Events directly related to Cornwall women are also included
1642 | Connecticut establishes the death penalty for any man committing adultery with a married or engaged woman; the adulteress would also be sentenced to die. |
1642 | Connecticut establishes the death penalty for the rape of a married or engaged woman; single women were not included in the legislation. |
1667 | Connecticut allows divorce in the case of adultery, fraudulent contract, desertion for three years, or complete disappearance (including being at sea) for seven years. |
1672 | Connecticut law establishes the death penalty for the rape of married women, provided the complaint and prosecution are made immediately; no punishment for raping unmarried women is specified. |
1672 | Connecticut reduces the punishment for adultery from death to whipping; adultery is defined as being committed by any man with a married or engaged woman; single women are not mentioned. |
1702 | Any woman caught wearing men’s clothing, or any man wearing women’s clothing, will be “corporally punished” and fined. |
1702 | In Connecticut, it is illegal for single women to have sex; the punishment for the woman and the man was a fine or a whipping, at the discretion of the court. |
1717 | Connecticut Acts & Laws states that men can be married at age 14, and women at age 12. |
1717 | Connecticut’s law against adultery applied specifically to any man found in bed with “another’s man’s wife”; the punishment of 30 lashes would be given to both the man and the woman, unless it was established that one of them had been “surprised and did not consent,” in which case the “surprised” person would not be punished. |
1723 | Connecticut enacts a law protecting the right of women to own land they inherited; before this, any land inherited by a woman was legally the sole property of her husband, who could sell the land without her permission or knowledge. |
1735 | Connecticut Act declares that a guardian must be appointed for any male age 14 to 21 or female age 12 to 18 who does not have a father, guardian, or master. |
1766 | Cornwall’s Amy Johnson, newly widowed, retains control over the large estate left to her by her husband. |
1771 | Mercy Winegar wins a lawsuit against Daniel Abbott in Cornwall. |
1774 | Mary Bierce wins a lawsuit against Nathan Sawyer in Cornwall. |
1774 | Elizabeth Jillet is sued by Elihu Allen in Cornwall. |
1777 | Hannah Bunce Watson becomes publisher of the Connecticut Courant; co-owner with Sarah Ledyard. |
1784 | Connecticut’s law against adultery is redefined to include only married women, excluding women “betrothed to another man.” Married men having sex with single women are still not mentioned. |
1784 | Cornwall’s Mabel Dibble is an Administrator for the estate of her husband, David Dibble. |
1792 | The Litchfield Female Academy is founded by Sarah Pierce; it closes in 1833. |
1792 | Peg, an African American woman enslaved in Cornwall, gains her freedom and marries Cesar Barber of Litchfield. |
1801 | Legal actions begun by single women in Connecticut are no longer automatically voided if they continue past the date on which she marries, so long as her husband takes her place in court. |
1808 | A Connecticut law decrees that any woman found guilty of concealing an illegitimate pregnancy will be fined $150 or imprisoned for three months; the law also specifies punishments for concealing a stillborn illegitimate birth and for killing an illegitimate newborn. |
1808 | Connecticut updates its law against rape to include all girls and women, married or otherwise; the punishment for rape is death, so long as the complaint and prosecution are made immediately. |
1809 | Married women in Connecticut are allowed to write wills. |
1809 | Mary Kies of South Killingly, CT is the first woman to receive a U.S. patent. |
1818 | Patty Swift Lippincott, originally from Cornwall, moves to Illinois six months before it becomes a state and starts the first Sunday school in Illinois. |
1818 | Elizabeth Benedict begins assembling a profitable farm for herself on Great Hill in East Cornwall. |
1821 | Emma Willard founds Troy Female Seminary, first collegiate-level school for girls. |
1822 | Hartford Female Seminary founded by Catharine Beecher. |
1824 | Sarah Northrup creates a national scandal when she defies convention and marries a Cherokee, John Ridge, whom she met while he was a student at Cornwall’s Foreign Mission School. |
1826 | Harriet Gold follows Sarah Northrup’s example, marrying Elias Boudinot, also a Cherokee student from the Foreign Mission School. |
1828 | Naomi Freeman purchases an acre of land with a dwelling house in Cornwall; despite being married, the deed is made out to Naomi, not to her husband. |
1833 | Oberlin College is founded as first coeducational college. |
1837 | Mount Holyoke, first college for women, is founded by Mary Lyon. |
1839 | Abolitionist Abby Kelley attempts to speak publicly at Cornwall Bridge and is nearly assaulted; area women are conflicted in their response to Kelley, uncomfortable with the idea of a woman speaking in public. |
1841 | Three women graduate from Oberlin College. |
1842 | Lewey Bierce is Cornwall’s first female college graduate, at Mount Holyoke. |
1847 | Miss Porter’s School opens in Farmington. |
1848 | World’s first women’s rights convention held at Seneca Falls, NY on July 19 and 20. |
1848 | West Cornwall’s Elizabeth Stoddard Huntington moves to California with her husband, two years before California becomes a state. |
1849 | Married women in Connecticut are allowed to own and manage property in their own name during the incapacity of their spouse. |
1850 | First annual national women’s rights convention held in Worcester, MA. |
1850 | Female Medical College of Pennsylvania established by Quaker physicians for women. |
1850 | Cornwall’s Mary Chapin becomes the second principal of Mount Holyoke. |
1851 | Amelia Bloomer publishes a description of what becomes known as “bloomers”. |
1851 | West Cornwall’s Hannah Stoddard and Clara Stoddard Prentice join their sister, Elizabeth Huntington, in California, becoming one of the state’s early pioneers. |
1851 | Sojourner Truth delivers her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech at a women’s rights convention. |
1853 | Eliza Northrup Dorman, originally from Cornwall, moves with her family to Wisconsin, which had become a state only five years earlier. |
1855 | Lucy Stone is the first recorded woman to keep her maiden name after marriage. |
1855 | University of Iowa admits women students. |
1855 | Missouri v. Celia establishes the right of slave owners to rape female slaves. |
1856 | Married women are granted patent rights in Connecticut. |
1860 | Connecticut prohibits artificial miscarriages and abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother or of the unborn child; punishment of anyone conducting the abortion consisted of up to five years in prison and/or a fine of $1,000; women convicted of having an abortion could be punished with between one and two years in prison and/or a fine of $500. |
1860 | Connecticut permits married women to transfer their ownership of stock without their husband’s involvement. |
1864 | The Alger Female Institute opens in Cornwall. |
1865 | Connecticut law protects married women’s property from being taken to pay the husband’s debts; married men were protected from being sued for any liabilities incurred by their wives prior to marriage. |
1865 | Divorce could be granted in Connecticut for adultery, bestiality, life imprisonment, fraudulent contract, seven years’ disappearance, three years’ desertion, habitual drunkenness for at least three years with no “prospect of reform,” intolerable cruelty, or any other “infamous crime.” The law also affirmed the payment of alimony and child support to the wife. |
1866 | American Equal Rights Association is founded, the first U.S. organization to advocate women’s suffrage. |
1868 | Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony publish The Revolution. |
1871 | West Cornwall’s Mary Jane Stoddard Emmons helps her husband found the city of Huntington, WV. |
1872 | Susan B. Anthony and 14 women register and vote in presidential election, testing Fourteenth Amendment; Anthony is arrested and fined $100. |
1872 | Congress gives women federal employees equal pay for equal work. |
1873 | Comstock Law (U.S.) defines information about contraception as obscene. |
1876 | The North Cornwall Congregational Church gives full church voting rights to women members. |
1877 | The Connecticut Married Women’s Act establishes separate legal identities for married women, ending centuries of legal tradition merging women with their husbands. Married women are now entitled to full control of their earnings, finances, and property. |
1882 | Mary Hall is the first woman admitted to the Connecticut bar following a State Supreme Court decision on her case. |
1884 | Belva Lockwood is the first woman to receive votes in a presidential election. |
1885 | The Housatonic Valley Institute opens in Cornwall as a boarding school for girls. |
1890s | Artist Lydia Brewster Hubbard establishes the Cream Hill Group of artists in Cornwall. |
1889 | West Cornwall’s Jessie Wheaton begins a career as a private duty nurse, supporting herself for nearly half a century. |
1892 | Smith College introduces women’s basketball to its students, with modified rules making the game easier and more “feminine;” the modified rules continued to be used for close to a century. |
1893 | Connecticut enacts a bill requiring every city with a population of 20,000 or more to appoint a police matron to “take charge of all women” arrested by the local police. |
1893 | Connecticut enacts a bill allowing women to vote” at any meeting held for the purpose of choosing any officer of schools or for any educational purpose;” women voters had to be at least 21 and have resided in Connecticut for at least one year, in their town for at least six months, and they had to be able to read English. Women’s ballots were cast separately from men’s, in special boxes labeled “For Women’s Ballots.” |
1894 | The first Ph.D. to be earned by a woman is awarded at Yale in New Haven. |
1894 | Cornwall’s Rose Hubbard launches her acting career. |
1894 | Cornwall’s Hattie Scoville Devan becomes principal of The Catharine Aiken School for girls in Stamford. |
1895 | Hattie J. Pratt runs for election as School Visitor in Cornwall. |
1896 | Susan B. Anthony declares that the bicycle “has done more to emancipate women than anything else.” |
1900 | Cornwall’s Annie Beecher Scoville works for several years for the Bureau of Indian Affairs on reservations in the Dakotas, publishing her observations of native culture and the impact of U.S. government programs. |
1907 | Lillias Rumsey Sanford relocates her school for boys, Rumsey Hall, to Cornwall. |
1912 | The first women’s suffrage meeting in Cornwall is organized by Josepha Newcomb Whitney. |
1913 | Cornwall’s Harriet Bennett publishes a brief news article about a meeting of the Cornwall Equal Suffrage League, held in her home. |
1916 | Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic. Birth control consists of diaphragms made available only to married women with large families. |
1917 | Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress. |
1920 | August 26: women gain the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. |
1921 | Ruth Maxon Adams begins designing houses for Cornwall’s Yelping Hill community. |
1922 | Caroline Whitney, one of Cornwall’s summer residents, makes national headlines when she turns down her acceptance into the Phi Beta Kappa society; she is the first woman to do so. |
1928 | Women are allowed to compete in track & field events at the Olympics. |
1929 | May F. Wilford becomes the first woman from Cornwall to be elected to the State Legislature. |
1933 | Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor, is the first woman to serve in a Presidential cabinet. |
1935 | Jeans for women are introduced with the Lady Levi’s line. |
1936 | Cornwall’s Betty Woolsey is captain of the first U.S. women’s ski team to compete in the Olympics. |
1939 | The Hollywood movie The Women depicts socialites wearing jeans at a dude ranch. |
1942-45 | World War II opens up new opportunities for women to join the workforce. Several Cornwall women served in the military as nurses. |
1944 | Wellesley College students wearing jeans on campus are photographed for Life magazine and cause a national scandal over their “sloppy look.” |
1944 | Cornwall’s Melissa Clark is one of five American nurses who were the first Allied women to fly into the zone of operations, four days after the D-Day invasion began. |
1944 | Ruth Farwell of West Cornwall enlists in the Medical WACS. |
1945 | Cornwall’s Lydia Hubbard is stationed on Saipan, the U.S. base closest to Japan. |
1945 | Cornwall Hollow’s Eleanor Halloway reports for duty at the Chelsea Naval Hospital. |
1945 | Equal Pay for Equal Work bill is introduced; finally passes in 1963. |
1947 | Connecticut adopts the Fair Employment Practices Act, outlawing job discrimination. |
1952 | Democratic and Republican parties eliminate women’s divisions. |
1953 | Helen Coley Nauts founds the Cancer Research Institute in New York City. |
1956 | Harriet Clark becomes the second woman from Cornwall to be elected to the State Legislature. |
1957 | The ratio of men and women voting is roughly equal for the first time. |
1959 | The first Rose Algrant Art Show is held in Cornwall. |
1960 | FDA approves the birth control pill. |
1960 | Women earn 60 cents for every dollar earned by men. |
1961 | Bertie Cartwright is the first woman to be elected as a Selectman in Cornwall. |
1963 | Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique is published, laying groundwork for modern feminist movement. |
1964 | Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on gender, race, etc. |
1965 | Dorothy Bouteiller is the first woman to be elected Judge of Probate in Cornwall. |
1970 | President Nixon signs the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, declaring that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” |
1971 | Patsy Van Doren is the first woman to be elected First Selectman in Cornwall. |
1972 | The Equal Rights Amendment is passed, but fails to be ratified. Title IX establishes greater equality for women in sports. |
1973 | Women are allowed to compete in Olympic marathons for the first time. |
1974 | Connecticut’s Ella Grasso is the country’s first woman to win election as governor. |
1981 | Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. |