Women were admitted to the University of Michigan starting in 1870, the first for a large state university. The first African-American woman in the country to earn a degree in dentistry — Ida Gray — did so at U-M in 1890. Notable alumnae include Alice Freeman Palmer, named to the presidency of Wellesley College in 1882 and who quickly became the nation’s leading advocate of higher education for women, and Alice Hamilton, first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard Medical School. Forty years after women first were admitted, they outnumbered men being inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
— U-M Bicentennial website, bicentennial.umich.edu
