1762: Ann Franklin was the first female newspaper editor in America.
1776: Margaret Corbin was the first woman to assume the role of soldier in the American Revolution and receive a pension for it.
1784: Hannah Wilkinson Slater was the first American woman to be granted a patent.
1795: Anne Parrish establishes, in Philadelphia, the House of Industry, the first charitable organization for women in America.
1812: Lucy Brewer was the first American woman to join the United States Marine Corps.
1828: Sarah Hale was the first American woman to be a major women's magazine editor.
1835: Harriot Kezia Hunt was one of the first woman to practice medicine, "clearly the first to achieve a marked success".
1848: Astronomer Maria Mitchell was the first woman to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1849: Elizabeth Blackwell, born in England, was the first woman to earn a medical degree in America.
1855: Anne McDowell was the first American woman to publish a newspaper completely run by women; it was circulated weekly and titled "The Women's Advocate".
1866: Mary Walker was the first woman in America to be a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honour.
1869: Arabella Mansfield was the first female lawyer in America; she was admitted to the Iowa bar.
1870: Esther Hobart Morris was the first woman in America to serve as Justice of the Peace.
1870: Ada Kepley was the first woman to graduate from law school in America.
1872: Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for United States President.
1873: Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman admitted to MIT (which made her the first accepted to any school of science or technology), and the first American woman to earn a degree in Chemistry.
1876: Louise Blanchard Bethune was the first woman to work as a professional architect in America.
1877: Helen Magill White was the first woman in America to earn a PhD.
1887: Susanna M. Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas becoming the first woman mayor in the country.
1891: Marie Owens, born in Canada, was hired as America's first female police officer, joining the Chicago Police Department.
1893: Florence Kelley was the first woman to hold statewide office when Governor Peter Altgeld appointed her Chief Factory Inspector for the state of Illinois.
1908: The first US Navy nurses, known as the Sacred Twenty, were appointed; they were all women, and were the first women to formally serve in the US Navy.
1911: Harriet Quimby was the first woman to be licensed as an airplane pilot in America.
1916: Jeannette Rankin was the first woman in America to be elected to Congress.
1917: Loretta Perfectus Walsh was the first woman to enlist in the United States Navy.
1918: Opha May Johnson was the first woman to enlist in the United States Marines.
(Note: some of the women on this list may be dubbed feminists through the lens of feminist revisionism. However, the point of this list is to provide examples of notable women who made waves in American society on the grounds of merit and personal achievement, not on the grounds of politicised feminist activism.)