Educator Elizabeth Peabody opens the nation’s first kindergarten in Boston.
The population in the southern states includes a quarter of a million free blacks and four million slaves.
Ellen White and her husband cofound the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The scriptural interpretations she receives through approximately two thousand visions contribute toward the establishment of the church and its health and educational institutions. Her views on health, especially her opposition to coffee, tea, meat, and drugs, are incorporated into Seventh-day Adventist practices.
Physician Mary Edwards Walker finds women’s clothes too confining. She wears men’s attire and is unfazed by belittlement. She later becomes the first woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for her medical services in the Civil War.
In San Francisco, 85 percent of the city’s population of Chinese women are enslaved as prostitutes and displayed for sale in closely guarded rooms. The practice will continue until after the turn of the century; at its peak, more than two thousand Chinese women will be sex slaves.
The Civil War begins.
For her extensive work in helping wounded soldiers, Sally Tompkins becomes the first woman to be a commissioned officer in the Confederate Army.
In what would become West Virginia, seventeen-year-old Belle Boyd, passionate for the Southern cause, raises money to arm the Confederate soldiers. She wants to be more actively involved, and when her town is occupied by the Union, she beguiles military information from admiring Union officers. She is an outstanding horsewoman and uses her knowledge of the Shenandoah Valley to ferry information and act as a courier. It is believed she also smuggled needed supplies, such as quinine. She is discovered as a Confederate spy and is captured on several occasions and punished. After the war, she tells of her exploits.
Mary Bickerdyke ministers to sick and wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War.
Educator Mary Jane Patterson becomes the first black woman to receive a bachelor’s degree from an established American college when she graduates from Oberlin College.
Physician Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska founds the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Massachusetts. The hospital becomes a primary training hospital for several generations of women physicians, and nurses as well. It continues in operation today as the Dimock Community Health Center.
During the Civil War, black educator Charlotte Forten Grimké teaches illiterate southern slaves to read.