Katie Cernugel’s Reviews > We the Women: The Hidden Heroes Who Shaped America > Status Update

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1917) – formally named the only female acting assistant surgeon in the US Army during the Civil War; spied for the Union Army; became a prisoner of war in Richmond; one of the first women to wear pants in America (crazy); to this day, she is still the only woman to have received the Medal of Honor

The Blackwell Sisters (1821, 1826-1910) – that's DOCTORS Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell to you! Elizabeth became the first woman in America to attend medical school and the first to earn a medical degree in 1849; the sisters focused on giving medical care to the poor; founded the first American hospital staffed by women in Manhattan in 1857 and a women's medical college in 1868

The Women of Seneca Falls (1848) – I didn't know the women's suffrage movement started with Quaker women but that makes sense (#equality); over 300 people attended the 2-day convention; the end of the chapter had the full Declaration of Sentiments which seemed timely still today; crazy it took 72 years after the convention to get the right to vote and none of the women at the convention ever got to vote themselves

Charlotte Forten (1837-1914) – teacher, writer, abolitionist, and activist from Philadelphia raised in a family of free Black elites; kept a well-maintained diary and published her entries in poems and essays; after the Civil War, she became the first Northern Black teacher to travel south to educate free slaves; she was also the first Black woman to publish in the prestigious magazine, The Atlantic Monthly

The Grimké Sisters – Sarah and Angelina were the only white Southern women to become prominent abolitionists; grew up on a plantation in South Carolina and moved to Philadelphia to work with the abolitionist movement, although never acknowledged their past as part of slave owning family; Angelina was the first woman to speak before a legislative body and presented a petition calling for immediate end to slavery

Patience Lovell Wright – one of the first professional female sculptors in America, creating realistic life-size wax figures (decades before Madame Tussaud); she secretly hid British intelligence messages inside these figures and sent them from London to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia (American spy!!); when her husband died she shaved a decade off her age (why not); denied return to US by those she helped

Elizabeth Ellet – slave in Massachusetts who, upon hearing the Declaration of Independence, sought representation and sued her owner for her freedom and WON! her case helped lead to the informal abolition of slavery in Massachusetts in 1783. she became economically independent and bought her own 19-acre property which she then passed down to her family. she died the second-wealthiest Black landowner in her town.

Elizabeth Ellet – first writer to record the lives of women who contributed to the Revolutionary War and paved the way for women's studies; not without her faults, she did not include the lives of Black women, but she was the first to attempt to capture women's history as American history

reading one chapter/woman per day. so far have read about:
- Mary Katherine Goddard, who printed copies of the Declaration of Independence for distribution to each state (including her name)
- Phillis Wheatley, whose slaveowners agreed to educate her and who became the first published African American poet (and later freed!)
- Mercy Otis Warren, the leading female intellectual of the Revolution and outsold Hamilton