Who Was the First Woman to Earn a College Degree? Catherine Brewer Benson's 1840 Graduation

The First College Degree Awarded to a Woman: July 16, 1840

Catherine Brewer Benson received the first college degree awarded to a woman by a chartered degree-granting institution on July 16, 1840, at Georgia Female College in Macon, Georgia. The college, now known as Wesleyan College, held a state charter from the Georgia General Assembly explicitly authorizing it to confer degrees. That legal distinction set it apart from the female seminaries and finishing schools that existed for women at the time. Eleven women graduated that day. Brewer's name came first alphabetically. She was 17 or 18 years old.

The institution still operates as a four-year liberal arts college. The original diploma is preserved in the Georgia State University Library Special Collections. The Georgia Historical Society has placed a historical marker at Wesleyan College designating it "the World's First College Chartered to Grant Degrees to Women."

For comparison: Vassar College did not open until 1865. Wellesley College and Smith College followed in 1875. Bryn Mawr College in 1885. Every institution we now associate with women's higher education came decades after 11 women collected their diplomas in Macon on a July morning in 1840.

The Short Answer and Why It Needs a Qualifier

The "first woman to earn a college degree" is Catherine Brewer Benson, but that claim requires a specific qualifier to be accurate.

Mississippi College, a coeducational institution, awarded degrees to two women, Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall, in 1831. That was nine years before Brewer. Those degrees were real. The distinction is not degree quality but institutional charter: Mississippi College was not founded to grant degrees to women and held no charter establishing that as its purpose.

Georgia Female College's charter, granted by the Georgia General Assembly on December 23, 1836, used language that had never appeared in a charter for a women's institution: the college would have the power to "confer all such honors, degrees, and licenses as are usually conferred in colleges or universities." Degree-granting was not an accommodation or an afterthought. It was the founding purpose.

Oberlin College graduated three women with bachelor's degrees in 1841, one year after Georgia Female College. Oberlin's distinction is different and equally significant: it was the first coeducational institution to award women degrees in a program identical to the men's program. Those three women, Mary Hosford, Elizabeth Prall, and Mary Caroline Rudd, completed the same course of study as their male classmates. Georgia Female College was first among institutions chartered specifically for women; Oberlin College was first among coeducational institutions where men and women completed the same curriculum together.

Catherine Brewer holds the "first at an institution chartered specifically for women" distinction, and that is the claim this article covers.

Catherine Brewer Benson: The Person Behind the Historic Diploma

Catherine Elizabeth Brewer was born in 1822 in Augusta, Georgia. Her parents had moved south from Brookline, Massachusetts, and had initially planned to send her back to New England for school, which was the expected path for a family of their background.

When her father heard about the new Georgia Female College in Macon, he enrolled her on the school's opening day, January 7, 1839. She entered as a junior. She had already completed two years of schooling elsewhere, which placed her immediately in the cohort that would form the first graduating class. That cohort started with approximately 20 women. Eleven would complete the course.

Graduation was held on July 16, 1840. Eleven bachelor's degrees were awarded. The diploma given to Catherine Brewer explicitly stated she had "completed the regular course" and was granted "the First Degree," the period's equivalent of a bachelor's degree. Because her surname began with B, she was first in line. That alphabetical accident is how she became, by name, the first.

After graduation, Catherine married Richard Aaron Benson on November 24, 1842. They raised ten children in Macon. She remained connected to her alma mater throughout her life. In 1859, she helped found the Wesleyan Alumnae Association, described as the first alumnae organization of its kind in the world. In 1888, nearly 50 years after her own graduation, she returned to Wesleyan College to address the graduating class at the Semi-Centennial celebration. Her remarks became the Benson Charge, still quoted at Wesleyan commencements today.

She died February 27, 1908, in Macon, at age 86. She had lived long enough to see the women's suffrage movement reach full momentum, though the 19th Amendment would not pass until 12 years after her death.

One further detail: her son William Shepherd Benson became the first Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy, a position created on May 11, 1915. A family with two American firsts, separated by 75 years.

Georgia Female College: The 1836 Charter That Changed American Education

The founding of Georgia Female College was not a solitary act of progressive idealism. It came from a specific convergence of Methodist institutional ambition, local civic investment, and genuine educational reform.

In 1835, a group of Macon businessmen held a town meeting and raised $9,000 for construction. The Georgia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church joined as the institutional sponsor, providing both legitimacy and organizational infrastructure. The Georgia General Assembly chartered the college on December 23, 1836.

The charter's language was what made the institution historic. Previous institutions for women had deliberately stopped short of using the word "college" and had stopped short of degree-granting authority, because awarding women credentials equal to men's was politically and socially contentious. The Georgia Female College charter said nothing of the sort. It authorized the institution to grant "all such honors, degrees, and licenses as are usually conferred in colleges or universities," with no qualifications or restrictions.

The college opened to students on January 7, 1839, under Rev. George Foster Pierce as its first president. Eighteen months later came graduation. The institution was renamed Wesleyan Female College in 1843, then Wesleyan College in 1917. It still operates today as a four-year liberal arts college in Macon, Georgia.

A Curriculum Designed to Prove That Women Could Match Men's Coursework

The Georgia Female College curriculum was not domestic science. It was not "accomplishments." It was a full academic program designed to match what men received at comparable institutions.

Students studied natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, botany, physiology, geology, history, and both ancient and modern languages. That list was deliberate. The founders intended to demonstrate that women could complete the same rigorous coursework as men, not a simplified version. The curriculum was the argument, made in syllabi rather than speeches.

Female seminaries like Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary (founded 1821) and Mary Lyon's Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (founded 1837) offered serious coursework and were genuine predecessors in women's education. Both seminaries stopped short of granting degrees. In legal terms, they were closer to elite secondary schools than to colleges. Georgia Female College held a state-chartered degree-granting authority that neither seminary possessed.

July 16, 1840: The Graduation Ceremony and What the Diploma Actually Said

Eleven women received diplomas on July 16, 1840. The ceremony marked the completion of approximately 18 months of study for a group that had entered the college as juniors when it opened in January 1839.

Catherine Brewer received her diploma first because her surname came first alphabetically among the 11 graduates. The diploma's language was precise: she had "completed the regular course" and received "the First Degree." That phrasing was not ceremonial. It was a legal statement about the nature of the credential, one that established Georgia Female College's diploma as equivalent to a bachelor's degree from any chartered institution of higher learning.

The University of Washington iSchool later included this diploma in its "Documents That Changed the World" series.

The original diploma is held in the Georgia State University Library Special Collections, accessible through the Digital Library of Georgia. It is one of the few primary source documents from this event that survives in photographic form.

The Arguments Against Women's Higher Education in the 1800s

The 1840 graduation was a deliberate act against the dominant cultural current, and the founders of Georgia Female College knew it.

Opposition to women's higher education drew on several distinct arguments. The medical establishment produced the first pseudoscientific case: physicians claimed that intellectual exertion diverted blood from reproductive organs, causing infertility, disease, and physical deterioration in women. These medical arguments grew louder after 1850 and were deployed specifically against the rigorous academic curricula women were pursuing.

Religious opposition read scripture as restricting women's scholarly ambitions. The proper sphere of a woman, by this view, was domestic and spiritual, not academic.

The social-role argument was perhaps the most pervasive of the three. Education should prepare women for domesticity and motherhood, not confer credentials. Female seminaries were socially acceptable precisely because they stopped short of granting degrees. A degree implied something, and that something made people uncomfortable.

By 1890, the discomfort had acquired statistics. Data showed that graduates of Vassar College, Smith College, and Wellesley College were marrying later and less frequently than the national average. Critics cited these numbers as evidence that higher education "ruined" women for marriage.

Georgia Female College's Methodist sponsors handled this by framing women's education as an expression of religious virtue and social responsibility, not a challenge to it. The resistance to women's degrees was not just cultural inertia. It was a deliberate argument about where women belonged. Even Florence Nightingale's transformation of nursing into a respected profession was shaped by these limits: nursing was acceptable because it extended domestic caregiving, not because it defied it.

From 11 Graduates in 1840 to the Seven Sisters and Beyond

In the last quarter of the 19th century, women attending college grew from roughly 3,000 to nearly 20,000. The institutions that shaped this growth came, one by one, in the decades after Wesleyan College pioneered the path. Vassar College opened in 1865. Wellesley College and Smith College followed in 1875. Radcliffe College in 1879. Bryn Mawr College in 1885. Barnard College in 1889. These institutions, along with Mount Holyoke (elevated from its seminary origins), became the Seven Sisters colleges, the most recognized cluster of women's higher education in American history.

In 1862, Mary Jane Patterson became the first Black woman to earn a bachelor's degree in the United States, graduating from Oberlin College. She had completed the same program that had graduated its first female class just 21 years earlier.

The credentialing gap between men and women carried real economic consequences across this entire period. It would take decades before women could translate education into independent wealth at the highest levels, as the story of the first self-made female millionaire in American history makes clear.

In 1979, women first outnumbered men in college degree programs. That balance has not reversed.

Today, women earn 59% of all U.S. bachelor's degrees, according to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data. Pew Research Center reported in November 2024 that 47% of women ages 25 to 34 hold a bachelor's degree, compared to 37% of men. Female undergraduates exceed male undergraduates on U.S. campuses by 2.4 million students.

The bachelor's degree was just the beginning. In the decades that followed 1840, women pushed steadily into graduate study, which raises the question of who earned the first doctoral degree awarded to a woman in the US, a milestone that required its own set of institutional battles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the first woman to earn a college degree in the US?

Catherine Brewer Benson, who graduated from Georgia Female College (now Wesleyan College) in Macon, Georgia, on July 16, 1840. She was the first woman to receive a degree from an institution legally chartered to grant degrees to women. Mississippi College had awarded degrees to two women, Alice Robinson and Catherine Hall, in 1831, but as a coeducational institution, not one chartered specifically for women.

What college was first chartered to grant degrees to women?

Georgia Female College, chartered by the Georgia General Assembly on December 23, 1836. The institution is now known as Wesleyan College and is still operating in Macon, Georgia. Its 1836 charter explicitly authorized it to confer "all such honors, degrees, and licenses as are usually conferred in colleges or universities," language unprecedented for a women's institution at the time.

Was Oberlin College the first to give women college degrees?

Oberlin College was first among coeducational institutions. Three women, Mary Hosford, Elizabeth Prall, and Mary Caroline Rudd, graduated from Oberlin with bachelor's degrees in 1841, one year after Georgia Female College graduated its first class. Oberlin's distinction is that it was the first coeducational college to award women degrees in a program identical to the men's program. Georgia Female College was first among institutions chartered specifically for women.

Who was the first Black woman to earn a college degree?

Mary Jane Patterson, who earned her bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1862, making her the first Black woman to receive a college degree in the United States.

What was the Benson Charge?

The Benson Charge is the speech Catherine Brewer Benson delivered at Wesleyan College's Semi-Centennial celebration in 1888, nearly 50 years after her own graduation. Her most-quoted passage: "Demands will be made upon you which were not made upon us. Your training, if you are true to it, will amply qualify you to meet those demands." Wesleyan College has cited this speech at commencements ever since.

What Her Degree Started: The Benson Charge and the World It Made Possible

The Benson Charge is still read at Wesleyan commencements. The words are from 1888, but the event that made them possible happened in 1840, when a college in Macon, Georgia, decided that a legal charter authorizing degrees for women was both achievable and worth pursuing.

Catherine Brewer's diploma did not change the world by itself. What it did was make an argument, in legal form, that women could complete the same academic program as men. That argument was contested for decades. The opposition cited biology, scripture, marriage rates, and social order. The counterargument was a curriculum, a charter, and 11 graduates on a July morning.

One woman's name happened to come first. That is how history records her.

Catherine Brewer Benson's diploma is the starting point for a much longer story. Read more about women's educational firsts in this archive.