Women's History

New York, NY

From 1923 to 1929, novelist and playwright Edna Ferber lived here during the most productive stretch of her career, writing fiction marked by sweeping American settings and strong female characters. While at this address she published the Pulitzer Prize–winning So Big in 1924 and Show Boat in 1926, the latter adapted into a landmark American musical. She would later be best known for the novel Giant.

Llano, TX

This one-and-a-half-story L-plan Victorian cottage was built in 1892 for Frank and Alice Hargon with six hundred dollars of materials from the Llano Brick and Lumber Company, and it was soon sold to Edna J. Moore for a thousand. A rancher and banker, Moore lived here through her 1928 marriage to Julius Seaholm and long after his death, until her own in 1953. Its turned porch columns, jigsawn bargeboards, and box window make it a fine example of small-town Victorian architecture.

New York, NY

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the free-spirited voice of Jazz Age America, famous for the lines "my candle burns at both ends." While living at this Greenwich Village address in 1923-24, she wrote "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," which won her the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was among the first women to be so honored.

New York, NY

In 1924 the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and fellow theatre artists converted a Greenwich Village box factory into the Cherry Lane Theatre, which became a proving ground for daring new American drama, staging early work by Edward Albee, Lanford Wilson, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard. Decades later the Academy Award–winning actress Kim Hunter—celebrated as the original "Stella" in A Streetcar Named Desire—lived above the theatre with her playwright husband, Robert Emmett, until her death in 2002.

Denton, TX

In 1915 Edna Westbrook Trigg became the first county home demonstration agent appointed in Texas, taking up her Denton County post the next February. For more than two decades she traveled the county teaching farm women gardening, canning, sewing, and household management, overcoming resistance to both government advice and a woman working in "a man's world." During World War I she pushed agricultural self-sufficiency, urged Liberty Bond purchases, and ran Saturday canning schools, even borrowing county funds to buy communal steam canners.

Edom, TX

The Methodist congregation at Edom traces its worship to the eve of the Civil War and organized formally in 1874 under the Rev. D. L. Lake. A singing school begun in 1866 and a Women's Missionary Society formed by 1914 wove music and outreach into its life, and the fellowship carried on through a succession of wooden and, later, brick sanctuaries. Renamed Edom United Methodist Church in 1968, it marked more than seventy years on the same ground in 1997.

Amarillo, TX

Designed by Harold Walsh in 1949 with heavy input from its owners, this Amarillo home was built as a nod to Santa Fe architecture, with an irregular ranch-style plan, exposed beams, stucco fireplaces, and stone floors. Its co-owner, Margaret Seewald Roberts—once a student of Georgia O'Keeffe at Amarillo High School—earned national recognition as an etcher and sculptor and carved much of the home's woodwork herself.

Giddings, TX

Built around 1890, this American four-square house was home to attorney Edward R. Sinks, Lee County's first state district judge and a founding director of its first bank. His parents, George and Julia Sinks—both friends of Sam Houston—lived out their later years here. George had served as first chief clerk of the Republic of Texas Postal System, while Julia Lee Sinks was a pioneering amateur historian and charter member of the Texas State Historical Association.

New York, NY

From 1933 to 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt kept a residence at 20 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village during the years her husband occupied the White House. It offered her a foothold in New York even as she remade the role of First Lady into one of activism and public advocacy. The plaque marks the address as one of her city homes.

San Antonio, TX

In 1877, former Confederate officer and Virginia legislator Elias Edmonds and his wife Lucy built one of the first houses in San Antonio's new King William neighborhood. Elias practiced law while Lucy ran a "high school for young ladies" on the grounds of their home. The handsome two-story limestone house later passed through prominent physicians and realtors, with one family living here for more than four decades.

Austin, TX

Elisabet Ney was already a celebrated sculptor of German royalty and European statesmen before she ever saw Texas. Born in Westphalia in 1833, trained at the Munich academy, and married to the Scottish-born philosopher Dr. Edmund Montgomery, she settled in Texas in 1872, drawn by its vastness and love of freedom. In 1892 she built this studio, "Formosa," where she carved the statues of Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston that now stand in the State Capitol, along with the recumbent figure over Albert Sidney Johnston's grave.

Hamilton, TX

Elise Waerenskjold left Norway for Texas and spent half a century writing home about the opportunities of her adopted land. Her letters and articles drew waves of Norwegian settlers, and her home stood open to the newcomers she inspired. Known as the Lady with the Pen, she and her husband raised three sons and left many descendants.

Hamilton, TX

Born Elise Tvede in Norway in 1815, Waerenskjold became an influential promoter of Norwegian emigration to Texas. After John Reiersen founded the first Norwegian settlement in the state, she edited his periodical on Norway and Texas, and her articles inspired many to follow. She moved to Texas herself in 1847, settling in Van Zandt and Hamilton counties, where she and her husband welcomed newcomers and preserved their people's history.

Round Mountain, TX

Born in Virginia in 1830, Elitha Smith Martin came to Texas in 1856 and, widowed in 1869, moved to Round Mountain with her younger children and built a two-story hotel, a livery stable, and a general mercantile store. Appointed postmaster in 1879, she kept the post office in her store and served in that role for nearly seventeen years.

Richmond, NH

This monument in the hills of Cheshire County marks the birthplace of Eliza Ballou, born here in 1801, who would become the mother of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. Widowed young, Eliza raised her children in frontier poverty on an Ohio farm, and her son's rise from a log cabin to the White House became one of the era's celebrated 'self-made man' stories. When Garfield was sworn in as president in 1881, Eliza became the first mother to witness her son's presidential inauguration. Small New England towns like Richmond often took quiet pride in the native sons and daughters whose lives reached far beyond their borders.

San Marcos, TX

Eliza Pitts came to Texas from Georgia as a girl in 1842, married James Lafayette Malone in 1850, and raised sixteen children while helping build the life of early San Marcos as a charter member of its First Methodist Church. When the Civil War took the men away, she ran the family's thousand-acre farm and sewed for Confederate soldiers; decades later, in her eighties, she knitted socks for American troops in World War I. Widowed, she and her daughter built this home in 1909.

New York, NY

This chapel stands on the site of the home where Elizabeth Ann Seton lived with her family from 1801 to 1803 and where her daughter Rebecca was born. A wife, mother, and educator, Seton went on to found the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation of religious sisters. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.

Acton, TX

This stone marks the grave of Elizabeth Crockett, second wife of frontier legend David Crockett, who died at the Alamo in 1836. Widowed by his sacrifice, she came to Texas years later to claim the land granted for his service, settling near Acton where she lived out her days. Her simple gravestone, at what is said to be the smallest state historic site in Texas, honors a pioneer woman who followed her husband's legacy to the frontier.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2019

In a Philadelphia rowhouse, the Quaker matron Elizabeth Drinker kept a diary for nearly half a century, from 1758 until her death in 1807. Her entries are one of early America's richest personal records — she watched the British march into the city during the Revolution's 1777 occupation and set down the texture of ordinary life amid founding-era upheaval. As a woman of means, faith, and unusual persistence, she chronicled a world that official histories rarely captured.

Hillsborough, NC

Elizabeth Keckly was born into slavery around 1820 and, as a young woman, lived among the Burwell family in Hillsborough. A gifted seamstress, she eventually bought her own freedom in 1855 and rose to become a celebrated Washington dressmaker and confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Her 1868 memoir gave a rare, unflinching view from inside the Lincoln White House.

Newburyport, MA

A decade before the more famous Salem hysteria, Elizabeth Morse of Newbury was accused of witchcraft, tried, convicted, and imprisoned between 1679 and 1681 before winning a reprieve. Rather than hang, she was confined to her husband William Morse's small house lot beside Market Square, where she lived out her days under a shadow of suspicion. Her case is a stark reminder that witchcraft panic haunted Puritan New England well before 1692.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, who lived at this site, rose from humble beginnings to become one of the most acclaimed concert singers of the 19th century. Dubbed the "Black Swan" for her extraordinary vocal range, she won praise across the United States and in England, where she performed before Queen Victoria. She broke barriers as a Black woman commanding the concert stage in an era of deep racial prejudice.

Littleton, NC

Ella Baker spent decades as a strategist behind the civil rights movement, and in April 1960 she helped young activists found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh. Preferring grassroots, participatory leadership to charismatic figureheads, she mentored a generation of organizers. Her childhood home stands a quarter mile east of this marker.

Chicago, IL

Labagh Woods honors Ella Labagh, remembered as a pioneer in establishing the forest preserves around Chicago. In the early 20th century, Cook County built one of the nation's first large forest preserve systems, and advocates like Labagh helped set aside green space amid rapid urban growth.

New York, NY

From 1919 to 1946, Ellen Biddle Shipman lived and worked at 21 Beekman Place, running one of the most sought-after landscape design practices in the country. Celebrated in her lifetime as the 'dean of women landscape architects,' she shaped gardens for elite clients while championing women in her profession. Her studio here produced designs that carried her reputation nationwide.

Bryson City, NC

Ellen Black Winston built a career reshaping how America cared for its most vulnerable. From 1944 to 1963 she led North Carolina's Board of Public Welfare, then broke new ground as the first Commissioner of Welfare for the United States, a federal post created in the era of expanding social programs. A trained social worker, she brought professional rigor to public assistance at the national level.

Waxahachie, TX

Built in 1925-26 on land deeded by Quincy Davis Getzendaner, the Ellis County Woman's Building answered a very practical need: a place where rural women who came to town on market days could rest. Funded by the city, county, and local women's clubs, the Tudor Revival building included an auditorium called Davis Hall and stood as a memorial to Mrs. Getzendaner's parents. It gave women a public space of their own in the courthouse town of Waxahachie.

Austin, TX

Elvira Davis grew up in rural east Travis County and married into a family whose quarry helped supply stone for the 1853 Texas Capitol. Widowed and raising six children, she bought this lot in 1896 and had a home built by 1904 whose porch columns, balustrade, and bay windows capture the moment when Victorian taste gave way to classical revival. She lived here until her death in 1918.

Tupelo, MS

This two-room shotgun house is where Elvis Presley was born in 1935, in a working-class corner of Tupelo. After Elvis rose to fame he funded a park here with proceeds from a 1957 hometown concert, and the women of the East Heights Garden Club took on the restoration — scrubbing, painting, and furnishing the rooms with period pieces donated by local residents so it could open to fans in 1971. Their volunteer hostesses often met travelers outside town to guide them in.

Edinburg, TX

Hidalgo County native Emilia Schunior Ramirez graduated from Edinburg High in 1919, raised a family, and earned her degrees while building a career as a teacher and principal across Rio Grande Valley schools. Her 1950 master's thesis studied the children of Mexican immigrants in South Texas, and she went on to teach Spanish at Pan American College and to represent Edinburg at an inter-American meeting in Guatemala. She became a respected educator and historian.

Mont Belvieu, TX

In 1870 Elizabeth Barrow deeded a house and 198 acres to Thompson and Emily Brown in return for her care in old age—an arrangement that gave the formerly enslaved couple land of their own just years after emancipation. Emily served as a midwife to families across the area, and in 1881 the Browns donated ground to the Old River Methodist Episcopal Church, from which this cemetery grew. The congregation later renamed itself St. Emily in her honor and still tends the graves of the Brown family.

Amherst, MA · est. 1963

This Amherst house was the lifelong home of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet who, in the 1850s and 1860s, quietly wrote nearly 1,800 poems that almost no one saw in her lifetime. Working in near-total privacy, she forged a startlingly modern voice of dashes, slant rhyme, and compressed intensity. The federal government has recognized the home as a National Historic Landmark for its exceptional value to American history.

Jones Creek, TX

Emily Austin was the sister of Stephen F. Austin, the empresario who led the first Anglo-American colonization of Texas. Raised in the lead-mining town of Potosi, Missouri, that her father Moses Austin helped found, she twice married and raised a large family before bringing her household to Texas in 1831 to join her bachelor brother. From the family's Peach Point Plantation she offered Stephen a home and counsel during the crucial years of colonization and the Texas Revolution, and her descendants went on to help build the new republic and state.

Blowing Rock, NC

Emily Prudden left New England to spend her later years founding schools across the mountains of western North Carolina, establishing some fifteen institutions—several serving Black and Appalachian students who otherwise had little access to learning. Her Skyland Institute once stood on this site at Blowing Rock, and one of her foundations became a forerunner of Pfeiffer College.

Eminence, KY

Chartered by the Kentucky Legislature as a high school in 1856, this institution became Eminence College in 1861 and grew into one of the state's earliest coeducational boarding schools, where men and women were equally represented. Under the long presidency of Rev. W. S. Giltner from 1858 to 1893, it added a commercial department and a normal school for training teachers, with enrollment peaking near 200 before it closed in 1895.

Santa Anna, TX

Emma Daugherty came west with her family to Coleman County as a girl, left home at fourteen to earn a teaching certificate, and in 1894 married lawman John R. Banister, with whom she raised nine children. When her husband died in office as county sheriff in 1918, Emma was chosen to finish his term, making her among the earliest women to hold a sheriff's office in the United States. She served out the year in a role almost unheard of for a woman of her day.

Orange, TX

Widowed young, Emma George Latchem came to Orange in 1871 and began teaching two years later in a private school, joining the public system when it opened in 1884. Over forty-two years in the classroom she also helped found a mothers and teachers club in 1908 to improve conditions for her students, retiring only in 1915.

New York, NY

The anarchist, orator, and free-speech advocate Emma Goldman lived at this address from 1903 to 1913, the years in which she published her influential radical magazine Mother Earth. A fierce champion of free speech and free love, she became one of the most watched and controversial voices in Progressive-era America. In 1919, amid the Red Scare, the government deported her to the Soviet Union.

Plainview, TX

Born in Tennessee and brought to Texas as a child, Emma Grigsby Meharg became a teacher and, with her educator husband, a fixture of Plainview civic and church life after 1902. In 1925 she won lasting renown as the first woman to serve as Texas Secretary of State, appointed by Miriam A. Ferguson, the state's first woman governor. Her rise came just five years after American women won the vote, placing two women at the top of Texas government in a single stroke.

Frankfort, KY

Emma Guy Cromwell broke ground for women in Kentucky government across a long career, serving as state librarian, treasurer, director of state parks, and director of archives. In 1923 she became the first woman in the state ever elected to a statewide office when she won the post of secretary of state. She urged other women to "blaze a trail for a new day" and stand alongside men in governing the country, and she lived out her life in Frankfort, dying there in 1952.

Orange, TX

Born in Waxahachie in 1876 and trained at Prairie View College, Emma Henderson Wallace came to Orange in 1901 as one of four teachers at the Orange Colored School, which met inside local Black churches. She joined the public school faculty in 1914 and in 1933 became principal of Moton High School, building up its library, athletic courts, band, choir, and student clubs over thirteen years. In 1946 the school was renamed Emma H. Wallace High School in her honor, a lasting tribute to a career devoted to educating Orange's African American youth.

San Antonio, TX

This monument commemorates Emma Tenayuca (1916–1999), a San Antonio–born organizer who by her early twenties was rallying the city's mostly Mexican American working poor against brutal wages and conditions. She is best remembered for helping lead the 1938 pecan shellers' strike, one of the largest labor actions of Depression-era Texas. A fearless voice for immigrants, women, and laborers, she paid for her activism with blacklisting and exile from the city she fought for.

Austin, TX

After the attorney Robert G. West died in 1904, his widow Emma Grant West had this brick apartment building erected the next year to earn rental income to support their four children. Built by the contractors Fischer & Lambie, it held one apartment on each floor with servants' quarters in the basement. West later sold the property to an Austin schoolteacher, Katie Gannaway, and the building was restored by a later owner in 1973.

City of Troy, NY

This monument honors Emma Hart Willard, who in 1821 founded on this spot the Troy Female Seminary — the first permanent institution in America devoted to the advanced education of women. At a time when higher learning was considered unsuitable and even dangerous for girls, Willard taught mathematics, science, history, and philosophy to young women, proving they could master subjects reserved for men. Her graduates fanned out to become teachers themselves, multiplying her influence across the country. Erected in 1895 by her former pupils, the monument calls the gratitude of educated women her most enduring memorial.

New Braunfels, TX

The New Braunfels Library Association formed in 1928 and ran a public library from shifting downtown quarters for a decade. In 1937 Emmie Seele Faust, daughter of the town's first teacher, led a joint effort by the city, the Sophienburg Museum, and the association to give the library a permanent home, and the native-rock building opened in 1938. It served as the public library until 1969, then became museum storage before being restored in 2010 as a meeting hall and classroom.

Ephrata, PA · est. 2022

In the 1740s, within the austere religious community of Ephrata Cloister, a remarkable group of women composed original hymns for their congregation's worship. Sister Föben, Sister Ketura, and Sister Hanna wrote both intricate melodies and sacred texts at a time when few women anywhere were credited as composers. Their music was woven into the daily devotional life of one of colonial America's most distinctive spiritual settlements.

Hallettsville, TX

John Hallett, a member of Stephen F. Austin's colony and a former sea captain, built the area's first home — a log cabin — in 1833. After his death, his widow Margaret gave land for the town in 1852, when it became the county seat and took her family's name. The state recognized the site as a Historic Landmark in 1967.

Brownsville, TX

On the ranchlands of the lower Rio Grande, María Estéfana Goseascochea de Cavazos y de Cortina — Doña Estéfana — set aside this burial ground by the mid-1800s on land she held from the Espíritu Santo grant. Widowed twice, she moved her family to Rancho el Carmen in 1848, building a house and chapel and anchoring a ranching community even as speculators stripped away part of her land despite a court in her favor. When she died in 1867, a Brownsville paper remembered her boundless philanthropy, and her son Juan Cortina became one of south Texas's most storied figures.

El Paso, TX

Estela Portillo Trambley (1926–1998), an El Paso native, became one of the first voices of the "Chicano Renaissance," writing fiction, plays, and poetry that centered strong, independent Mexican and Mexican American women. Educated at the University of Texas at El Paso, she taught high school for more than 40 years while co-founding a bilingual theater and seeing her plays staged across the country. In 1972 she became the first woman to win the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol, and she hosted radio and television programs that carried Chicano culture to a wider audience.

Town of Wilmington, NY

High in the Adirondack Mountains near Whiteface, this peak bears the name of a teenager who climbed it for no reason other than that she wanted to. As the inscription records, fifteen-year-old Esther McComb made the first known ascent of the summit purely for the pleasure of the climb, not for survey, trade, or settlement. In an era when the northern New York wilderness was still largely untracked, a young woman reaching a remote peak simply for the joy of it was a striking thing — and the mountain has carried her name ever since.

Weimar, TX

Born in Weimar in 1901, Etta Moten began singing in the AME churches her father pastored and rose to become one of the most acclaimed African American performers of the twentieth century. After a breakthrough role in Gold Diggers of 1933, she made history on January 30, 1934, as the first African American woman to perform at the White House, singing for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Married to Associated Negro Press founder Claude Barnett, she marched in Washington in 1963 and championed civil rights and interfaith understanding until her death at 102.

Lancaster, KY

Born in Garrard County in 1840, Eugenia Dunlap Potts built a literary career in Lancaster as a poet, author, and editor at a time when few women published under their own names. Her first work, "Song of Lancaster," was a metrical local history modeled on Longfellow's "Hiawatha," and in 1892 she became editor of the "Illustrated Kentuckian." She produced nine works before her death in 1912.

Abilene, TX

Born in Georgia around 1877, Eugenia Pickard settled in Abilene in the early 1900s and quietly transformed its Black neighborhoods, owning properties she offered rent-free to poor families with children and setting aside places for African American children to play where the city gave them no parks. At her death in 1945 she willed her savings and land to Abilene for a new Black schoolhouse; when the funds fell short, the community instead dedicated the Eugenia Pickard Library inside Carter G. Woodson High School. It became an educational and social hub for the surrounding neighborhood.

Pocopson Township, PA · est. 2011

Eusebius Barnard was a Chester County Quaker who took the radical path of the Progressive Friends, embracing temperance, women's equality, and the abolition of slavery. His farm became a station on the Underground Railroad, where he and his family sheltered freedom seekers and guided them toward the next safe house — dangerous work in the tense decades before the Civil War. He helped found the Longwood Progressive Meeting, a hub of reform in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Victoria, TX

Victoria's earliest citizens resisted a public cemetery, preferring home burials even after an 1846 ordinance banned the practice, so a new burial ground took shape in the 1850s on land John McCrabb bought from a Republic of Texas grant. After the Civil War, graves were relocated here from the old city cemetery and from the razed St. Mary's Church, and in 1876 local women organized the Victoria Ladies' Cemetery Association to rescue the neglected plot, naming it "Evergreen" in 1883. Among its 9,000 graves lies Martín de León, the empresario who founded Victoria, alongside veterans of the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War.

Exeter, NH

In the years after 1918, towns across America raised monuments to the local men and women who had served in what that generation simply called "the World War" — the global conflict we now know as World War I. Exeter, a New Hampshire town whose roots reach back to the colonial era, joined that wave of civic remembrance, honoring not only its sons but explicitly its daughters, a nod to the nurses and volunteers who served alongside soldiers. The memorial's language moves deliberately from grief for the dead, to gratitude for the survivors, to a charge laid upon future generations.

Fairfield, TX

In the years just before the Civil War, education for young women was a rarity on the Texas frontier, which makes this 1858 undertaking notable. Erected by the Freestone School Association and opened in 1859 under president Dr. Henry Lee Graves, Fairfield Female College received its state charter on February 8, 1860. It reflected a broader antebellum push to bring formal schooling — and specifically women's education — to the growing settlements of East Texas.

San Angelo, TX

San Angelo laid out its "New City Cemetery" here in 1893, and within a few years a volunteer women's auxiliary — led for 38 years by Mrs. C.A. Broome — took charge of the graveyard and renamed it Fairmount. Its 52 acres now hold more than 33,000 burials that read like a cross-section of West Texas history: former slaves, African American Buffalo Soldiers, pioneer ranchers and oilmen, and veterans of every conflict from the Texas Revolution through Vietnam, among them WWII Medal of Honor recipient Lt. Jack Mathis. Fine statuary, a Greek Orthodox section, and decades of women's stewardship make it a civic landmark.

Center, TX

Founded in 1901 to add burial space alongside the older Methodist churchyard, Fairview became Center's second-oldest cemetery, organized by a seven-member association that bought land tracing back to the Jesse Amason headright survey. Kate Crisp Ricks, an early promoter of the project, was the first buried here in 1902. Its monuments mark many of the civic leaders who built the young town—among them Panzie Annie Rennick Bryarly, the first female member of the Texas Press Association—beneath tall memorials and a white gazebo at the cemetery's heart.

Raleigh, NC

From this house, Fannie E. S. Heck emerged as a leading social activist and writer in turn-of-the-century North Carolina. She led the Baptist Woman's Missionary Union after 1892, organizing women for religious and charitable work on a broad scale, and became a benefactor of what is now Meredith College. Her career shows the growing public leadership of women in the era before suffrage.