The College That Started It All — For Women

In 1836, a group of Macon businessmen raised $9,000 to found a college where women could study the same subjects as men — a radical idea at the time. Chartered as the Georgia Female College, it became the first institution in the world authorized to grant degrees to women. In 1840, it awarded the first college degree ever given to a woman: Catherine Brewer of Macon. The college, later renamed Wesleyan, kept racking up firsts. In 1851 and 1852, students there founded the first two sororities in American history — the Adelphean Society, now known as Alpha Delta Pi, and the Philomathean Society, now known as Phi Mu. Its alumnae association, founded in 1859, is the oldest in the world. Among its graduates: Georgia's first licensed female pilot, Georgia's first woman to earn a medical degree, and the first woman to argue a case before the Georgia Supreme Court.