About Women

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Wyoming is called the “Equality” state, because in 1869, it was the first state in the U.S. to give women the right to vote and to allow them to run for public office. Wyoming was also the first state to elect a woman, Nellie Taloe Ross, as governor, in 1929. Also Wyoming was the first state to appoint a woman as a Justice of the Peace. The first woman to obtain a medical degree in the U.S., who graduated at the top of her class, in 1849, graduated from Geneva Medical School in New York. Her name was Elizabeth Blackwell and she was born in 1821 in England. Her sister, Emily, was the third woman to get a medical degree in the U.S. Martha Jane Canary was born in 1852. She became known as “Calamity Jane.” She was a frontierswoman and professional scout. She lived in many different places but settled in Deadwood, S.D. in 1876, in the Black Hills. When I visited Deadwood, several years ago, we learned that she was buried next to Wild Bill Hickok on Boot Hill. Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She has many claims to fame, but the one that fascinated me was that she was the FIRST African-American woman to make the cover of “Vogue” magazine. And then there was Sarah Breedlove, who was born in 1867, in Louisiana. She invented the formula for straightening hair, quite a LONG time ago. Picture of Wild Bill Hickok by Pixabay