Science: First Woman To ...

• 1786 - Caroline Herschel becomes the first woman to discover a comet, the first of eight she would discover between 1786 and 1797. In 1787, she began reciving an annual salary from the king for her work as her brother's assistant, making her the first woman officially recognized in a scientific job. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal - no woman would be awarded it again until Vera Rubin in 1996 - and in 1835 the society elected her as an honorary member. The asteroid 281 Lucretia was named after Caroline's second given name; C. Herschel crater in the Sinus Iridium on the Moon was also named in her honour.


• 1953 - Jerrie Cobb is the first woman in the U.S. to undergo astronaut testing. NASA, however, cancels the women's program in 1963.


• 1963 - USSR cosmonaut Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space and the first woman in orbit.


• 1983 - Dr. Sally K. Ride becomes the first American woman to be sent into space.


• 1995 - Lt. Col. Eileen Collins becomes the first woman to pilot a space shuttle. Four years later, she would be the first woman space shuttle commander.


• 2007 - Dr. Peggy Whitson, an American astronaut, becomes the first woman to command the International Space Station.

• 350 BC - Agnodice, the first female doctor and gynecologist, was a young woman of the Athenian high society frustrated by the law that banned women from studying. Encouraged by her father, she cut her hair and dressed like a man so that she could attend classes, particularly those of famous physician Herophilus. In the year 350 BC, she obtained the highest marks in the medicine test and became a gynecologist, still hiding her real identity.


• 12th century A.D. - The Salerno School was the first medical school in Europe not run by a religious organization and had female doctors on staff. One possible explanation goes back to Muslim control of the city during the Crusades. In Islamic society, only women physicians could examine women patients. This may explain why women doctors were included on the integrated staff of the Salerno School, which included Jews, Arabs, women, and Christians. Trota or Trotula was the most famous of the women teachers at Salerno.


• 1754 - Dorothea Erxleben received a medical degree in 1754 from the German University of Halle, the first woman to do so. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the U.S. receive a medical degree in 1849.


• ~1866 - Lucy Hobbs Taylor graduated from the Ohio College of Dentistry in Cincinnati, Ohio, the second dental school in the world, as the world's first fully-trained woman dentist.


• 1978 - Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, is born in England. Her parents had tried to conceive for nine years before undergoing the extremely experimental treatment.

• 1809 - Mary Kies becomes the first woman to receive a patent in the U.S. for a method of weaving straw with silk.


• 1904 - Electrical engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton becomes the first woman to read a paper on her work at the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific academy.


• 1940s-1950s - Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator in the 1940s, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language, COBOL, in the 1950s.


• 2007 - Frances Allen, a fellow emerita at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, was given the award for her contributions in the area of program optimization, a way of modifying a program to run more efficiently and improve performance.

First Woman To ...


Adventure & Exploration: First Woman To ...



Arts & Literature: First Woman To ...



Business: First Woman To ...

Nobel Prize: First Woman To ...



Politics: First Woman To ...



Science: First Woman To ...



Sports: First Woman To ...