In WWII many U.S. states passed laws mandating equal pay for men and women: a trend to continue afterward with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in Title VII forbidding gender discrimination in hiring, but notably excluding academia from that rule. Schools and universities in Japan, too, struggled with the inclusion of females — as students. Before the Meiji restoration of the 19th century the feudal system of Japan taught women to be subservient to the men in their lives. The trend only changed starting in the early decades of the 20th.

On this day, August 16, in 1913, the Tohoku Imperial University of Japan, one of the elite schools in the nation, for the first time accepted women into their programs.

Chika Kuroda, Raku Makita and Ume Tange were the first three women to be accepted into Tohoku, breaking the tradition of male selection from regional high schools. All went on to great accomplishments. Kuroda, for example, earned a bachelor’s in science and went on to study at Oxford before joining a Japanese research laboratory and dedicating her life to studying plant.