. She and her family move to Rhode Island.

1648

Margaret Brent, one of the largest landowners in Maryland, asks the Maryland Assembly for two votes, one for herself and another as Leonard Calvert's administrator and Lord Baltimore's attorney. Her request is denied.

1650

Anne Bradstreet's first volume of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, is published in London.

1660

Mary Barrett Dyer is executed in Boston for her Quaker proselytizing.

1682

Mary Rowlandson publishes A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, describing her capture by Narragansett warriors and three months of captivity.

1692

In an outbreak of hysteria in and around Salem, Mass., hundreds of people, mostly women, are accused of witchcraft. Nineteen are put to death. Most of the accused and the accusers are women.

1701

The first sexually integrated jury hears cases in Albany, New York.

1707

Henrietta Johnston begins to work as a portrait artist in Charleston, South Carolina, making her the first known professional woman artist in America.

1766

Mary Katherine Goddard and her widowed mother become publishers of the Providence Gazette newspaper and the annual West's Almanack, making her the first woman publisher in America.

1767

Anne Catherine Hoof Green takes over her late husband's printing and newspaper business, becoming the first American woman to run a print shop. The following year she is named the official printer for the colony of Maryland.

1769

American colonies based their laws on the English common law, which was summarized in the Blackstone Commentaries. It said, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law? The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything.”

1770

Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman poet of note in the United States, publishes her first poem, An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine…George
Whitefield.

1773

As an adjunct to the Sons of Liberty, women form the Daughters of Liberty.

1774

North Carolina women sign the Edenton Proclamation calling for the boycott of British goods.

1775

Mary Katherine Goddard becomes the first woman postmaster in the country (in Baltimore), and in 1777 she became the first printer to offer copies of the Declaration of Independence that included the signers' names.

1776

Ann Lee founds the parent Shaker settlement in America in the woods of Niskeyuna, New York.

1777

All states pass laws which take away women's right to vote.

1778

On June 28, Mary McCauly (“Molly Pitcher”), wife of an American gunner, brings water to the troops at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Legend claims that she takes her husband's place after he collapses.

1782

Deborah Sampson Gannett, disguised as a man, enlists in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment as Robert Shurtleff. She is one of many women who fight in the American Revolution.

1789

The United States Constitution ratified. The terms “persons,” “people” and “electors” are used, allowing the interpretation of those beings to include men and women.

Mary Katherine Goddard opened a Baltimore bookstore, probably the first woman in America to do so.

1790

Judith Sargent Murray publishes her essay "On the Equality of the Sexes.

The Second Great Awakening begins; significantly more women than men participate in this wave of religious revival.

Mother Bernardina Matthews establishes a Carmelite convent near Port Tobacco, Maryland, the first community of Roman Catholic nuns in the Thirteen Colonies. (The Ursuline convent established in New Orleans in 1727 was still in French territory.)

1792

Suzanne Vaillande appears in The Bird Catcher, in New York, the first ballet presented in the U.S. She was also probably the first woman to work as a choreographer and set designer in the United States.

1793

Hannah Slater receives the first U.S. patent granted to a woman, for a type of cotton thread. Her invention helps her husband build a successful textile business.

1795

Anne Parrish founds the House of Industry, which provides employment to poor women. It is the first American charitable organization operated by women for women.