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- Founding - Old
Sem - Name - Women
- First Graduates -
- King Chapel - Physical
Education - May Music Festivals
- OCAAT -
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Harriette J. Cooke
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You could almost say that Girl Power started at Cornell
College. Just look at the facts. When the college opened in 1853
the first person to enroll was a woman. One of the first two graduates
was a woman. Cornell was the first college west of the Mississippi
to be coeducational, the first college in Iowa to grant a bachelor's
degree to a woman and the first U.S. college to grant a full professorship
to a woman, Harriette J. Cooke, with pay equal to a male professor.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke at the college in 1875.
Susan B. Anthony visited in 1879. So it was no big surprise that
in the early 1870s, when the men got compulsory military training,
the women demanded the same thing. However, the women got wooden
sticks instead of rifles and had to wear skirts, not trousers, with
their khaki uniforms. But by 1889 the women had real rifles and
target practice. And they stuck by their guns, so to speak, even
though the boys teased and claimed they scared up the cows that
roamed freely around the campus.
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