The entire United States is connected by rail when the transcontinental railroad is completed. This event significantly affects the social, political, and economic lives of women and men across the nation.
Middle- and upper-class women often take more than two hours and the help of an assistant to dress and put up their hair. Much of this time is devoted to arranging seven to ten pounds of underwear, including corsets. Women’s waists are nipped in at least four inches from their natural size by tightening metal and whalebone stays and laces and exerting anywhere from twenty-five to eighty pounds of pressure per square inch on the body. Corsets permanently alter the location of women’s organs, such as stomachs and livers, and compress their ribs. Little girls’ bodies are not allowed to develop normally, as they begin to wear corsets at age five.
Fifteen percent of women are in the paid workforce.
Margaret Knight patents paper-bag-folding machines to make square-bottom bags (the grocery bag).
Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary), a sharpshooting, hard-riding gender nonconformist, serves as a scout for military expeditions in the Dakota territories.
Sophia Smith charters and endows Smith College, established in Northampton, Massachusetts, through her will. The will provides for “the establishment and maintenance of an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for the education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.”
Martha Coston works many years with chemists to invent Coston flares; they are used for naval rescues and during Civil War sea battles.