Women's History

Waller, TX

This Methodist congregation first appears in regional conference records in 1888, its early membership a handful of founding families who at first worshipped in the Waller School and shared facilities with the town's Baptists. Its first building went up in 1906 only to be destroyed by a tornado two years later, rebuilt, then wrecked by a second tornado in 1917 before a new church rose in 1920. For two decades the Methodists and Baptists shared circuit-riding ministers, and church women—beginning with a society organized in 1911—helped sustain the congregation through repeated rebuilding.

Victoria, TX

Around 1911, rancher and postmaster Edward R. Fleming and his wife Lillian hired builder B. F. Williams to raise this Victoria home. It passed through the Grunder family before Eliza Hughes Welder bought it in 1936 and reshaped it into the Colonial Revival house seen today, distinguished by unusually elongated dormers and strong horizontal lines. Its look reflects the era of Welder's ownership more than its original form.

Summit Township, PA · est. 1989

On this Somerset County farm in October 1914, Flora Black founded the Society of Farm Women of Pennsylvania, giving rural women a formal organization of their own in an era when farm households ran on their unpaid, largely unrecognized labor. The society spread county by county across the Commonwealth, working to improve conditions in farm homes and to raise the standing of the women who kept them. Black herself remained a civic leader in county and state affairs for decades.

Robeson County, NC

Chartered in 1841, Floral College was one of the earliest colleges for women in the South, operating until 1878. It offered higher education to young women decades before most American institutions would admit them at all. The former college chapel survives as Centre Presbyterian Church a short distance north.

San Francisco, CA · est. 1939

Unveiled at San Francisco's 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, this memorial honors Florence Nightingale, celebrated as the founder of professional nursing. Sculpted by David Edstrom and produced through the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project, it was dedicated on National Hospital Day by a coalition of California nursing and hospital associations. The piece unites two American stories: the New Deal's public art and the rise of nursing as a respected profession.

Baltimore, MD

Florence Rena Sabin broke barriers as the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she advanced the study of living cells and the lymphatic system. In retirement she returned to Colorado and led a sweeping reform of the state's public-health laws. Her statue represents Colorado in the U.S. Capitol.

Fort Worth, TX

Named for a charter member of the Fort Worth Woman's Club, this building began as a 1905 cottage rebuilt in 1910 by civic leader W. R. Edrington. The Woman's Club, formed in 1923, purchased the house the next year as a home for its committees devoted to civic improvement.

Floydada, TX

In 1898 the members and families of Floyd City's Masonic lodge petitioned Texas for a charter to found a local chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star, the Masonic-affiliated fraternal order open to both women and men. Led by Worthy Matron Ella B. Starks and Worthy Patron J. L. Crabtree, the chapter took root quickly. It was renamed Floydada Chapter No. 31 in 1933 to match the town's own renaming, and over the decades it channeled its members' energy into charitable and civic work.

Livingston, TX

By 1905 Livingston's old city cemetery was full, so residents formed the Forest Hill Cemetery Association in 1906 and bought a hilltop south of downtown, where Arthur B. Garner became the first burial that November. Women organized the Ladies Cemetery Association in 1908 to beautify the grounds, and in the 1930s Marion Tew's stewardship even prompted the paving of Washington Avenue — Livingston's first paved street. Its stones mark thirty Confederate and one Union soldier alongside circus figures and acclaimed theatre director Margaret 'Margo' Jones.

Lancaster, TX

From 1891 to 1918, Lucy Frances Head ran a celebrated boarding house on this Lancaster site, where her fried chicken, popovers, and ambrosia drew crowds—especially on Sundays and holidays. Traveling salesmen, known then as "drummers," spread word of her table across the country, and the house became a favorite of honeymooners. It kept the Head name until it closed and was torn down in 1936.

Temple, TX

Doctors Arthur C. Scott and Raleigh White, Jr. founded this nursing school in 1904 as part of their Temple Sanitarium, first teaching a small student body in a former Catholic convent. Modeled on Florence Nightingale's philosophy, the program grew steadily, adding liberal-arts coursework with Temple Junior College by 1946 and ranking among the nation's best by 1949. Before its diploma program was phased out in favor of a baccalaureate degree, the school graduated 1,233 nurses over 66 years.

Fort Worth, TX

Prominent Fort Worth architect Wyatt C. Hedrick designed this five-story Georgian Revival building, erected in 1927-28 as the headquarters of Elks Lodge 124 and lodging for visiting members. Built of steel with brick and cast-stone veneer, metal balustrades, and shallow-relief detail, it reflects the confident civic architecture of the 1920s. In 1955 the Fort Worth Y.W.C.A. purchased the building for its own use.

Fort Worth, TX

At the turn of the 20th century, cities across America won free public libraries by tapping the fortune of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who gave away tens of millions to build them. When a Fort Worth woman asked him for "the price of a good cigar," he answered with $50,000, and paired with local gifts of money and land, the city's first library opened on this site in 1901. Its first librarian was also a leader in the parks and art movements of the era, reflecting how libraries anchored civic and cultural life.

Sterling City, TX

Foster Cemetery began on the ranch of Robert West and Fannie B. Foster, early settlers and civic leaders of Sterling County, when their infant daughter Fay became the first burial here in 1883. Over more than a century it grew into the resting place of the county's founders—commissioners, mayors, early ranchers, and even a saloon keeper who doubled as a cattle inspector. Among them lies Ethel Foster, a president of the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs.

Navasota, TX

Mattie Brigance Foster, daughter of Grimes County settler Franklin Brigance, had this cypress-frame home built in 1900 shortly after her husband's death. Blending Colonial Revival and Shingle-style elements beneath a multi-gabled roof, its restrained design signaled the turn away from ornate Victorian detailing, and the house remained in the Foster family for sixty years.

San Francisco, CA

This San Francisco marker commemorates Frances E. Willard, the reformer and educator who led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and became, as the inscription notes, a pioneering "world organizer of women." Inspired during an 1883 visit to the city, she carried her vision of a united "world of tempted humanity" across the globe, building one of the largest women's organizations of the 19th century.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

In the decades before and after the Civil War, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was among the most widely read and widely heard Black voices in America—a poet, novelist, and traveling lecturer who took the abolitionist and, later, equal-rights cause to audiences across the country. From this Philadelphia home she wrote and organized, insisting that education was the surest road to advancement for Black Americans. Her work bridged the antislavery struggle and the reform movements of the later 19th century.

New York, NY

In the Conservatory Garden at the north end of Central Park stands a quiet bronze fountain honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett, the English-born American author whose children's books—most enduringly The Secret Garden—shaped generations of young readers. The fountain's two children, a boy playing a flute and a girl holding a bowl, echo Mary and Dickon from that beloved 1911 novel, set in a walled garden much like the one that surrounds them here. Dedicated in the 1930s after Burnett's death, the memorial was a gift meant for the children of the city, tying the author's imaginative world to a real public garden they could wander.

De Leon, TX

Born in North Carolina in 1849, Frances Marie Sparks married Thomas Brown in 1865 and moved to a 410-acre farm near here around 1876. Through the 1880s and 1890s, "Aunt Fanny" served as midwife and lay doctor, often riding six to eight miles by horseback in the dark to deliver a baby. After her husband's death in 1912 she managed the farm, raised twelve children, and kept nursing her neighbors to the end of her long life in 1934.

Homestead, PA · est. 2003

When Frances Perkins came to Homestead in July 1933 as the nation's first female cabinet secretary, local officials tried to silence her — barring her from meeting aggrieved steelworkers in a nearby park. Undaunted, the U.S. Secretary of Labor simply moved the gathering onto federal ground at the local post office, where free speech could not be denied. As the architect of much of the New Deal, including Social Security and wage-and-hour laws, Perkins served longer than any labor secretary in history.

Williamsport, PA · est. 2024

Raised in Williamsport, Frances Tipton Hunter became one of the most beloved commercial illustrators of the mid-20th century. Her warm, sentimental cover art of children and their pets graced The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and other national magazines during the golden age of American illustration. She also lent her brush to advertisements, calendars, puzzles, and the popular Little Busybodies paper dolls.

Littlefield, TX

Franklin A. Loyd, born in Montague County, took office as sheriff of Lamb County on the South Plains in 1935 and was mortally wounded in the line of duty. In a striking arrangement for the era, his widow, Grace Owen Loyd, was appointed to serve out the remainder of his term. He left behind eight children.

Friona, TX

As settlers arrived in the railroad town of Friona in the early 1900s, twenty local women organized a club in 1909 that would reshape their community. Joining the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs in 1922 and spawning three more clubs, the women raised money for a meeting house, planted trees, provided medical aid, and founded the Friona Public Library. Their 1941 clubhouse became a gathering place for members and the wider community alike.

Gainesville, TX

Authorized by the Texas Legislature in 1913 and opened in 1916, the Texas State Training School for Girls reflected the Progressive Era's faith in reforming troubled youth through education and vocational training. Led first by Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith and then by Agnes Stephens, the campus east of Gainesville grew with cottages, an academic building, and a gymnasium. Racially integrated in 1966 and made co-educational as Gainesville State School in 1974, it became an all-male juvenile correctional facility in 1988 and still serves young Texans today.

Raleigh, NC

Joseph Gales founded the Raleigh Register in 1799, one of the young state capital's early newspapers, while his wife Winifred wrote fiction in an age when few American women published at all. Their sons Joseph and Weston carried on as editors, making the Gales name a fixture of early North Carolina print culture. In the Early Republic, a partisan press like theirs shaped how citizens argued and voted.

Palm Beach, FL

In 1978 the Garden Club of Palm Beach marked a half-century of civic work by donating a beach-beautification project to the town. Founded in 1928, the club belonged to the nationwide garden-club movement in which women organized to shape public landscapes, conservation, and civic beauty. The plaque celebrates that fifty-year record of volunteer service to the seaside community.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2000

Genevieve Blatt broke barrier after barrier in 20th-century Pennsylvania politics, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office as Secretary of Internal Affairs and the first woman a major party nominated for a U.S. Senate seat in the state. Elected to the Commonwealth Court in 1973, she authored the 1975 opinion that opened school sports to girls on equal terms. She made her home at 115 North Street in Harrisburg for a quarter century.

Sulphur Springs, TX

Soon after they married in 1881, George and Myra Wilson set about transforming Sulphur Springs from a small town into a city. George and his brother ran a brick plant and built many of its landmarks—the City National Bank, First Baptist Church, and several county courthouses—while Myra led the Ladies' Cemetery Society for 43 years, helped found the public library, and raised money for a cemetery chapel. Together they typified the civic energy that reshaped a once-frontier Texas town.

Galveston, TX

In 1895, in the parlor of Mrs. George Seeligson's Galveston home, a group of women founded the George Washington Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution — the very first DAR chapter in Texas, five years ahead of the state organization. They took Washington's name because charter members Mrs. Sydney Fontaine and her daughter Shirley counted the first president among their ancestors. From the start the chapter devoted itself to historic preservation, youth education, and civic patriotism.

Canyon, TX

Before she became one of America's most celebrated artists, Georgia O'Keeffe taught in the Texas Panhandle, drawn by what she called "the openness. The dry landscape." From 1916 to 1918 she taught at West Texas State Normal College in Canyon, where the sweep of Palo Duro Canyon pushed her toward the bold abstraction that would define her work. She exhibited her Texas pieces in New York in 1917 and carried the region's influence for the rest of her life.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Gertrude E.H. Bustill Mossell, born into Philadelphia's distinguished Bustill family, made her living with a pen at a time when few Black women could. As a teacher and journalist she wrote widely on race and women's rights, and her book "The Work of the Afro-American Woman" documented and celebrated Black women's contributions. She also raised funds for the Frederick Douglass Hospital, which her husband founded.

Goldsboro, NC

Gertrude Weil (1879–1971) of Goldsboro was a tireless reformer who campaigned for extending the vote to women, achieved nationally in 1920, and remained active in labor, racial-justice, and Jewish causes throughout her long life. She brought the energy of Progressive reform to eastern North Carolina for decades. Her home once stood at this site.

Ben Franklin, TX

Settlers from Giles County, Tennessee founded this academy in 1859 and named it for the homeland they had left, hiring fellow Tennessean Thomas Hart Benton Hockaday as its first teacher. Parents paid the bills, and a small community with a store, blacksmith, and church grew up around the log schoolhouse. Hockaday's daughter Ela, born here, would go on to found the celebrated Hockaday School for Girls in Dallas in 1913.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2001

On Armistice Day 1932, Philadelphia Girl Scouts baked cookies and sold them in the display windows of the local gas and electric company, turning a simple fundraiser into a local sensation. The idea spread through the city as a yearly tradition, and by 1936 the national Girl Scouts had adopted the cookie sale as an official program. What began as girls behind a store window grew into one of the most recognizable youth enterprises in the country.

Borger, TX

Borger boomed on Panhandle oil in the 1920s and '30s, and civic-minded newcomers like Hudson and Ruby Davis helped knit the young town together. Ruby organized a Girl Scout troop that drew more than a hundred girls, and after wartime shortages delayed construction, the Lions Club rallied a community-wide effort to build this rock headquarters—faced in dolostone from the local Alibates formation—completed in the years after World War II.

Marshall, TX

Lucy Holcombe Pickens (1832–1899) grew up at Wyalucing, her family's East Texas plantation home that was a hub of social and cultural life among the surrounding plantations. Celebrated for her beauty and charm, she became the only nineteenth-century Texas woman honored with a portrait on currency—the Confederate $100 bill. Her husband served as the Civil War governor of South Carolina, and from 1863 to 1865 Wyalucing housed the Confederate Post Office Department west of the Mississippi.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2021

Gloria Casarez began as a grassroots organizer in Philadelphia, fighting for economic justice, welfare rights, and affordable housing before becoming a leading voice for LGBTQ+ equality. She directed the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative, building nationally recognized programs for men of color and transgender people. Appointed the city's first director of LGBT Affairs, she helped Philadelphia adopt some of the strongest LGBT protections in the country.

Jefferson, TX

Schoolteacher Margaret Godfrey bought this Jefferson lot in 1892 and built a Folk Victorian house trimmed with Queen Anne spindlework, though she moved away and died only a few years later. Dr. Robert Moseley acquired it in 1901, and from 1910 to 1987 the family of attorney John Singleton lived in and enlarged the home. Its decorative detailing on a simple folk form typifies the modest but ornamented houses of turn-of-the-century Texas towns.

Corpus Christi, TX

Dedicated in 1931 in Corpus Christi's Spohn Park, this memorial honored the mothers of Nueces County servicemen who died in World War I. Championed by the Daughters of the American Revolution and designed by Mrs. Frank de Garmo, it was the first Gold Star Court of Honor in Texas, complete with a lighted three-foot gold star and, later, a captured British field piece. Listed in the National Register in 1988, it was restored by volunteers beginning in 2000.

Wilmington, NC

Gold Star Families Memorial Monuments like this one belong to a nationwide effort to honor the families of American service members who died in the line of duty. The "Gold Star" tradition reaches back to World War I, when households hung service banners bearing a blue star for a loved one in uniform—and a gold star when that loved one never came home. Standing in Wilmington, this monument gives those families a permanent place of recognition, turning private grief into public remembrance.

New Kensington, PA

In the mill towns of the Allegheny Valley, as across America, a "Gold Star Mother" was a woman who had lost a son or daughter in the nation's wars — the gold star replacing the blue one families hung in their windows while a loved one served. This honor roll gathers the names tied to New Kensington's fallen, a community's ledger of grief kept in bronze and stone. The tradition took hold after World War I and endured through the wars that followed.

Berkeley, CA

English immigrant John G. Wright founded the Golden Sheaf, Berkeley's first wholesale and retail bakery, in 1877; this 1905 annex was built to shelter its fleet of horse-drawn delivery wagons. Wright helped organize a bakers' union in 1904 and opened the building as a meeting place for temperance and women's suffrage advocates. After the 1906 earthquake the bakery turned out thousands of loaves for San Francisco's refugees before the business was sold to Wonder Bread in 1909.

Dallas, TX

Around 1920 Martha Schultze, a registered nurse trained in her native Germany before immigrating to the United States, opened Good Samaritan Hospital on Leland Avenue, where her husband Ernest ran an associated clinical laboratory. Starting with maternity care, the hospital added an operating room and general services by 1933 and treated neighborhood residents—elderly, infirm, and those unable to pay—until it closed in 1945. Schultze ran it for the whole of its roughly twenty-five years, and hundreds of children were born under its roof.

Austin, TX

At the turn of the twentieth century, Austin's prosperous families were building grand homes on the streets radiating from the university, and this was among the finest. Physician Goodall Harrison Wooten, son of a Confederate-veteran doctor, and his wife Ella completed the house in 1900 and transformed it in 1910 into a Classical Revival showpiece of paired Ionic columns and wraparound galleries. Ella's celebrated gardens helped make it a local landmark, and the family held the property until the 1940s.

San Antonio, TX

When painter Robert J. Onderdonk settled in San Antonio in 1878, he brought a realist sensibility that helped shape Texas art, and in this 1882 house his family made a gathering place for the state's artists. His son Julian became a celebrated painter of impressionistic Texas landscapes, famous for bluebonnet scenes, while daughter Eleanor was a noted miniaturist and served for decades as art curator of the Witte Museum. The home preserved the legacy of one of Texas's most influential artistic families.

Mineola, TX

James Stephen Hogg spent his formative years in Wood County from 1868 to 1882, the crucible of a career that carried him to the Texas governorship as the state's first native-born chief executive. Once in office he drew on friendships forged here, appointing Wood County associates to shape state institutions—among them a professor at Sam Houston Normal College, the future Ranger captain Bill McDonald, and a State Librarian. These local ties rippled outward into the governance of the whole state.

Washoe County, NV

Emmet Derby Boyle (1879–1926) rose from the mining town of Goldhill to become, at thirty-five, the youngest governor in Nevada history and the first born within the state's own borders. Serving from 1915 to 1923, he modernized Nevada's government with its first executive budget and helped shape the water law of an arid state. A committed supporter of suffrage, he called the legislature into special session in 1920 so Nevada could ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

Austin, TX

James "Farmer Jim" Ferguson won the Texas governorship in 1914 on rural-reform promises but was impeached and removed from office in 1917 amid charges of misusing state funds, and later barred from holding state office. So in 1924 his wife Miriam ran in his place, and "Ma" Ferguson became the first woman elected governor of Texas, campaigning on "Two Governors for the Price of One." She defeated a Ku Klux Klan-backed candidate and backed an anti-mask law that broke the Klan's power.

Galveston, TX

Grace Episcopal began in 1874 as a mission of Galveston's Trinity Church and became an independent parish two years later. The white limestone Gothic building, dedicated in 1895, was made possible by the bequest of civic leader Henry Rosenberg, with its hand-carved altar and reredos given by Mollie Rosenberg. It was designed by Nicholas J. Clayton, the architect who gave Gilded Age Galveston much of its distinctive skyline.

East Pikeland Township, PA · est. 2014

Graceanna Lewis was among the best-educated female naturalists of nineteenth-century America, devoting her life to botany and zoology at a time when science was largely closed to women. She displayed her ambitious Chart of the Animal Kingdom at the 1876 Centennial Exposition and won awards for her scientific drawings at later world's fairs. A Quaker abolitionist, she also aided freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad at her family's nearby farm.

Granbury, TX

Widowed and raising three children, Martha Washington Stringfellow came to Hood County about 1871 and supported her family by running a boarding house here known as "The Granbury House." In 1874 she married local stonemason and builder Joseph W. Anderson, who likely erected this structure and went on to construct many of Granbury's homes, churches, and Victorian commercial buildings. Over the years the building also housed hotels, saloons, cafes, and clothing stores.

Baltimore, MD

The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans who had marched home from the Civil War, and by the 1930s their ranks were thinning fast as the old soldiers passed into memory. This sundial was placed in Baltimore in 1933 not by the veterans themselves but by their descendants — the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, a heritage society formed to keep faith with the men of 1861–1865. A sundial makes a fitting tribute: a quiet instrument marking the passage of time over a generation that was slipping away.

Houston, TX

Amid the "golden age" of African American fraternal societies, the Order of Calanthe took shape in 1883 as a women's auxiliary of the Colored Knights of Pythias, offering Black women sick benefits, life insurance, and a rare arena of self-governance. Organized in Texas by 1898 and headquartered in Houston, the Grand Court grew into one of the most successful female-led fraternal insurers in the country, managing millions of dollars, making mortgage loans to Black residents, and joining the local NAACP's fight for voting and civil rights. In 1948 its members raised a state headquarters on Dowling Street, a modern building owned and run by Black women when that was almost unheard of.

Acton, TX

This grave marks the resting place of Elizabeth Crockett, second wife of frontiersman and Alamo defender David Crockett, who married him in Tennessee in 1816. After Crockett's death at the Alamo, Elizabeth eventually came to Texas on land granted for his service and died in 1860 in what is now Hood County. Her monument stands as a tribute to the family the famed frontiersman left behind.

Hamilton Township, PA

This weathered gravestone in Hamilton Township, in Pennsylvania's Monroe County, marks the burial of seventeen-year-old Etna Bittenbender, daughter of Samuel and Margaret, whose epitaph records that she was murdered by an unknown assailant one Sunday evening. Such starkly specific inscriptions were a 19th-century way of memorializing an unsolved crime in stone. The precise phrasing—naming the very hours of the deed—preserves a community's shock at a young life cut short.

Village of Mill Neck, NY

This monument in Mill Neck, on Long Island's storied Gold Coast, honors Sara Appleby Hutchins, a woman for whom conservation was not a cause but a daily habit. In an era when the North Shore's estates and shorelines faced mounting development pressure, individuals like Hutchins helped safeguard the marshes, woodlands, and wildlife that made the region distinctive. The great blue heron—patient, watchful, and dependent on healthy wetlands—was chosen as a fitting emblem of that quiet stewardship.

Gonzales, TX

Green and Sarah DeWitt left Missouri for Texas in 1826 after Green won an empresario grant to settle 400 Anglo-American families southwest of Stephen F. Austin's colony. Sarah earned her own land grant, the Sarah Seely League, in 1831, and set aside this acre as a family burying ground. She is remembered for the defiant "come and take it" flag raised as the fight for Texas independence began, while her husband lies buried in Mexico.

Austin, TX

This Austin Victorian rose in 1894-95 on an 1835 land grant and passed through several prominent owners before becoming the home of the Faulk family in 1916. Mary Faulk and her husband Chester Koock named it "Green Pastures" and opened it for public dining in 1946, turning the old house into a beloved Austin institution. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1976.

New York, NY

In 1965, the wooded hills of Staten Island's High Rock Park became a rallying point for one of New York City's earliest grassroots conservation fights, and Gretta Moulton stood at its center. Her campaign helped spare the land from development and seeded the far larger effort to protect the Staten Island Greenbelt, a sprawling patchwork of forest and wetland set improbably within the nation's largest city. Moulton also served as a trustee of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, linking the borough's cultural life to the stewardship of its landscape. This gate stands as a quiet tribute to a citizen-organizer whose work outlasted her.

Bedias, TX

During the Republic of Texas years, settlers gathered here to form the Bethel community, and the burial of a smallpox victim in 1843 began what became Bethel Cemetery. Among those resting here is Sarah Bradley Dodson, remembered as the 'Betsy Ross of Texas,' whose 1835 Lone Star flag flew over Washington-on-the-Brazos at the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence. Her husband Archelaus later deeded the ground to a Presbyterian congregation, and in 1904 an adjacent section opened for the area's African American residents.