Skip to content Skip to main navigation Skip to footer

Cornelia Kelley Hood

(1851–1916)

In the late 1880s, Cornelia Kelley Hood chaperoned the first class of women admitted to the New York University School of Law, where she completed her own law degree in 1893.

She initiated what became a 25-year series of lectures on the law as it affected women for The Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. A close friend of Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Hood led many national events designed to further the women’s suffrage cause, although her main thrust was not so much to urge women to rebel as to inform them of their rights under existing laws and show them how to take advantage of the new rights that the suffrage movement was gradually opening to them.