Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman) is an investigative reporter who goes around the world in seventy-two days.
Writer Kate Chopin publishes her first two stories. She goes on to publish more than one hundred well-polished short stories. Chopin becomes known for writing about the oppression of married women, and her novel The Awakening centers on a character who rejects the traditional roles of married women of the day.
Jane Addams begins Hull House, a neighborhood community center offering a full range of health and social services. For this achievement, she receives the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. She will second Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for president in 1912. Newspapers call her “one of the ten greatest citizens of the Republic.” Hull House becomes a model of neighborhood social support, which is replicated in other cities, and still operates to this day.
Photographer and photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston is the official White House photographer for five presidential administrations: those of Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft. She gains further renown when she is commissioned to document the success of the first higher educational institution to admit both African Americans and Native Americans, what would later become Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. Her first camera is a gift from George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak fame. More than twenty thousand of her photographs are housed in the Frances Benjamin Johnston collection at the Library of Congress.
Lifelong radical and activist Emma Goldman immigrates to New York City; later she says that her life began on this date. She agitates on behalf of unrestricted liberty; eventually she cofounds the radical journal Mother Earth. Goldman is also very pivotal in the movement supporting birth control and speaks in public forums to attract support for the cause.
Jane Cunningham Croly founds and becomes the first president of the Women’s Press Club of New York.
Susan La Flesche Picotte graduates from medical school at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania at the top of her class. She becomes the first Native American woman physician in the United States to earn a medical degree. She returns to the Omaha reservation in Nebraska, where she serves as a physician and works to improve health conditions of the tribe.
Roman Catholic nun Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, who from childhood wanted to make religious life her work, comes to the United States to work among poor Italian immigrants. In 1946, she becomes the first American citizen to be made a Roman Catholic saint.