Women's Firsts: 30 Barrier-Breaking Moments
Not a ranking — a chronology. The first time a woman did a thing that had, until that moment, never been done by a woman. Some are celebrated; many aren't. Each date is when it happened in the United States unless otherwise noted.
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1
1776 — First woman to cast a ballot in the US (Lydia Chapin Taft)
Voted in a Massachusetts town meeting on whether to fund the French and Indian War. A local anomaly — women's suffrage wouldn't come for 144 more years.
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2
1849 — First US MD earned by a woman (Elizabeth Blackwell)
Graduated first in her class at Geneva Medical College after the faculty, as a joke, asked students to vote on her admission. They voted yes.
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3
1866 — First woman to earn a US undergraduate degree (Cornell / Vassar opening)
Vassar, founded 1861, was the first US women's college to grant degrees. Women's higher education as an institutional norm dates from this period.
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4
1869 — First woman law graduate (Ada Kepley, Union College of Law, now Northwestern)
Illinois still barred women from practicing law — a right Kepley helped win in 1872.
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5
1920 — Women's suffrage ratified (19th Amendment)
Ratified August 18, 1920. The amendment barred US states from denying the vote on account of sex. In practice, Black women in many Southern states were blocked by Jim Crow voter suppression for another 45 years.
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6
1932 — First woman US Senator elected (Hattie Caraway, D-AR)
Won a special election to fill her husband's seat, then won the general election outright in her own right — the first woman to do so.
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7
1932 — First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (Amelia Earhart)
Lindbergh did it in 1927. Earhart replicated the feat solo five years later and became the first person of any gender to fly solo across both the Atlantic and Pacific.
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8
1963 — First woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova, USSR)
Vostok 6, June 16, 1963. Twenty years before the first American woman in space. Tereshkova orbited Earth 48 times, more than all previous American astronauts combined at that point.
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9
1966 — First woman Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine (Rita Levi-Montalcini, Italy)
Awarded the 1986 Nobel (not 1966 — error: Levi-Montalcini wasn't the first in her field). The first woman Medicine Nobel was Gerty Cori in 1947. Cori's work on glycogen metabolism was foundational to biochemistry.
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10
1974 — Equal Credit Opportunity Act signed
Made it illegal for US banks to require a male co-signer for women applying for credit. Before 1974, most married women needed their husband's signature to get a credit card or bank loan.
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11
1981 — First woman US Supreme Court Justice (Sandra Day O'Connor)
Appointed by Reagan, confirmed 99-0. Served 24 years. Famously said of her seat, 'It was important that it not be the last.'
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12
1983 — First American woman in space (Sally Ride)
STS-7, Space Shuttle Challenger, June 18, 1983. Twenty years after Tereshkova. Ride was 32 and held a PhD in physics.
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13
1984 — First woman on a major-party US presidential ticket (Geraldine Ferraro, D-VP)
Mondale-Ferraro lost in a landslide to Reagan-Bush, but the ticket broke a nearly 200-year barrier.
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14
1993 — First woman US Attorney General (Janet Reno)
Served Clinton's full two terms — the longest-serving AG of the 20th century.
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15
1997 — First woman US Secretary of State (Madeleine Albright)
Albright was sworn in January 23, 1997. She held the highest diplomatic office in US government.
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16
2007 — First woman Speaker of the US House (Nancy Pelosi, D-CA)
Served two non-consecutive terms as Speaker; also the first to regain the gavel after losing it (110th, 116th, 117th Congresses).
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17
2008 — First Black woman US First Lady (Michelle Obama)
Served two terms as First Lady (2009-2017). Harvard Law JD; worked at Chicago University Hospital before her husband's 2008 presidential campaign.
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18
2013 — US ground combat roles opened to women
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women serving in direct ground combat, ending 20+ years of debate and Army Research Institute performance studies.
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19
2015 — First woman to complete US Army Ranger School (Capt. Kristen Griest, 1st Lt. Shaye Haver)
Ranger School admits roughly half its students on merit; women had been barred from attending until this integration. Both women have since served in combat arms roles.
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20
2016 — First woman major-party US presidential nominee (Hillary Clinton, D)
Clinton won the Democratic nomination; lost the electoral college while winning the popular vote by 2.8 million. 132 years after the first woman ran for president (Belva Lockwood, Equal Rights Party, 1884).
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21
2017 — First woman in history to earn a Fields Medal (Maryam Mirzakhani, in 2014)
Iranian-American mathematician, Stanford professor. Work on hyperbolic geometry and moduli spaces. Died of cancer in 2017 at 40. The highest honor in mathematics.
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22
2017 — Saudi Arabia lifted ban on women driving
Saudi Arabia was the last country on Earth to prohibit women from driving. The ban was formally lifted June 24, 2018 following the 2017 royal decree.
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23
2019 — First all-woman spacewalk (Christina Koch, Jessica Meir, NASA)
October 18, 2019. Spacewalk had originally been scheduled for March but was delayed due to spacesuit sizing issues — a story that drew wide attention to the historical male-default assumptions in spacesuit design.
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24
2021 — First woman US Vice President (Kamala Harris)
Also the first Black and South Asian Vice President. Sworn in January 20, 2021.
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25
2021 — First woman to lead a major US investment bank (Jane Fraser, Citigroup)
CEO of Citigroup. First woman to lead any of the four major US 'bulge bracket' banks.
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26
2022 — US Women's National Soccer Team wins equal pay
USWNT and USMNT agreed to identical pay structures through 2028 CBA, with equal prize-money sharing from World Cups. The deal included $24M in back pay to USWNT players.
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27
2022 — First Black woman on the US Supreme Court (Ketanji Brown Jackson)
Confirmed 53-47 to replace retiring Justice Breyer. Brown Jackson is the 116th Justice of the Supreme Court.
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28
2023 — First woman solo recipient of the Economics Nobel (Claudia Goldin)
For her historical analysis of women's labor force participation. Only the 3rd woman to win the Economics Nobel, and the first to win it alone.
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29
2024 — First woman to lead a Big Six US airline (Joanna Geraghty, JetBlue)
February 12, 2024. JetBlue is the smallest of the Big Six but Geraghty's appointment broke a 100-year male-only pattern at the top of US commercial aviation.
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30
2025 — Record women governors + Congress
12 US women governors, 150 women in the 119th Congress, 56 Fortune 500 CEOs — each an all-time high. No single dramatic 'first,' just continued pipeline movement.
Sources
Frequently asked
When did US women get the right to vote?
The 19th Amendment was ratified August 18, 1920. But voting-rights barriers persisted for Black women in the South until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
When could women open a bank account without a male co-signer in the US?
Not until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Many living women remember not being able to get a credit card in their own name.
Who was the first American woman in space?
Sally Ride, aboard Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-7), June 18, 1983 — 20 years after the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova of the USSR in 1963.
When did women first serve in US ground combat?
The ban on women in direct ground combat was lifted in 2013 by Secretary Panetta. The first women graduated Army Ranger School in 2015.
What's the most recent major first?
The 2022-24 period saw: first woman solo Economics Nobel (Goldin), first Black woman Supreme Court Justice (Brown Jackson), first woman leading a major US airline (Geraghty), and the first major US bank led by a woman (Fraser, Citi). Pace has accelerated.