Vermont Women's History Time Line
1900-1950
1900 - Law passed allowing women to serve as town clerks, trustees of public libraries, superintendents of schools, and notaries public.
1906 - First woman appointed to Board of Visitors to State Institutions.
1907 - VT Equal Suffrage Association organized.
1910 - Addie (Laird) Card, 10 year old Pownal mill worker photographed by Lewis Hines. Becomes a “poster child” for those working against child labor.
1912 - Gertrude Daniels launches no taxation without suffrage campaign in Grafton.
1917 - Tax-paying women obtain right to vote in municipal elections.
1919 - Legislature ratifies 19th Amendment and Gov. Clement vetoes bill.
1920 - Gov. Percival Clement refuses to call special session of the VT Legislature to ratify Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution granting full suffrage to women.
- Edna Beard, first women elected to VT Legislature.
- Formation of VT League of Women Voters.
1921 - Establishment of first woman's prison, Riverside Women's Reformatory.
- Dorothy Canfield Fisher, first women elected to VT State Board of Education.
1922 - Edna Beard, first woman elected to VT Senate.
1924 - US Abenaki women eligible to vote in Vermont elections.
1927 - Nellie Cox Laird represents Montpelier. First woman to be elected to the legislature from a large town in VT.
- Appointment of 1st woman factory inspector in VT.
1929 - Consuelo Northrop Bailey is first woman to try a murder case in VT.
1931 - Helen Hartness Flanders, folklorist, publishes Vermont Folk-Songs and Ballads.
1932 - Bennington College for Women opens.
1933 - Consuelo Northrop Bailey is the first woman admitted to practice law before the US Supreme Court.
1936 - VT branch of OWLS (Order of Women Legislators) formed.
1942 - Law passed making women eligible for jury duty.
- Amolina Elias of St. Albans, first woman to graduate from machine shop course in Production Training Program at Bellows Free Academy.
1949 - Helen Burbank appointed first woman Secretary of State in VT.