Elizabeth Blackwell, becoming the United States' first woman doctor, is awarded her M.D. by the Medical Institute of Geneva, New York, on January 23, 1849.

Elizabeth Blackwell opens a hospital, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, on March 12, 1857.

In 1853, Blackwell had established a small dispensary near Tompkins Square.

She had also taken Marie Zakrzewska, a Polish woman pursuing a medical education, under her wing, serving as her preceptor in her pre-medical studies.

In 1857, Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, along with Blackwell and her sister Emily, who has also obtained a medical degree, expand Blackwell's original dispensary into the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children.

Women will serve on the board of trustees, on the executive committee and as attending physicians.

The institution will accept both in- and outpatients and serve as a nurse's training facility.

The patient load will double in the second year.

Stanton's position has led to a major schism in the women's rights movement itself by the time the Fifteenth Amendment is making its way through Congress.

Many leaders in the women's rights movement, including Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, strongly argue against Stanton's "all or nothing" position.

By 1869, disagreement over ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment has given birth to two separate women's suffrage organizations.

The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) had been founded in May 1869 by Anthony and Stanton, who will serve as its president for twenty-one years.

The NWSA opposes passage of the Fifteenth Amendment without changes to include female suffrage and, under Stanton's influence in particular, champions a number of women's issues that are deemed too radical by more conservative members of the suffrage movement.

The better-funded, larger, and more representative woman suffragist vehicle American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded the following November and led by Stone, Blackwell, and Howe, supports the Fifteenth Amendment as written.

Following passage of that Amendment, the AWSA prefers to focus only on female suffrage rather than advocate for the broader women's rights espoused by Stanton: gender-neutral divorce laws, a woman's right to refuse her husband sexually, increased economic opportunities for women, and the right of women to serve on juries.