Lured by cheap and plentiful land, German-born Anna Maria Merckle Hite with husband Jost moved to the northern Shenandoah Valley in 1732. That same year, Quaker Ann Robinson Hollingsworth and her husband Abraham began settling what is now Winchester. Migration to Virginia's Great Valley was encouraged to create a barrier between the Indians and the English settled to the east.

Captured by Indians in 1755, Mary Draper Ingles walked hundreds of miles through wilderness from the Ohio Valley to her home in what is now Blacksburg.

Virginia's first chartered woman's college was Hollins in Roanoke in 1842. The state's first female college president, Matty Cocke, took the helm 59 years later in 1901.

Ida Stover, mother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was born in Augusta County, 1862.

First American-born black woman to obtain a medical degree was Rebecca Lee in 1864. A Richmond native, she graduated from the New England Woman's Medical College in Boston.

Initial meetings of the Virginia Equal Suffrage League (ESL) took place in 1909 at the Richmond home of Anne Clay Crenshaw. After women won the vote in 1920, the ESL became the Virginia League of Women Voters.

Of the five Albemarle County Langhorne sisters, who included Lady Nancy Astor, Irene was the dazzling beauty. She married Charles Dana Gibson in 1895 and became famous as The Gibson Girl in his drawings which influenced a change to less constricting women's garments.

The nation's first state appointed home demonstration agent was Ella G. Agnew of Richmond. In 1910, she established model programs in Nottaway and Halifax Counties.

Internationally recognized black poet, Anne Spencer of Henry County, established her well-known Lynchburg home in the early 1900s.

Richmond's first public library opened in 1924 in a Victorian mansion. A $500,000 bequest in 1925 from Sally May Dooley funded the (James H.) Dooley Memorial Library building.

Virginia Tech's first female engineering graduate was Ruth Louise Terrett Earle in 1925. Two years earlier, she had helped create and then captained Tech's first women's basketball team.

The first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature was Pearl S. Buck in 1938. She graduated from Lynchburg's Randolph-Macon Woman's College in 1914.

Supervisor of the WWII Army Nurse Corps and the first woman to hold a permanent commission in the U.S. Army (1947) was Florence Aby Blanchfield from Warren County.

In 1958 Mavis Cobb became the first Fairfax woman to practice law full-time. She lived in what is now the City of Fairfax.

The first female solo artist elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame (1973) was Winchester's Patsy Cline.

Virginia's first black woman legislator, Yvonne Bond Miller of Norfolk, was elected to the House in 1984, the Senate in 1988. Widely known and respected.

Dorothy Height, born in Richmond in 1912, served four decades (1957-1997) as president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Leslie L. Byrne, former Fairfax local League of Women Voters president, became Virginia's first U.S. Congresswoman (1993).

Three Virginia jurisdictions have had female sheriffs: Richmond, Michelle B. Mitchell (1994); Charlottesville, Cornelia D. Johnson (1999); Arlington, Beth Arthur (2000).

The first woman named an honorary Virginian was former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1998.

In 1999, June Boyle, first Fairfax female homicide detective, became the first woman to win Virginia's "Top Homicide Investigator of the Year" award.

Directed by JoAnn Falletta, the Virginia Symphony's debut at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in January 2000 was well received. The Norfolk-area based ensemble is unusually youthful and over half of its personnel are women.

In the 2000 General Assembly session, Senator Mary Margaret Whipple of Arlington became chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, the first woman to hold a senate leadership position. Frances P. Datig of Henrico was the first woman elected House Sergeant-at-Arms. Duties include carrying the ceremonial mace to begin the day's proceedings.

The first black woman elected to the Alexandria City Council was Joyce Woodson in May, 2000.

Each of us can make a difference.