circa  8000  B.C.	Creation legends in the Tuscarora, Algonquian, Cherokee, Siouan, and Catawba cultures identify women in four significant roles: life givers, intermediaries between the natural and spiritual worlds, indispensable components of the earth and its processes, and people different from but equally important to men.
1587	August 18: Virginia Dare becomes the first English child born in the New World.
1635	Anne Hutchinson demands that women be allowed to speak in church and is banished from her church as a result.
1695	Dinah Nuthead becomes the first woman printer in the country, in Annapolis, Maryland, by continuing her husband’s business after his death.
1738	Elizabeth Timothy becomes the first woman in America to edit a newspaper, the South Carolina Gazette.
1774	October 25: Fifty-one “patriotic ladies” gather in Edenton to announce in writing their boycott of East Indian tea as long as it is taxed by the British. This protest, known as the Edenton Tea Party, is one of the first political activities in this country staged by women.       Print of Penelope Barker, leader of the Edenton Tea Party. The print's caption reads Mrs. Penelope Barker/President of the Edenton Tea Party of 1774.
1777	Abigail Adams asks her husband, John, to "remember the ladies" when he and the Continental Congress begin writing the laws for the new country. "If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies," she continues, "we will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."
1777	Women, initially permitted to vote in some areas during the colonial period and early statehood, are systematically disfranchised in every state but New Jersey through a series of legislative acts.
1793	Mrs. Samuel Slater, the inventor of cotton sewing thread, becomes the first American to receive a patent.

Nineteenth Century
 

1809	North Carolina native Dolley Madison becomes First Lady when James Madison is inaugurated as the fourth president. She remains one of the most popular First Ladies in the nation’s history.   The United States Postal Service issued this stamp in 1980.
1812	The Newbern Female Charitable Society is founded to help “destitute female children.”
1821	Emma Hart Willard founds the Troy Female Seminary, the first endowed school for girls, in Troy, New York.
1826	The General Council of the Cherokee Nation goes against tribal tradition of gender equality by drafting a constitution patterned after that of the United States which excludes women from holding office and denies them franchise.
1833	Oberlin College becomes the first coeducational college in the United States. In 1841, Oberlin awards the first academic degrees to three women.
1833	Lucretia Mott and other women form the Female Anti-Slavery Society to have a say in how the abolition movement is being organized.
1833	Frankie Silver is convicted for the murder of her husband in present-day Mitchell County. She becomes the first woman in North Carolina to be executed by hanging.
1838	Greensboro College, North Carolina’s first chartered college for women, is opened and operated by the Methodist Church.
1842	Harriet Jacobs, an Edenton slave, is smuggled aboard a ship to escape slavery after spending seven years hiding in a tiny attic room in her grandmother’s house. She escapes to New York, where she buys the freedom of her children. She later writes Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
1848	July 19–20: The world’s first women's rights convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York. A Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions is debated and ultimately signed by 68 women and 32 men, setting the agenda for the women's rights movement that follows.
1848	When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brings the Southwest under U.S. law, married women living in the region lose their property rights and can no longer enter into contracts, sue in court, or operate their own businesses.
1848	Astronomer Maria Mitchell becomes the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; almost a century passes before a second woman is elected.
1848	Dorothea Dix spends three months in North Carolina studying the treatment of the unfortunate and lobbying the state government to build a hospital for the mentally ill. Her persistence and persuasion are rewarded in 1856, when the state legislature makes its first appropriation to a hospital for the insane.
1849	Elizabeth Smith Miller appears on the streets of Seneca Falls, New York, in "turkish trousers," soon to be known as "bloomers."
1849	Amelia Jenks Bloomer publishes and edits Lily, the first prominent women's rights newspaper.
1850	The first national women's rights convention attracts over 1,000 participants to Worcester, Massachusetts, from as far away as California. Only lack of space keeps hundreds more from attending. Annual national conferences are held through 1860 (except 1857).
1850	Quaker physicians establish the Female (later Woman's) Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to give women a chance to learn medicine. Because of threats against them, the first women graduate under police guard.
1851	Sojourner Truth gives her spontaneous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech at the women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio.
1851	Myrtilla Miner opens the first school to train black women as teachers, in Washington, D.C.
1853	Antoinette Brown (later Blackwell) becomes the first American woman ordained as a minister in a Protestant denomination, serving two First Congregational Churches in New York.
1855	Lucy Stone becomes the first woman on record to keep her surname after marriage, setting a trend among like-minded women, who become known as "Lucy Stoners."
1855	In Missouri v. Celia, a female slave is declared to be property without a right to defend herself against a master's act of rape.
1860	Of 2,225,086 black women in America, 1,971,135 are held in slavery.
1862	Congress passes the Morrill Act, establishing land grant colleges in rural areas. Millions of women will earn low-cost degrees at these schools. In North Carolina, this act results in the founding of North Carolina State University.
1862	Mary Jane Patterson, a free black from Raleigh, becomes the first African American woman to receive a bachelor of arts degree. She obtains the degree from Oberlin College in Ohio.
1862	March 20: Sarah Malinda Pritchard Blalock, disguised as a man, enlists in the 26th North Carolina Regiment.
1863	March 18: During what has become known as the Salisbury Bread Riot, several dozen women armed with axes and hatchets storm speculators’ stores demanding flour, molasses, and salt in Salisbury. When shop owners refuse to turn over the goods, the women take them by force.
1865	Hundreds of white women move to the South to teach at freedman schools.
1866	The Fourteenth Amendment is passed by Congress (it will be ratified by the states in 1868), defining "citizens" and "voters" as "male" for the first time in the Constitution.
1866	The American Equal Rights Association, the first organization in the country to advocate national women's suffrage, is founded.
1868	The National Labor Union supports equal pay for equal work.
1868	Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony begin publishing The Revolution, an important women's movement periodical. Other media ridicule their ideas, calling wider public attention to them.
1868	The North Carolina legislature passes a new constitution that grants women the right to own property and businesses, to work for their own wages, to sue in courts, to make wills, and to make contracts without their husbands' consent.
1869	December 10: the first woman suffrage law in the United States passes in the territory of Wyoming.
1869	In disagreement over the Fifteenth Amendment, Anthony and Stanton withdraw from the Equal Rights Association to found the National Woman Suffrage Association. Its wide-ranging goals include a federal amendment for the women's vote.
1869	The American Woman Suffrage Association is formed to secure the vote through each state constitution.
1870	The Fifteenth Amendment receives final ratification. By its text, women are not specifically excluded from the vote. During the next two years, approximately 150 women attempt to vote in almost a dozen different jurisdictions from Delaware to California. Among them are the Grimke sisters in Boston, Sojourner Truth in, Michigan, and Matilda Joselyn Gage in New York. In South Carolina, a few black women, protected by Reconstruction officials, cast ballots.
1870	The first issue of the Woman's Journal appears, sponsored by the American Woman Suffrage Association and edited by Mary Livermore. It is published until 1917.
1872	Charlotte E. Ray, Howard University law school graduate, becomes the first African American woman admitted to the U.S. bar.
1872	November 5: Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women register and vote in the presidential election to test whether the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment can be interpreted as protecting women's rights. Anthony is arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined $100, which she refuses to pay.
1872	Dr. Susan Dimock becomes the first female member of the North Carolina Medical Society, although she never practices in the state. Earlier Dimock is forced to go abroad to find a medical school that will accept women, then practices at a hospital in Boston as one of the nation’s first licensed female doctors.
1873	Professor Edward H. Clarke of Harvard Medical College argues that higher education harms women and their future offspring. To women's detriment, Clarke is widely believed and quoted for decades.
1873	In Bradwell v. Illinois, the U.S. Supreme Court affirms that states can restrict women from practicing any profession in order to preserve family harmony and uphold the law of the Creator.
1874	The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is founded by Annie Wittenmyer. The WCTU later becomes an important force for woman suffrage.
1875	Through her will, Sophia Smith becomes the first woman to found and endow a women's college. Smith College, chartered in 1871, opens in 1875.
1875	In Minor v. Happersett, the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to extend the Fourteenth Amendment protection to women, thereby denying them the vote.
1876	Matilda Joslyn Gage writes a Declaration of the Rights of Women, distributed on July 4 to crowds attending the massive Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Many women's networks grow out of the action.
1878	The Susan B. Anthony Amendment, to grant women the vote, is introduced in the U.S. Congress.
1878	Tabitha Ann Holton passes the North Carolina state bar to become the first licensed female lawyer in the South.
1880	The 1870s see an 80 percent increase in the number of women teachers, mainly in the West.
1883	November: The first Woman’s Christian Temperance Union chapter is established in the state in Greensboro. Within a year, 11 more chapters are established and in 1903 the state has 65 chapters and 3,000 members. With the passing of state prohibition in 1908, membership dwindles to 1,000.       The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union awarded this medal. The organization gave many women their first opportunity to move out of their domestic realm into the public arena of political and social activism.
1887	For the first and only time in the nineteenth century, the U.S. Senate votes on woman suffrage. Suffrage loses, 34 to 16. Twenty-five senators do not bother to participate.
1887	Dr. Annie Lawne Alexander, born in Mecklenburg County, returns to the state several years after her graduation from Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia to become the state’s first licensed female doctor.
1889	The work of educated women serving the Chicago poor at Hull House establishes social work as a paid profession for women.
1889	African American members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement secede and form WCTU No. 2. Like the original group, the spin-off reports directly to the national organization. North Carolina is the only state to have a black woman’s temperance union, and by 1891 WCTU No. 2 will have 400 members in 19 chapters.
1891	The General Assembly charters the State Normal and Industrial College as the first state-supported institution of higher education for women. Known as Women’s College, the school will evolve into the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
1893	Colorado is the first state to adopt a state amendment franchising women.
1893	March 4: The North Carolina General Assembly passes a law allowing women to cash checks and withdraw money from their personal accounts without obtaining their husbands' permission.
1894	The United Daughters of the Confederacy is established. By 1901 North Carolina will have 33 chapters.
1895	Elizabeth Cady Stanton publishes the first volume of The Woman's Bible, in which she revises biblical passages that degrade women. Reviled but not deterred, she publishes a second volume in 1898.
1896	The National Association of Colored Women, founded by Margaret Murray Washington, unites black women's organizations.
1897	The first petition to the North Carolina General Assembly for woman suffrage is referred to the committee on insane asylums.
1898	Sallie Walker Stockard becomes the first woman to graduate from the University of North Carolina. Women have been allowed to attend the summer teachers’ institute in Chapel Hill since 1879, but Stockard is the first female student to earn a degree from the university.

Twentieth Century
 

1900	Two-thirds of divorce cases are initiated by wives. A century earlier, most women lack the right to sue, and many are hopelessly locked into bad marriages.
1902	The North Carolina Federation of Women’s Clubs is organized.
1902	October 10: Charlotte Hawkins Brown opens Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia. The campus of Palmer Memorial Institute, ca. 1915.
1910	The number of women attending college has increased 150 percent since 1900.
1911	Jovita and Soledad Pena organize La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (League of Mexican Feminists) in Laredo, Texas. Its motto: "Educate a woman and you educate a family."
1912	Juliette Gordon Low founds the first American group of Girl Guides, in Atlanta. Later renamed Girl Scouts of the USA, the organization brings girls into the outdoors, encourages their self-reliance and resourcefulness, and prepares them for varied roles as adults.
1913	March 3: 5,000 to 8,000 suffragists parade in Washington, D.C., drawing people away from the arrival of newly elected President Woodrow Wilson. They are mobbed by abusive crowds along the way.
1913	May 10: the largest suffrage parade to date, including perhaps 500 men, marches down Fifth Avenue in New York City.
1914	The first meeting of the Equal Suffrage League of North Carolina is held in Charlotte.
1914	Margaret Sanger calls for legalization of contraceptives in her new feminist publication The Woman Rebel, which the post office bans from the mail.
1915	Forty thousand people march in a New York City suffrage parade, the largest parade ever held in that city.
1917	During World War I, women move into many jobs, working in heavy industry, mining, chemical manufacturing, and automobile and railway plants. They also run streetcars, conduct trains, direct traffic, and deliver mail.
1917	Jeannette Rankin of Montana becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress as a member of the House of Representatives.
1917	October: 168 National Woman's Party members are arrested and convicted for peacefully picketing the White House for woman suffrage, becoming the first U.S. citizens held as political prisoners. In prison, they stage hunger strikes and are force-fed. In response to public outcry, they are eventually released without comment or pardon.
1918	January 8: Margaret Sanger wins her suit, New York v. Sanger, to allow doctors to advise their married patients about birth control for health purposes.
1918	Harriet Morehead Berry is appointed head of North Carolina’s Road Commission and soon becomes known as the “Mother of Good Roads in North Carolina.”
1919	The U.S. House of Representatives passes the Women’s Suffrage Amendment, 304 to 89; the Senate passes it with just two votes to spare, 56 to 25.
1920	Female college undergraduates have doubled in number since 1910.
1920	Despite the efforts of a number of black women voter leagues, when black women try to register to vote in most southern states, they face property tax requirements, literacy tests, and other obstacles.
1920	August 26: the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing American female citizens the right to vote. It is quietly signed into law in a ceremony to which the press and suffragists are not invited.
1920	Lillian Exum Clement of Buncombe County becomes the first woman elected to the North Carolina House of Representatives.       Lillian Exum Clement in 1920. Clement was the first women in North Carolina to begin a law practice without male partners.
1920	In October Equal Suffrage League president Gertrude Weil and other suffragists gather in Greensboro to plan how to use the right to vote to focus on women’s issues and to transform the North Carolina Equal Suffrage League into the North Carolina League of Women Voters.
1921	Margaret Sanger organizes the American Birth Control League, which evolves into the Federation of Planned Parenthood in 1942.
1921	Kate Burr Johnson of Morganton becomes the first woman in the country to serve as state commissioner of public welfare and the first woman in the state to head a major department.
1923	Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party succeed in having a constitutional amendment introduced in Congress that states: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." In 1943 the wording is revised to what we know today as the Equal Rights Amendment.
1928	The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women is organized after women's history is ignored by the American Historical Association.
1928	Annie Wealthy Holland of Gates County forms the North Carolina Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers, the first such organization for African Americans in the state.
1929	Ella May Wiggins, one of the most outspoken union activists in North Carolina, is killed during a labor dispute at the Loray Mill.
1932	The National Recovery Act forbids more than one family member from holding a government job. As a result, many women lose their jobs.
1932	Hattie Wyatt Caraway becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She will represent Louisiana for three terms.
1933	Frances Perkins, the first woman in a presidential cabinet, serves as secretary of labor during the entire Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency.
1935	Mary McLeod Bethune organizes the National Council of Negro Women as a lobbying coalition of black women's groups and serves as president until 1949. The NCNW takes the forefront in fighting job discrimination, racism, and sexism.
1937	North Carolina initiates a birth control program, funds maternal and infant health programs, and licenses midwives.
1941	A massive government and industry media campaign persuades women to take jobs during World War II. Almost seven million women respond, two million as industrial "Rosie the Riveters" and 400,000 as members of the military.
1942	On May 15, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs a bill that creates the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). Women who join the corps perform a variety of noncombat tasks formerly done by male soldiers, such as driving military vehicles; rigging parachutes; and serving as translators, cooks, weather forecasters, and aircraft control tower operators.       The U.S. Army used propaganda posters like this to recruit WAACs.
1945	The Equal Pay for Equal Work bill is again introduced into Congress. It will pass in 1963.
1945	Women industrial workers begin to lose their jobs in large numbers to returning servicemen. Surveys show that 80 percent want to continue working.
1947	Elreta Alexander becomes the first African American woman licensed as a lawyer in North Carolina.
1948	Margaret Chase Smith (Republican from Maine) becomes the first woman elected to both houses of the U.S. Congress when she is elected to the Senate. In 1964 she will become the first woman to run for the U.S. presidency in the primaries of a major political party. She will serve in the Senate until 1973.
1949	Susie Sharp becomes North Carolina’s first female superior court judge.
1957	The numbers of women and men voting are approximately equal for the first time.
1960	The Food and Drug Administration approves birth control pills.
1960	Women now earn only 60 cents for every dollar earned by men, a decline since 1955. Women of color earn only 42 cents.
1961	President John F. Kennedy creates the President's Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Fifty parallel state commissions are eventually established.
1962	Judge Susie Sharp becomes first woman to serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court.
1963	A report issued by the President's Commission on the Status of Women documents discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life. It makes 24 specific recommendations, some surprisingly farsighted (e.g., community property in marriages). Some 64,000 copies are sold in less than a year, and talk of women's rights is again respectable.
1963	Betty Friedan's best-seller The Feminine Mystique details the "problem that has no name." Five million copies are sold by 1970, laying the groundwork for the modern feminist movement.
1964	Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination by private employers, employment agencies, and unions based on race, sex, and other grounds. To investigate complaints and enforce penalties, it establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which receives 50,000 complaints of gender discrimination in its first five years.
1967	Executive Order 11375 expands Executive Order 11246's nondiscrimination measure to include women; however, enforcement is not won until 1973.
1968	The first national women's liberation conference takes place in Chicago.
1968	Shirley Chisholm (Democrat from New York) becomes the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress; she will serve in the House of Representatives for 14 years.
1968	Margaret Taylor Harper enters the race for lieutenant governor of North Carolina, becoming the first woman to run for statewide office.
1970	The Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes the self-help manual Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women, incorporating medical information with personal experiences. Nearly four million copies will be sold by 1997.
1970	Betty Friedan organizes the first Women's Equality Day on August 26 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of women's right to vote.
1970	The North American Indian Women's Association is founded.
1970	The Equal Rights Amendment is reintroduced into Congress.
1971	The North Carolina General Assembly ratifites the Nineteenth Amendment after 51 years.
1972	Title IX of the Education Amendment requires that "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."
1972	In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the right to privacy encompasses an unmarried person's right to use contraceptives.
1972	Congress extends the Equal Pay Act to include executive, administrative, and professional personnel.
1972	Congress passes the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, giving the Equal Employment Opportunity Council power to take legal action to enforce its rulings
1972	March 22: After languishing since 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment passes in Congress and goes to the states for ratification. Hawaii approves it within the hour. By the end of the week, so have Delaware, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Idaho, and Iowa.
1973	The National Black Feminist Organization is established.
1973	The Office of Federal Contract Compliance issues guidelines prohibiting sex discrimination in employment by any federal contractor and requiring affirmative action to correct existing imbalances.
1973	The U.S. military is integrated when women-only branches are eliminated.
1973	In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court establishes a woman's right to abortion, effectively canceling the anti-abortion laws of 46 states.
1974	Ella Grasso becomes the first woman to win election as governor in her own right, in Connecticut.
1976	Title IX goes into effect. It opens the way for women's increased participation in athletic programs and professional schools, and enrollments leap in both categories. Title IX will withstand repeated court challenges over time.
1976	U.S. military academies open admissions to women.
1977	The North Carolina General Assembly declines to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
1977	Isabella Cannon is elected mayor of Raleigh, becoming the first female mayor of a major North Carolina city.
1978	Some 100,000 people march in support of the Equal Rights Amendment in Washington, D.C.
1978	For the first time in history, more women than men enter college.
1980	The "gender gap" first appears at the election polls as women report different political priorities than men.
1981	At the request of women's organizations, President Jimmy Carter proclaims the first National Women's History Week, incorporating March 8 as International Women's Day.
1981	Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1993 Ruth Bader Ginsberg will join her.
1984	Geraldine Ferraro becomes the first woman vice presidential candidate of a major political party.
1985	Wilma Mankiller becomes the first woman principal chief of a major Native American tribe, the Cherokee in Oklahoma.
1986	About 25 percent of scientists are now women, but females are still less likely than men to be full professors or to be on a tenure track in universities.
1987	Responding to the National Women's History Project, the U.S. Congress declares March as National Women's History Month.
1988	Gertrude B. Elion and research partner George H. Hitchings win the Nobel Prize for medicine for their pioneering research in drug development at Burroughs Wellcome in Research Triangle Park.
1992	Women-owned businesses employ more workers in the country than Fortune 500 companies do worldwide.
1992	November: Eva M. Clayton is elected to the United States House of Representatives. She is the first woman and the first African American woman to represent North Carolina in Congress.
1993	The Family Medical Leave Act goes into effect. Vetoed by President George Bush, it is the first bill signed by President Bill Clinton.
1993	Women hold a record number of positions in state and federal governments.
1993	North Carolina natives Sadie and Bessie Delaney, at ages 104 and 102, publish their book, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. Their story becomes a successful Broadway play.
1996	Elaine F. Marshall is elected North Carolina's first female secretary of state.
1997	Elaborating on Title IX, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that college athletics programs must actively involve roughly equal numbers of men and women to qualify for federal support.
2000	Beverly Purdue is elected North Carolina's first female lieutenant governor.
2002	Elizabeth Dole is elected North Carolina's first female United States senator.

2008	Beverly Purdue is elected North Carolina's first female governor.

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