On this day in women’s history
| February 21st, 2004February 21
1846: (A First) Sarah Bagley reports to work at New York and Boston Magnetic Telegraph Company office in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the first female telegrapher. This is accomplishment is the last [known] among many, many others achieved by Bagley. Previous to this, Bagely worked in a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts.
By early 1845 Sarah Bagley had left her mill job, and she soon had organized branches of the Female Labor Reform Association in Waltham and Fall River in Massachusetts and Manchester, Nashua, and Dover in New Hampshire. In 1845 she was appointed corresponding secretary of the New England Working Men’s Association, to whose journal, Voice of Industry, she was a frequent contributor. She organized an Industrial Reform Lyceum to bring radical speakers to Lowell, wrote a series of pamphlets on labor topics, and by her militant criticism contributed decisively to the demise of the pro-owner Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley, in December 1845. The 10-hour movement largely disintegrated in 1846 following the legislature’s refusal to act, and Sarah Bagley, her health declining, turned to a utopian philosophy of social reform espoused by Charles Fourier. She became superintendent of the Lowell telegraph office and is believed to have been the nation’s first female telegraph operator. After her replacement as president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in February 1847 there is no record of her.
1866: (A First) Lucy Hobbs graduates from Ohio Dental College, becoming the first American woman to become a dentist. This came after being denied admission to both the Eclectic College of Medicine and Ohio College of Dental Surgery. Through private tutelage by a professor from the former and the dean of the latter school, she opened a private practice in Cincinnati in the spring of 1861, and later in Bellevue, Iowa and McGregor, Iowa. In July 1865 she was elected to membership in the Iowa State Dental Society and sent as a delegate to the American Dental Association convention in Chicago. In November 1865 she finally was admitted to the senior class of the Ohio College of Dental Surgery, and on her graduation in February 1866 she became the first American woman to receive a dental degree.
1936: (Birthday) Barbara Jordan, Representative to U.S. Congress 1973-79, born in Houston, Texas. Jordan was the only black and only woman in the Texas State Senate 1966-1972. Because of health, she was forced to retire to teaching at the University of Texas, but served as a political advisor to Texas Governor Ann Richards.
1960: Jerrie Cobb started secret tests for astronaut training. Years later in a U.S. Congressional probe, NASA officials admited they had “no intentions” of allowing women into space. Cobb testified that of the 25 women who applied to the space program in 1960, 13 had been found qualified.
March 2nd, 2005 at 11:11 am
The funny thing is that, despite all of the political hee-haw over beating the soviets to the moon, the soviets beat the americans to the record for first woman in space (Though, she only went up once) by 20 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/16/newsid_2685000/2685283.stm
http://www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/96may/ride.html
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