Brown, Olympia
Olympia Brown was born in a log cabin in Prairie Ronde, Michigan. After being educated locally, she began teaching school at age 15, then searched for a college that would admit her. Refused entrance...
View ArticleGoodell, Lavinia
Lavinia Goodell, born Rhoda Lavinia Goodell, was the daughter of a prominent abolitionist family in New York. While in high school &mdash a decade before women were admitted to law school or the...
View ArticleMears, Helen Farnsworth
Helen Farnsworth Mears was a self-taught sculptor. Born in Oshkosh, she learned anatomy from her father and used the family woodshed as a studio. She won her first award at the age of nine, at the...
View ArticleLa Follette, Belle Case
Born Belle Case in Summit, La Follette moved with her family to a farm in Baraboo, where she grew up. At age 16 she started attending the UW-Madison, where she met her husband, Robert. Already a...
View ArticleHooper, Jessie Jack
Jessie Jack Hooper was born on a farm in Iowa, but lived most of her life in Oshkosh. A local leader in school reform and public health, she joined the women’s suffrage movement in the 1910s and...
View ArticleCatt, Carrie Chapman
Catt was born Carrie Clinton Lane in Ripon. In 1880, she graduated from Iowa Agriculture College, where she was the only woman in her class. Catt worked as a law clerk, a teacher, and eventually a...
View ArticleWolcott, Laura Ross
Laura Ross was born in Maine in 1826. She graduated from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1856 — the third woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree. She then moved to Milwaukee in 1857,...
View ArticleColby, Clara Bewick
Clara Bewick was born in England in 1846, but grew up mostly in Windsor, Wisconsin, where her family experienced poverty and hardship. One of six women in the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s first...
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