[Kobi]

1519
Mexican Indian princess and slave Doña Marina becomes translator and mistress of Hernán Cortés as he conquers New Spain.

1528
In the Gulf of Mexico, 10 Spanish women accompany their husbands on a voyage of discovery. After the men are lost, the women search for them for a year, then settle in Veracruz.

1553
Mary Tudor becomes queen of England and has Lady Jane Grey, who had been queen for nine days, beheaded the following year. Mary's persecution of Protestants earns her the name Bloody Mary.

1558
Elizabeth I, half-sister of Mary Tudor, becomes queen of England. She brings religious tolerance for Protestants and ushers in an era of exploration.

1587
Mary, Queen of Scots, is beheaded by order of Queen Elizabeth I.

1603
Okuni, a Japanese dancer of the Izumo shrine, invents Kabuki.

1607
Pocahontas saves Jamestown colonist Captain John Smith from execution by Algonquian Chief Powhatan.

1629
Tokugawa shogun Iemitsu bans women from Kabuki theatre because it is considered immoral for women to dance in public.

1638
Anne Hutchinson is expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for “traducing the ministers” of that Puritan colony. She and other religious dissenters found Rhode Island.

1642
Brilliana, Lady Harley, defends Brampton Bryan Castle from the Royalist army in her husband's absence during the English Civil Wars.

1643
Blanche, Lady Arundel, holds off the English Parliamentarian troops who attack Wardour Castle while her husband is away.

1644
On her 18th birthday, Queen Christina ascends the throne of Sweden.

1648
Margaret Brent, one of the largest landowners in Maryland, asks the Maryland Assembly for two votes, one for herself and another as Leonard Calvert's administrator and Lord Baltimore's attorney. Her request is denied.

1650
Anne Bradstreet's first volume of poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, is published in London.

1660
Mary Barrett Dyer is executed in Boston for her Quaker proselytizing.

1669
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz enters the convent of Santa Paula in Mexico City. Her religious life allows her to dedicate herself to scholarship and lyric poetry.

1681
La Fontaine makes her debut at the Paris Opéra as the first female professional ballet dancer.

1682
Mary Rowlandson publishes A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, describing her capture by Narragansett warriors and three months of captivity.

1682
Sophia becomes regent of Russia for her brother Ivan after she leads a palace coup against their half-brother Peter, who becomes coruler.

1692
The Salem witch trials condemn 19 to die; most of the accused and the accusers are women.

1702
Queen Anne ascends the throne of England.

1704
Twenty-five Frenchwomen, called “Cassette girls,” journey to Mobile on the Gulf Coast of North America to find husbands. Initially they refuse to marry any of the colonists, because of the crude conditions they find.

1711
Queen Anne founds the Ascot races.

1715
Elizabeth Elstob publishes The Rudiments of Grammar, the first Anglo-Saxon grammar.

1718
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu advocates smallpox inoculation, which she has seen in Constantinople.

1725
Catherine I becomes ruler of Russia on the death of her husband, Peter the Great.

1741
Elizabeth Lucas Pinckney introduces indigo cultivation in South Carolina; by 1742 she has a successful crop.

1748
Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi publishes Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (“Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth”).

1750
Hannah Snell publishes The Female Soldier, an account of her exploits in the British army fighting against the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie as well as her years as a marine in India.

1762
Sophie Friederike Auguste, princess von Anhalt-Zerbst, ascends the Russian throne as Catherine II several months after forcing her husband, Peter III, to abdicate. She rules as an “enlightened despot” until 1796.

1770
Phillis Wheatley, the first African American woman poet of note in the United States, publishes her first poem, An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of the Celebrated Divine…George Whitefield.

1774
Joining many other colonial women boycotting British goods, 51 women in Edenton, North Carolina, sign a petition endorsing the Nonimportation Association resolves.

1776
Ann Lee founds the parent Shaker settlement in America in the woods of Niskeyuna, New York.

1778
On June 28, Mary McCauly (“Molly Pitcher”), wife of an American gunner, brings water to the troops at the Battle of Monmouth Court House. Legend claims that she takes her husband's place after he collapses.

1778
Laura Bassi, author of De problemate quodam mechanico and De problemate quodam hydrometrico and the first woman professor of physics (at the University of Bologna), dies.

1782
Deborah Sampson, disguised as a man, enlists in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment as Robert Shurtleff. She is one of many women who fight in the American Revolution.

1783
German-born British astronomer Caroline Herschel discovers three nebulae.

1783
Catherine II (the Great) of Russia makes Yekaterina Dashkova the first president of the newly founded Russian Academy, which promotes the study and use of the Russian language.

1789
More than 8,000 Parisian market women march to Versailles and present their demands, which include more affordable bread, to the National Assembly and the king.

c. 1790
In the United States, the Second Great Awakening begins; significantly more women than men participate in this wave of religious revival.

1791
French activist Olympia de Gouges publishes Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), in which she argues that women are citizens as much as are men. She goes to the guillotine in 1793.

1792
Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

1793
Four years after the start of the French Revolution, queen consort Marie-Antoinette is guillotined.

1793
Hannah Slater receives the first U.S. patent granted to a woman, for a type of cotton thread. Her invention helps her husband build a successful textile business.

1795
Anne Parrish founds the House of Industry, which provides employment to poor women. It is the first American charitable organization operated by women for women.

1800
The United States logs the highest birth rate in the world, 7.04 children per woman.