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6 Essays on Women's History

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Check out the following 6 blog posts in which the contributions of a number of key figures from women’s history are discussed. Together, these posts shed light on some of the unique ways that women have helped to shape the political landscapes of multiple countries and the experiences of workers in industries including the teaching profession itself.

Fannie Lou Hamer: Unsung Woman of the Civil Rights Movement   Facing History Cleveland recently offered a riveting professional development webinar to Ohio-based educators called “Standing on Their Shoulders: Unsung Women of the Civil Rights Movement.” There, Program Director Pamela Donaldson and Senior Program Associate Lisa Lefstein-Berusch provided educators with strategies and frameworks they can use to broaden students’ knowledge of the contributions Black women made to the movement, as well as deepen students’ understanding of specific strategies that have driven social change.

Dolores Huerta's Life of Indefatigable Resistance A powerful story that is often left out of news stories and history books is that of Dolores Huerta—a Chicana activist whose contributions rival those of the most renowned civil rights leaders in U.S. history, but whose legacy is significantly less known. Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and nine honorary doctorates, Huerta is a living legend in the labor movement and has been a tireless advocate for social justice for over 50 years.

Remembering Daisy Bates: Orator at the March on Washington The March on Washington was the historic 1963 protest in which as many as 500,000 people marched to demand jobs and freedom for Americans of all racial backgrounds. Though many of us remember this as the day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, it is easy to forget that he was not the only civil rights leader to address the crowd. One of the leaders who joined him was movement veteran Daisy Bates—the only woman permitted to speak, though not in her own words.

How One Lesbian Couple Defied the Nazis: An Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Jackson We spoke with Dr. Jeffrey Jackson—Professor of History at Rhodes College and author of  Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis . In this interview. Dr. Jackson discusses the untold story of Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, a French lesbian couple who intervened in the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands through an expansive artistic campaign during World War II. Better known to art historians by their adopted names of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Schwob and Malherbe’s story of resistance is told for the first time in Dr. Jackson’s new book. Here he shares a first look at their incredible story with Facing History.

Women's Suffrage at 100: The Key Role of Black Sororities Tuesday, August 18, 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This amendment established women's suffrage for the first time, granting white women across the country the right to vote to the exclusion of non-white women. Yet the women's suffrage movement contained many more key players than this outcome suggests. Among them were African American luminaries like Mary Church Terrell and the scores of Black women who joined with her to demand equal rights.

Teaching in the Light of Women's History Though we often think of Women’s History Month as a time to prioritize women’s voices and contributions in the classroom, this month is also a time to examine the profound ways in which women teachers, and broader perceptions of women, have shaped the teaching profession itself. From contemporary perceptions of the profession and the compensation of its workers, to the grounds for collective action that American teachers now enjoy, none can be understood outside the patriarchal context in which modern schooling emerged and women demanded justice. Examining this history offers not only a richer understanding of the challenges faced by today’s teachers, but reveals places where we must continue to disrupt patriarchal rhetoric if we are to cultivate school communities that do right by teachers and students. 

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American Women: Topical Essays

Introduction.

• American Women: An Overview
• Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913
• Sentiments of an American Woman
• The House That Marian Built: The MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire
• Women On The Move: Overland Journeys to California
• “With Peace and Freedom Blest!”: Woman as Symbol in America, 1590-1800
• The Long Road to Equality: What Women Won from the ERA Ratification Effort

Women’s history

World history.

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• The presentation of history

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In the 19th century, women’s history would have been inconceivable, because “history” was so closely identified with war , diplomacy, and high politics—from all of which women were virtually excluded. Although there had been notable queens and regents—such as Elizabeth I of England , Catherine de Medici of France, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Christina of Sweden —their gender was considered chiefly when it came to forming marriage alliances or bearing royal heirs. Inevitably, the ambition to write history “from the bottom up” and to bring into focus those marginalized by previous historiography inspired the creation of women’s history.

One of the consequences of the professionalization of history in the 19th century was the exclusion of women from academic history writing. A career like that of Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), one of the more prominent historians of 18th-century England, was impossible one hundred years later, when historical writing had been essentially monopolized by all-male universities and research institutes. This exclusion began to break down in the late 19th century as women’s colleges were founded in England (e.g., at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge) and the United States . Some of these institutions, such as Bryn Mawr College in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, had strong research agendas.

Although the earliest academic women’s historians were drawn to writing about women, it cannot be said that they founded, or even that they were interested in founding, a specialty like “women’s history.” Alice Clark wrote Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1920), and Eileen Power wrote Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (1922), a definitive monograph, and Medieval Women (published posthumously in 1975). Many women (including some in the early history of the Annales ) worked as unpaid research assistants and cowriters for their husbands, and it is doubtless that they were deprived of credit for being historians in their own right. An exception was Mary Ritter Beard (1876–1958), who coauthored a number of books with her more famous husband, Charles Beard , and also wrote Women as a Force in History , arguably the first general work in American women’s history.

Since it was still possible in the 1950s to doubt that there was enough significant evidence on which to develop women’s history, it is not surprising that some of the earliest work was what is called “contribution history.” It focused, in other words, on the illustrious actions of women in occupations traditionally dominated by men. The other preoccupation was the status of women at various times in the past. This was customarily evaluated in terms of comparative incomes, laws about ownership of property, and the degree of social freedom allowed within marriage or to unmarried women. In The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Gerda Lerner, whose work chiefly concerned women in the United States, examined Mesopotamian society in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subjection of women. Explorations of the status of women also contributed to a rethinking of fundamental historical concepts, as in Joan Kelly’s essay “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” (1977).

Another area of study, which was curiously slow to emerge, was the history of the family. Since in all times most women have been wives and mothers for most of their adult lives, this most nearly universal of female experiences would seem to dictate that women’s historians would be especially interested in the history of the family. Yet for a long time few of them were. The history of the family was inspired primarily not by women’s history but by advances made in historical demography, whose heavy quantification women’s history generally avoided.

This partly explains why the majority of works in women’s history have dealt with unmarried women—as workers for wages, nuns, lesbians, and those involved in passionate friendships. Evidence concerning the lives of these figures is in some ways easier to come by than evidence of maternal and family life, but it is also clear that feminist historians were averse to studying women as victims of matrimony—as they all too often were. There are, however, intersections between history of the family and women’s history. A few historians have written works on family limitation ( birth control ) in the United States, for example; one of these scholars, Linda Gordon, raised the important question of why suffragists and other feminists did not as a rule support campaigns for family limitation.

Another way in which women’s history can lead to a reassessment of history in general is by analyzing the concept of gender. Joan Scott has taken the lead in this effort. Gender, according to Scott and many others, is a socially constructed category for both men and women, whereas sex is a biological category denoting the presence or absence of certain chromosomes. Even physical differences between the sexes can be exaggerated (all fetuses start out female), but differences in gender are bound to be of greatest interest to historians. Of particular interest to women’s historians are what might be called “gender systems,” which can be engines of oppression for both men and women.

World history is the most recent historical specialty, yet one with roots in remote antiquity. The great world religions that originated in the Middle East— Judaism , Christianity , and Islam —insisted on the unity of humanity, a theme encapsulated in the story of Adam and Eve . Buddhism also presumed an ecumenical view of humankind. The universal histories that characterized medieval chronicles proposed a single story line for the human race , governed by divine providence; and these persisted, in far more sophisticated form, in the speculative philosophies of history of Vico and Hegel. Marxism too, although it saw no divine hand in history, nevertheless held out a teleological vision in which all humanity would eventually overcome the miseries arising from class conflict and leave the kingdom of necessity for the kingdom of plenty.

These philosophies have left their mark on world history, yet few historians (except for Marxists) now accept any of these master narratives. This fact, however, leads to a conceptual dilemma: if there is no single story in which all of humanity finds a part, how can there be any coherence in world history? What prevents it from simply being a congeries of national—or at the most regional—histories?

Modernization theorists have embraced one horn of this dilemma. There is, after all, a single story, they argue; it is worldwide Westernization. Acknowledging the worth of non-Western cultures and the great non-European empires of the past, they nevertheless see the lure of Western consumer goods—and the power of multinational corporations—as irresistible. This triumphalist view of Western economic and political institutions drew great new strength from the downfall of the managed economies of eastern Europe and the emergence in China of blatant state capitalism . It is easier to claim worldwide success for capitalism than for democracy , since capitalism has been perfectly compatible with the existence of autocratic governments in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong; but history does suggest that eventually capitalist institutions will give rise to some species of democratic institutions, even though multinational corporations are among the most secretive and hierarchical institutions in Western society.

Modernization theory has been propounded much more enthusiastically by sociologists and political scientists than by historians. Its purest expression was The Dynamics of Modernization (1966), by Cyril Edwin Black, which made its case by studying social indexes of modernization, such as literacy or family limitation over time, in developing countries. Extending this argument in a somewhat Hegelian fashion, the American historian Francis Fukuyama provocatively suggested, in The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that history itself, as traditionally conceived, had ceased. This, of course, meant not that there would be no more events but that the major issues of state formation and economic organization had now been decisively settled in favour of capitalism and democracy . Fukuyama was by no means a simple-minded cheerleader for this denouement; life in a world composed of nothing but liberal nation-states would be, among other things, boring.

A much grimmer aspect of modernization was highlighted by Theodore H. Von Laue (1987) in The World Revolution of Westernization . Von Laue focused on the stresses imposed on the rest of the world by Westernization, which he saw as the root cause of communism , Nazism , dictatorships in developing countries, and terrorism . He declined to forecast whether these strains would continue indefinitely.

The stock objection to modernization theory is that it is Eurocentric. So it is, but this is hardly a refutation of it. That European states (including Russia) and the United States have been the dominant world powers since the 19th century is just as much a fact as that Europe was a somewhat insignificant peninsula of Asia in the 12th century. Some modernization theorists have caused offense by making it clear that they think European dominance is good for everybody, but it is noteworthy how many share the disillusioned view of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who compared the rational bureaucracies that increasingly dominated European society to an “iron cage.” More-valid criticisms point to the simplistic character of modernization theory and to the persistence and even rejuvenation of ostensibly “premodern” features of society—notably religious fundamentalism .

A considerably more complex scheme of analysis, world-systems theory, was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein in The Modern World System (1974). Whereas modernization theory holds that economic development will eventually percolate throughout the world, Wallerstein believed that the most economically active areas largely enriched themselves at the expense of their peripheries . This was an adaptation of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ’s idea that the struggle between classes in capitalist Europe had been to some degree displaced into the international economy, so that Russia and China filled the role of proletarian countries. Wallerstein’s work was centred on the period when European capitalism first extended itself to Africa and the Americas, but he emphasized that world-systems theory could be applied to earlier systems that Europeans did not dominate. In fact, the economist André Gunder Frank argued for an ancient world-system and therefore an early tension between core and periphery . He also pioneered the application of world-systems theory to the 20th century, holding that “underdevelopment” was not merely a form of lagging behind but resulted from the exploitative economic power of industrialized countries. This “development of underdevelopment,” or “dependency theory,” supplied a plot for world history, but it was one without a happy ending for the majority of humanity. Like modernization theory, world-systems theory has been criticized as Eurocentric. More seriously, the evidence for it has been questioned by many economists, and while it has been fertile in suggesting questions, its answers have been controversial.

A true world history requires that there be connections between different areas of the world, and trade relations constitute one such connection. Historians and sociologists have revealed the early importance of African trade (Columbus visited the west coast of Africa before his voyages to the Americas, and he already saw the possibilities of the slave trade), and they have also illuminated the 13th-century trading system centring on the Indian Ocean , to which Europe was peripheral .

Humans encounter people from far away more often in commercial relationships than in any other, but they exchange more than goods. William H. McNeill , the most eminent world historian, saw these exchanges as the central motif of world history. Technological information is usually coveted by the less adept, and it can often be stolen when it is not offered. Religious ideas can also be objects of exchange. In later work, McNeill investigated the communication of infectious diseases as an important part of the story of the human species. In this he contributed to an increasingly lively field of historical studies that might loosely be called ecological history.

Focusing on the biological substrate of history can sometimes capture a vital element of common humanity. This was an early topic for the Annales historians, who were often trained in geography . Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie grounded his great history of the peasants of Languedoc in the soil and climate of that part of France , showing how the human population of the ancien régime was limited by the carrying capacity of the land. He went on to write a history of the climate since the year 1000. Even more influential were the magisterial works of Fernand Braudel (1902–85), perhaps the greatest historian of the 20th century. Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (1949; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II ) had a political component, but it seemed almost an afterthought. Although it was not a world history, its comprehensive treatment of an entire region comprising Muslim and Christian realms and the fringes of three continents succeeded in showing how they shared a similar environment . The environment assumed an even greater role in Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, XVe–XVIIIe siècle (vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2–3, 1979; Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century ). Although some of its claims seemed designed to shock conventional historical sensibilities—the introduction of forks into Europe, he wrote, was more important than the Reformation—no historical work has done more to explore the entire material base on which civilizations arise

One of the most important links between ecological history and world history is the so-called Columbian exchange , through which pathogens from the Americas entered Europe and those from Europe devastated the indigenous populations of the Americas. The Native Americans got much the worse of this exchange; the population of Mexico suffered catastrophic losses, and that of some Caribbean islands was totally destroyed. The effect on Europeans was much less severe. It is now thought that syphilis entered Europe from Asia, not the Americas.

Overt moralizing in historiography tends to attract professional criticism , and historians in Europe and the United States, where nation-states have long been established, no longer feel the moral obligation that their 19th-century predecessors did to exalt nationalism . They can therefore respond to global concerns, such as the clear-cutting of rainforests and global warming . It has become obvious that the world is a single ecosystem, and this may require and eventually evoke a corresponding world history.

There is, however, a powerful countertendency: subaltern history . Subaltern is a word used by the British army to denote a subordinate officer, and “subaltern studies” was coined by Indian scholars to describe a variety of approaches to the situation of South Asia , in particular in the colonial and postcolonial era. A common feature of these approaches is the claim that, though colonialism ended with the granting of independence to the former colonies of Britain , France, the United States, and other empires, imperialism did not. Instead, the imperial powers continued to exert so much cultural and economic hegemony that the independence of the former colonies was more notional than real. Insisting on free trade (unlimited access to the domestic markets of the former colonies) and anticommunism (usually enforced by autocratic governments), the old empires, as the subaltern theorists saw it, had reverted to the sort of indirect rule that the British had exerted over Argentina and other countries in the 19th century.

The other belief that united subaltern theorists is that this hegemony should be challenged. Orientalism (1978), by the literary critic Edward Said , announced many of the themes of subaltern studies. The Orient that Said discussed was basically the Middle East , and the Orientalism was the body of fact, opinion, and prejudice accumulated by western European scholars in their encounter with it. Said stressed the enormous appetite for this lore, which influenced painting, literature, and anthropology no less than history. It was, of course, heavily coloured by racism , but perhaps the most insidious aspect of it, in Said’s view, was that Western categories not only informed the production of knowledge but also were accepted by the colonized countries (or those nominally independent but culturally subordinate). The importation of Rankean historiography into Japan and Russia is an example. The result has been described rather luridly as epistemological rape, in that the whole cultural stock of colonized peoples came to be discredited.

Although originally and most thoroughly applied to the Middle East and South Asia, subaltern history is capable of extension to any subordinated population, and it has been influential in histories of women and of African Americans . Its main challenge to world history is that most subaltern theorists deny the possibility of any single master narrative that could form a plot for world history. This entails at least a partial break with Marxism, which is exactly such a narrative. Instead, most see a postmodern developing world with a congeries of national or tribal histories, without closures or conventional narratives, whose unity, if it has one at all, was imposed by the imperialist power.

The project of bringing the experience of subordinated people into history has been common in postwar historiography, often in the form of emphasizing their contributions to activities usually associated with elites. Such an effort does not challenge—indeed relies on—ordinary categories of historical understanding and the valuation placed on these activities by society. This has seemed to some subaltern theorists to implicate the historian in the very oppressive system that ought to be combated. The most extreme partisans of this combative stance claim that, in order to resist the hegemonic powers, the way that history is done has to be changed. Some feminists, for example, complain that the dominant system of logic was invented by men and violates the categories of thought most congenial to women. This is one of the reasons for the currency and success of postmodernist and postcolonialist thought. It licenses accounts of the past that call themselves histories but that may deviate wildly from conventional historical practice.

Such histories have been particularly associated with a “nativist” school of subaltern studies that rejects as “Western” the knowledge accumulated under the auspices of imperialism. An instructive example was the effort by Afrocentric historians to emphasize the possible Egyptian and Phoenician origins of classical Greek thought. Martin Bernal , for example, tried to show in Black Athena (1987) that the racist and anti-Semitic Orientalist discourse of the late 19th century (particularly but not exclusively in Germany ) obscured the borrowings of the classical Greeks from their Semitic and African neighbours. That there were borrowings, and that Orientalist discourse was racist and anti-Semitic, is beyond doubt, but these are findings made through ordinary historical investigation—whose conventions Bernal did not violate, despite the speculative character of some of his conclusions. How much distortion there was would also seem to be an ordinary, though difficult, historical question (made more difficult by the claim that the Egyptians had an esoteric and unwritten philosophical tradition that has left no documentary traces but that may have been imparted to Greek thinkers). But no historian could accept the claim that Aristotle gained knowledge from the library at Alexandria , since it was not built until after his death. If the idea that effects cannot precede causes is merely a culture-bound presupposition of Western-trained historians, then there is no logical basis for rejecting even a claim such as this. The nativist subaltern historians deserve credit at least for raising this issue (though, of course, not with such extreme examples). However, the price to be paid is high: if there are no logical categories that are not culture-bound, then people from different cultures cannot have a meaningful argument—or agreement—because these require at least some mutual acceptance of what will count as evidence and how reasoning is to be done . Most subaltern historians have therefore steered between the Scylla of contribution history and the Charybdis of nativism, and their emphasis on studying the mass of the people rather than colonial elites has had a powerful effect not only on the history of Asia and Africa but also on that of Europe and even the United States.

U.S. History As Women's History

New feminist essays, edited by linda k. kerber , alice kessler-harris , kathryn kish sklar.

488 pp., 6 x 9, 10 illus

• Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4495-3 Published: March 1995
• E-book EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8078-6686-3 Published: November 2000
• E-book PDF ISBN: 979-8-8908-6520-5 Published: November 2000

Gender and American Culture

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About the Authors

Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor of History at the University of Iowa, is author of Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America . For more information about Linda K. Kerber, visit the Author Page .

Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of history at Rutgers University, is author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States . For more information about Alice Kessler-Harris, visit the Author Page .

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York, Binghamton, is author of Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 . For more information about Kathryn Kish Sklar, visit the Author Page .

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In dialogue: Writing women’s history

By Marion Turner, Margaret Chowning, Virginia Trimble, and David A. Weintraub March 27, 2023

Over the last century, radical shifts in historical scholarship have filled glaring gaps in the way we understand gender from the past and in the present. By developing new methods of writing history, feminist scholars have produced more pluralistic and inclusive histories globally. In celebration of this collective effort, we asked four of our authors the following question: What do we find when we read ‘women’ into histories that often exclude them?  Their responses, ranging from medieval British literature to postcolonial Mexico to modern astronomy, illuminate the necessity of excavating women and womanhood from the past and the gifts we all enjoy upon doing so. This Women’s History Month, we present this dialogue to honor the innumerable women who make up our history as well as the many who write it.

Marion Turner |  The Wife of Bath: A Biography

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey , the heroine, Catherine Morland, confesses that she cannot make herself enjoy reading history: “The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.” Across time, the kinds of records that we have, and the kinds of stories that historians have most wanted to tell, have undoubtedly focused on men: on kings, soldiers, parliaments and other institutions which rigorously excluded women for most of history. Women’s histories are harder to excavate, but can be glimpsed and sometimes uncovered, if you know where to look and if you want to tell those unheard stories.

My 2019 biography of the fourteenth-century poet Chaucer— Chaucer: A European Life —was the story of a privileged man’s life, a story that had been told in different ways by many male biographers before me. I tried to do many things in this book, and one of those things was to look more at the women in Chaucer’s life. Very little work had been done on his daughter Elizabeth, for example, and I was able to find out fascinating information about the nunnery in which she lived. The nuns had been chastised for dancing and partying too much and having too many overnight guests. Similarly, while medievalists had long known that the earliest Chaucer life-record involved Chaucer being given some clothes, I put this record under a closer focus. The clothes had been given to him by his female employer, the countess of Ulster, and she was choosing to dress her young page in a scandalously tight and revealing outfit—in a style that was roundly condemned by contemporary chroniclers.

“Women’s histories are harder to excavate, but can be glimpsed and sometimes uncovered, if you know where to look and if you want to tell those unheard stories.”  

Nuns, parties, and fashion: these are as important in understanding Chaucer’s life and world as his work as a Member of Parliament, a Customs’ Officer, and a diplomat. And these more traditionally ‘male’ strands of history are not exclusively male either. His second trip to Italy, for instance, was made with the aim of organising a marriage alliance; he got his job as a Customs’ Officer at least partly because of his sister-in-law’s liaison with John of Gaunt.

My most recent project focuses primarily on recovering medieval women’s stories. It concentrates on an extraordinary female character—the Wife of Bath—and explores why and how she emerged in the late fourteenth century and how she has been treated across time, most recently with Zadie Smith’s 2021 adaptation. Taking this fictional woman as a focus, I created a methodology that allowed me to write a composite and experimental ‘biography,’ by delving into the lives of many fascinating medieval women.

I found, for example, a group of women who formed a union in the 1360s to complain to the king and mayor of London about price-fixing by a prominent male merchant. I found a widow who took over her husband’s skinning business, producing furs, ran it successfully, employed apprentices, and remembered a female scribe, as well as other women, in her will. I found a maid who abandoned her employer half-way across Europe in order to begin a social ascent, eventually gaining a far better job in Rome and dispensing patronage to her former employer. I found female blacksmiths, parchment-makers, and ship-owners. I found women who suffered abuse and women who made their voices heard in exposing misogyny and violence.

Perhaps most importantly, by tracing long histories, it became absolutely clear that things have not steadily improved across time. Women’s voices were sometimes suppressed more in later centuries than they were in the medieval era: for example, 1970s adaptations of the Wife of Bath were more misogynist than fifteenth-century versions. Recent events in the US have reminded us that the history of women’s rights is not an ongoing forward march. In my own study of the Wife of Bath, I saw hopeful signs in the last twenty years, when more female authors have made their voices heard and have produced intelligent and sensitive adaptations. But women’s voices are by no means heard equally with men’s, even today. The work of listening to women’s voices is as urgent now as it has ever been.

Margaret Chowning |  Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750–1940

Bucking the recent trend toward long, story-telling titles, I decided to call my recent book   simply “ Catholic Women and Mexican Politics.” This was after some false starts that included the word “gender” somewhere in the title. Although there is gender analysis in my project—both comparisons between women’s and men’s experiences, and discussions of gendered political discourses—the research centers on the real Catholic women who led other Catholic women, first into new relationships with priests within the church and then into political battles and collaborations with priests in an effort to try to preserve the special role of the Catholic church in Mexico.

“In my field of Mexican history, by the time women’s history was dead we had hardly begun the work of retrieving women from the archive.”  

My embrace of social history and women’s history is a bit of a contrarian (some would say antiquarian) position among feminist scholars, most of whom—at least since 1986, with the publication of Joan Scott’s famous essay that called gender (not women) a “useful” category of analysis—have seen “women’s history” as a more or less failed experiment. Too easy for non-feminist historians to ignore, too focused on stories of overcoming male oppression, too predictable and narrow in its themes. The very universality of those themes across time and space, thrilling in the early days of women’s history, eventually made them seem banal.

But in my field of Mexican history, by the time women’s history was dead we had hardly begun the work of retrieving women from the archive. Potentially important stories (not just about oppression; not predictable; capable of altering the traditional narrative) were abandoned in favor of a framework of gender (itself sometimes producing predictable results, though that is not my point here).

I lucked out in my project. The archive revealed not just a rather shocking change in women’s relationship to the church after the turmoil of Mexican independence (women suddenly came to lead lay associations with men as members, “governing” them in an upending of the natural order of things), but also a story of Catholic women first organizing and leading lay associations and then using those lay associations as vehicles to mobilize petition campaigns in defense of church power and privilege. Since the proper and appropriate role of the church in Mexican society was at the center of politics from independence in 1821 to well into the twentieth century, this meant women were weighing in on vital political issues. And they were being paid attention to. The way the liberal press handled women’s petitioning falls into the category of predictable gendered political discourse, but the way the conservative press squirmed and shuddered its way to an embrace of women’s petitioning was as interesting as the way the church managed to accept Catholic women as leaders of important parish organizations.

This story of Catholic women shifts the traditional narrative of Mexican history, not just by showing that women seized political power much earlier than generally thought, but also by refocusing our attention on the liberal and anticlerical reform era of the mid-nineteenth century, and away, to a certain extent, from the 1910 Revolution. I was lucky to find such a story, but I found it because I was interested in women and not just gender.

Virginia Trimble |  The Sky Is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words

Perhaps it should be unnecessary to say (but perhaps isn’t) that we all want our stories to be as accurate as possible in history of science as well as in chemistry, cosmology, condensed matter physics, and all the rest. Properly including the contributions of women scientists, as well as other minorities, is part of this process.

Now, assuming we all agree about this goal, other questions arise. One not much asked is whether our science would have progressed more rapidly if the capabilities of women had been more fully incorporated in the past. An example from my “alternative history” file is the case of Cecilia Helena Payne (later Gaposchkin). Her 1925 astronomy PhD dissertation at Harvard was a “first” in several respects, but the astronomically important point was that she demonstrated (using observations gathered by women and men, plus theoretical contributions from men) that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium. She finished this about when her fellowship funding ran out, was later employed at Harvard College Observatory by Shapley, and then had to work mostly on what he ordered. This was stellar photometry, variable and binary stars, not more about chemical composition of stars.

“If you take away the (not always properly recognized) contributions made by women, do you significantly slow down the progress of science?”  

My “what if” is this: What if she had continued along her own lines? Would she have discovered the differences in heavy element abundances between different populations of stars and thus laying the foundation for our understanding of the evolution of the Milky Way and other galaxies? This foundation is now credited to Eggen, Lynden-Bell, and Sandage in a 1962 paper, perhaps 30 years after she might have got there following her own path. There are surely other examples from other parts of science. Names to conjure with include Rosalind Franklin, Marietta Blau, and Lisa Meitner.

A different follow-on question is this: If you take away the (not always properly recognized) contributions made by women, do you significantly slow down the progress of science? Some of these contributions were made by wives, or sometimes sisters or daughters, of scientists who generally get most of the credit. Others came from women hired, cheaply, to act as human computers and other assistants to the men. Clued-in astronomers today would surely think of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who discovered the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheid variable stars, used (and sometimes misused) in studies of galaxies and cosmology today.  

A second example that comes incompletely to mind is the computers who worked with Chandrasekhar over the years at Chicago, carrying out complex numerical calculations that fed into his results in stellar structures, stellar dynamics, and most of the other topics on which he made major impact. It is a sobering aspect of the issue of women’s under-recognized contributions across the sciences that I am going to have to stop to look up her name, though she was parodied as Canna Helpit in a paper supposed to be by S. Candlestickmaker (meaning Chandra, whose 1983 Physics Nobel Prize primarily recognized work done 50 years earlier, before he had her or other computational assistants). His papers generally recognize her role, and some of his autobiographical material records her as catching and correcting mistakes in his own calculations. She does not, however, generally appear as a co-author, though his work would surely have proceeded more slowly without her input.  

I return triumphant with the name of Donna Elbert (1928–2010) who worked with Chandra from 1948 to 1979, and whose name (thank you, Astrophysics Data System) appeared as co-author on 17 of his 187 astronomy papers published during those years. She wrote (after Chandra’s death) about working with him, and a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA celebrated her in a press release on September 18, 2022. What can or should we do about all this? Does it help to write and edit books? Such was not the primary motivation for Dr. Weintraub and me—though we hope it won’t hurt!

David Weintraub |  The Sky Is for Everyone: Women Astronomers in Their Own Words

In helping Virginia Trimble compile autobiographical essays by women astronomers, I learned something particularly eye-opening from one of our chapter authors. Meg Urry is the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale. She wrote about an encounter she had with a male astrophysicist during her postdoctoral years at MIT. At a dinner one night, the senior scientist, believing himself to be an expert on the subject, announced that there had never been any good women artists. Urry’s response to this assertion comes from a famous essay by Linda Nochlin entitled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Nochlin explains, “As we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.”

“Histories that include women are exceptions because the victors usually write the histories. And women, historically, have not even been participants in the fight, let alone the victors.”  

And so, women have been excluded from histories of art, of science, of literature, of politics—the list of excluded areas of human endeavor is nearly unbounded. This we know. But why? The answer is simple: Throughout most of human history and in most cultures, they have been—and even continue to be—excluded from actively working in the professions of art, of science, of literature, of politics, and so much more. A person cannot be written into the story if that person is not allowed in the room.

So, what have I learned? My eyes and ears are more open. I am more attuned to and notice the double standards and barriers still placed before my female colleagues. And I am much more aware that many changes are still needed before the playing fields are level. I also recognize that this story is repeating itself. Most professions still are exclusionary. In many countries, those excluded are still women. In other countries, the “firsts” are no longer women; instead, they are persons of color or those whose sexuality is nonbinary. Histories that include women are exceptions because the victors usually write the histories. And women, historically, have not even been participants in the fight, let alone the victors. These histories open our eyes to what might have been and to what should be. The latter is more important, and these histories might help us reach a better, more inclusive future much sooner.

This exchange was facilitated by Akhil Jonnalagadda as part of the  Princeton University Press Publishing Fellowship program .

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The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all

As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, we should also celebrate the major strides women have made in the labor market. Their entry into paid work has been a major factor in America’s prosperity over the past century and a quarter.

Despite this progress, evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals. The gap in earnings between women and men, although smaller than it was years ago, is still significant; women continue to be underrepresented in certain industries and occupations; and too many women struggle to combine aspirations for work and family. Further advancement has been hampered by barriers to equal opportunity and workplace rules and norms that fail to support a reasonable work-life balance. If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.

A historical perspective on women in the labor force

In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. Of course, these statistics somewhat understate the contributions of married women to the economy beyond housekeeping and childrearing, since women’s work in the home often included work in family businesses and the home production of goods, such as agricultural products, for sale. Also, the aggregate statistics obscure the differential experience of women by race. African American women were about twice as likely to participate in the labor force as were white women at the time, largely because they were more likely to remain in the labor force after marriage.

If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.

The fact that many women left work upon marriage reflected cultural norms, the nature of the work available to them, and legal strictures. The occupational choices of those young women who did work were severely circumscribed. Most women lacked significant education—and women with little education mostly toiled as piece workers in factories or as domestic workers, jobs that were dirty and often unsafe. Educated women were scarce. Fewer than 2 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in an institution of higher education, and just one-third of those were women. Such women did not have to perform manual labor, but their choices were likewise constrained.

Despite the widespread sentiment against women, particularly married women, working outside the home and with the limited opportunities available to them, women did enter the labor force in greater numbers over this period, with participation rates reaching nearly 50 percent for single women by 1930 and nearly 12 percent for married women. This rise suggests that while the incentive—and in many cases the imperative—remained for women to drop out of the labor market at marriage when they could rely on their husband’s income, mores were changing. Indeed, these years overlapped with the so-called first wave of the women’s movement, when women came together to agitate for change on a variety of social issues, including suffrage and temperance, and which culminated in the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Between the 1930s and mid-1970s, women’s participation in the economy continued to rise, with the gains primarily owing to an increase in work among married women. By 1970, 50 percent of single women and 40 percent of married women were participating in the labor force. Several factors contributed to this rise. First, with the advent of mass high school education, graduation rates rose substantially. At the same time, new technologies contributed to an increased demand for clerical workers, and these jobs were increasingly taken on by women. Moreover, because these jobs tended to be cleaner and safer, the stigma attached to work for a married woman diminished. And while there were still marriage bars that forced women out of the labor force, these formal barriers were gradually removed over the period following World War II.

Over the decades from 1930 to 1970, increasing opportunities also arose for highly educated women. That said, early in that period, most women still expected to have short careers, and women were still largely viewed as secondary earners whose husbands’ careers came first.

As time progressed, attitudes about women working and their employment prospects changed. As women gained experience in the labor force, they increasingly saw that they could balance work and family. A new model of the two-income family emerged. Some women began to attend college and graduate school with the expectation of working, whether or not they planned to marry and have families.

By the 1970s, a dramatic change in women’s work lives was under way. In the period after World War II, many women had not expected that they would spend as much of their adult lives working as turned out to be the case. By contrast, in the 1970s young women more commonly expected that they would spend a substantial portion of their lives in the labor force, and they prepared for it, increasing their educational attainment and taking courses and college majors that better equipped them for careers as opposed to just jobs.

These changes in attitudes and expectations were supported by other changes under way in society. Workplace protections were enhanced through the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978 and the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace. Access to birth control increased, which allowed married couples greater control over the size of their families and young women the ability to delay marriage and to plan children around their educational and work choices. And in 1974, women gained, for the first time, the right to apply for credit in their own name without a male co-signer.

By the early 1990s, the labor force participation rate of prime working-age women—those between the ages of 25 and 54—reached just over 74 percent, compared with roughly 93 percent for prime working-age men. By then, the share of women going into the traditional fields of teaching, nursing, social work, and clerical work declined, and more women were becoming doctors, lawyers, managers, and professors. As women increased their education and joined industries and occupations formerly dominated by men, the gap in earnings between women and men began to close significantly.

Remaining challenges and some possible solutions

We, as a country, have reaped great benefits from the increasing role that women have played in the economy. But evidence suggests that barriers to women’s continued progress remain. The participation rate for prime working-age women peaked in the late 1990s and currently stands at about 76 percent. Of course, women, particularly those with lower levels of education, have been affected by the same economic forces that have been pushing down participation among men, including technical change and globalization. However, women’s participation plateaued at a level well below that of prime working-age men, which stands at about 89 percent. While some married women choose not to work, the size of this disparity should lead us to examine the extent to which structural problems, such as a lack of equal opportunity and challenges to combining work and family, are holding back women’s advancement.

Recent research has shown that although women now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men, they are still substantially less likely to reach the highest echelons of their professions.

The gap in earnings between men and women has narrowed substantially, but progress has slowed lately, and women working full time still earn about 17 percent less than men, on average, each week. Even when we compare men and women in the same or similar occupations who appear nearly identical in background and experience, a gap of about 10 percent typically remains. As such, we cannot rule out that gender-related impediments hold back women, including outright discrimination, attitudes that reduce women’s success in the workplace, and an absence of mentors.

Recent research has shown that although women now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men, they are still substantially less likely to reach the highest echelons of their professions. Even in my own field of economics, women constitute only about one-third of Ph.D. recipients, a number that has barely budged in two decades. This lack of success in climbing the professional ladder would seem to explain why the wage gap actually remains largest for those at the top of the earnings distribution.

One of the primary factors contributing to the failure of these highly skilled women to reach the tops of their professions and earn equal pay is that top jobs in fields such as law and business require longer workweeks and penalize taking time off. This would have a disproportionately large effect on women who continue to bear the lion’s share of domestic and child-rearing responsibilities.

But it can be difficult for women to meet the demands in these fields once they have children. The very fact that these types of jobs require such long hours likely discourages some women—as well as men—from pursuing these career tracks. Advances in technology have facilitated greater work-sharing and flexibility in scheduling, and there are further opportunities in this direction. Economic models also suggest that while it can be difficult for any one employer to move to a model with shorter hours, if many firms were to change their model, they and their workers could all be better off.

Of course, most women are not employed in fields that require such long hours or that impose such severe penalties for taking time off. But the difficulty of balancing work and family is a widespread problem. In fact, the recent trend in many occupations is to demand complete scheduling flexibility, which can result in too few hours of work for those with family demands and can make it difficult to schedule childcare. Reforms that encourage companies to provide some predictability in schedules, cross-train workers to perform different tasks, or require a minimum guaranteed number of hours in exchange for flexibility could improve the lives of workers holding such jobs. Another problem is that in most states, childcare is affordable for fewer than half of all families. And just 5 percent of workers with wages in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution have jobs that provide them with paid family leave. This circumstance puts many women in the position of having to choose between caring for a sick family member and keeping their jobs.

This possibility should inform our own thinking about policies to make it easier for women and men to combine their family and career aspirations. For instance, improving access to affordable and good quality childcare would appear to fit the bill, as it has been shown to support full-time employment. Recently, there also seems to be some momentum for providing families with paid leave at the time of childbirth. The experience in Europe suggests picking policies that do not narrowly target childbirth, but instead can be used to meet a variety of health and caregiving responsibilities.

The United States faces a number of longer-term economic challenges, including the aging of the population and the low growth rate of productivity. One recent study estimates that increasing the female participation rate to that of men would raise our gross domestic product by 5 percent. Our workplaces and families, as well as women themselves, would benefit from continued progress. However, a number of factors appear to be holding women back, including the difficulty women currently have in trying to combine their careers with other aspects of their lives, including caregiving. In looking to solutions, we should consider improvements to work environments and policies that benefit not only women, but all workers. Pursuing such a strategy would be in keeping with the story of the rise in women’s involvement in the workforce, which has contributed not only to their own well-being but more broadly to the welfare and prosperity of our country.

This essay is a revised version of a speech that Janet Yellen, then chair of the Federal Reserve, delivered on May 5, 2017 at the “125 Years of Women at Brown Conference,” sponsored by Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Yellen would like to thank Stephanie Aaronson, now vice president and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, for her assistance in the preparation of the original remarks. Read the full text of the speech here »

About the Author

Janet l. yellen, distinguished fellow in residence – economic studies, the hutchins center on fiscal and monetary policy, more from janet yellen.

Former Fed chair Janet Yellen on gender and racial diversity of the federal government’s economists

Janet Yellen delivered this remark at the public event, “The gender and racial diversity of the federal government’s economists” by Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at Brookings on September 23, 2019. 

The gender and racial diversity of the federal government’s economists

The lack of diversity in the field of economics – in addition to the lack of progress relative to other STEM fields – is drawing increasing attention in the profession, but nearly all the focus has been on economists at academic institutions, and little attention has been devoted to the diversity of the economists employed […]

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National Archives News

Women’s History

Suffrage parade in Washington, DC, March 3, 1913. View in National Archives Catalog

Records in the National Archives document the great contributions that women have made to our nation. Learn about the history of women in the United States by exploring their stories through letters, photographs, film, and other primary sources. Explore the records featured here, and view selected images from the National Archives Catalog .

In 2020, the nation observed the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited the states from denying the vote on the basis of sex. The exhibit Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote looked beyond suffrage parades and protests to the often overlooked story behind ratification. 

In support of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, we posted several video messages from notable women sharing their personal views about the 19th Amendment and addressing the complex history and legacy of this milestone anniversary. View the entire playlist on YouTube .

Women's Rights Topics

Research topics.

Equal Rights Amendment

Legislation and Advocacy

Notable Women

Additional Videos

Women’s History on the Horizon: The Centennial of Woman Suffrage in 2020

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote

Women’s Suffrage and the Vote: Funding Feminism

The Equal Rights Amendment: Yesterday and Today

Temperance and Woman Suffrage: Reform Movements and the Women Who Changed America

Women and the Supreme Court

Women’s History Month Program: The Glass Ceiling, Broken or Cracked?

Women's History Month Spotlight: National Archives Employee Adrienne Thomas

"Feminism" and Women of Color, National Conversation on #RightsAndJustice  (Q&A with  Soledad O'Brien)

National Conversations on Rights and Justice Women's Rights and Gender Equality

The Declaration of Independence: A Conversation with a Conservator

Historical Footage

Women and the Spirit of '76 (1976)

Decade of Our Destiny: Women—A New Force for Change (1976)

American Women and Social Change—Women at Work   (1975)

Space for Women  (NASA, 1981)

Women in Defense (1941)

Women on the Warpath (1943)

Education Resources

Education Updates: Women’s Suffrage Posters & Displays

Education Updates:  New Women’s Rights Teaching Resources

DocsTeach activities on Women's Rights

DocsTeach page on "Rights in America,” with primary sources on Women's Rights

DocsTeach page on "1970s America,” with primary sources on Women's Rights

The Suffrage and the Civil Rights Reform Movements

Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment

Failure Is Impossible, a one-act play

Women's Suffrage Party Petition

Examining Rosa Parks's Arrest Record

Harriet Tubman’s Claim for a Pension

Woman’s Place in America: Congress and Woman Suffrage

AOTUS: Remembering Cokie

Ford in Focus: I’ll Race You for It!

Forward with Roosevelt: A First Lady on the Front Lines

Forward with Roosevelt: Eleanor Roosevelt's Battle to End Lynching

Forward with Roosevelt: Missy LeHand: FDR’s Right Hand Woman

Hoover Heads: Tempest in a Teapot – Lou Henry Hoover and the DePriest Tea Incident

Hoover Heads: Who is Anne Martin?

JFK Library—Archivally Speaking: Finding Inspiration in the Archives: Honoring Women at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

JFK Library—Archivally Speaking: Personal Recollections of Corinne “Lindy” Boggs

JFK Library—Archivally Speaking: Restoring the Past in the White House: A Look at the Jacqueline Kennedy White House Restoration Project

NARAtions: The Making of Women’s Equality Day

Pieces of History:  On the Basis of Sex: Equal Credit Opportunities

Pieces of History:  On the Basis of Sex: Equal Pay

Pieces of History: Minnie Spotted Wolf

Pieces of History: The Hello Girls Finally Get Paid

Pieces of History: Finding the Girl in the Photograph

Pieces of History: Suffrage and Suffering at the 1913 March

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Reagan Library Education Blog: "Remembering the Ladies" Blog Series

Text Message: Meet Sgt. Eva Mirabal/Eah Ha Wa (Taos Pueblo); Women’s Army Corps Artist

Text Message: An Indigenous Woman’s Legal Fight After Forced Sterilization

Text Message: The Closed Door of Justice: African American Nurses and the Fight for Naval Service

Text Message: The First Woman to Fly in an Aeroplane in the United States, October 27, 1909

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Unwritten Record:  Queens of the Air: American Women Aviation Pioneers

Unwritten Record: Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Title IX with Archival Footage of Sporting Legends

Unwritten Record: International Worker’s Day and the Female Workforce

Unwritten Record: No Mail, Low Morale: The 6888th Central Postal Battalion

Unwritten Record: Their War Too: U.S. Women in the Military During WWII, part 1 and part 2

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Prologue Magazine Articles

From Slave Women to Free Women

View in National Archives Catalog

Winema and the Modoc War

“To the Rescue of the Crops”: The Women’s Land Army During World War II (16-G-323-4-N-4750)

Taking a Stand for Voting Rights

Belva Lockwood: Blazing the Trail for Women in Law

The Rejection of Elizabeth Mason: The Case of a “Free Colored” Revolutionary Widow

From Slave Women to Free Women: The National Archives and Black Women's History in the Civil War Era Women Soldiers of the Civil War

Winema and the Modoc War: One Woman’s Struggle for Peace

Women and Naturalization, ca. 1802–1940

When Saying "I Do" Meant Giving Up Your U.S. Citizenship

“Any woman who is now or may hereafter be married . . .” Women and Naturalization, ca. 1802–1940

The Story of the Female Yeomen during the First World War

World War I Gold Star Mothers, Part 1 ; Part 2

Women of the Polar Archives

“To the Rescue of the Crops”: The Women’s Land Army During World War II

Wearing Lipstick to War: An American Woman in World War II England and France

Women Workers in Wartime >

Online Exhibits

Rightfully Her: American Women and the Vote

Rightfully Hers,  created for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, looked beyond suffrage parades and protests to the often overlooked story behind ratification.

100th Anniversary of Jeannette Rankin as First Congresswoman

Jeannette Rankin's 1917 credentials as a Member of the House of Representatives were displayed at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

Records of Rights

The Records of Rights  exhibit in Washington, DC, and online tells the story of women's rights.

The U.S. Food Administration, Women, and the Great War

Women played a key role in food conservation during World War I.

Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations

After leaving the White House Eleanor Roosevelt became the first woman to represent the United States as a delegate to the United Nations.

Amending America: Women's Rights

Explore selected stories about civil rights and individual freedoms featured at our National Conversation on #RightsAndJustice: Women's Rights and Gender Equality in New York City.

A People at War: Women Who Served

Although women were not allowed to participate in battle during World War II, they did serve in so-called "noncombat" missions in the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).. These missions often proved to be extremely dangerous.

From the Presidential Libraries

Franklin d. roosevelt library.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Press Conferences  

It's Up To The Women  

Dwight D. Eisenhower Library

Women in Politics in the 1950s

Jacqueline Cochran and the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs)

Women Unite for Ike (online exhibit)

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library

Records of the Commission on the Status of Women

JFK’s remarks on the President's Commission on the Status of Women’s Final Report

Resources on Women’s Rights

Gerald R. Ford Library

George w. bush library.

Gale A. Norton, First Woman to be Secretary of the Interior

Ann Veneman, Frst Woman to be Secretary of Agriculture

Condoleezza Rice, First African American Woman to be Secretary of State

Cristeta Comerford, First Woman to be Named White House Executive Chef

Elaine L. Chao, first Asian American woman to be Secretary of Labor

The First Lady & Her Role

Speeches by First Lady Laura Bush

Mrs. Laura Bush’s Leadership

Mrs. Bush's Remarks to Women CEOs

Laura Bush and the President’s Radio Address

First Lady Laura Bush’s radio address about treatment of women & children by the Taliban in Afghanistan

Flickr Sets

Women in World War II

Women’s Rights

Girl Scouts

Women’s Bureau

Selected Images

Astronauts Ellen Ochoa, Julie Payette and, Tamara Jernigan with a National Women's Party banner in the International Space Station in 1999. View in National Archives Catalog

Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson in Japan, May 22, 1953. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

Frances Perkins meets with Carnegie Steel Workers, 1933. (Franklin D. Roosevelt Library)

First Lady Betty Ford with members of the National Women’s Party following the presentation of the first Alice Paul Award to Mrs. Ford in the Map Room at the White House, January 11, 1977.  View in National Archives Catalog  

Swearing-in ceremony for Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State, January 23, 1997 (Photo by Ralph Alswang). View in National Archives Catalog

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office, September 18, 2001 (Photo by Tina Hager). View in National Archives Catalog

Kamala Harris was sworn in as the first woman Vice President of the United States on January 20, 2021. In this picture, President Barack Obama greets Harris, then California's Attorney General, at a White House meeting on criminal justice on April 4, 2014. View in National Archives Catalog

A woman works on Liberty airplane engines at the Packard Motor Company in Detroit during World War I. View in National Archives Catalog

Amelia Earhart, July 30, 1936. View in National Archives Catalog

Three female lumberjacks walk up a log chute from Turkey Pond in New Hampshire, November 10, 1942. They had been rolling logs in the pond, pulling them to the log chute. View in National Archives Catalog

Native American women served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II. Left to right: Minnie Spotted Wolf (Blackfeet), Celia Mix (Potawatomi), and Violet Eastman (Chippewa). View in National Archives Catalog

Maj. Charity E. Adams and Capt. Abbie N. Campbell inspect women of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion, assigned to duty in England, February 1945. View in National Archives Catalog

Native women of the village of Ambler ice fishing for whitefish. View in National Archives Catalog

A woman scientist working for NASA, October 17, 1978 (Photo by Hank Seidel). View in National Archives Catalog

Blanca Tomé of the National Archives Document Preservation Branch, 1974. View in National Archives Catalog

History of the Women’s Rights Movement

Living the Legacy: The Women’s Rights Movement (1848-1998)

“ Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. ” That was Margaret Mead’s conclusion after a lifetime of observing very diverse cultures around the world. Her insight has been borne out time and again throughout the development of this country of ours. Being allowed to live life in an atmosphere of religious freedom, having a voice in the government you support with your taxes, living free of lifelong enslavement by another person. These beliefs about how life should and must be lived were once considered outlandish by many. But these beliefs were fervently held by visionaries whose steadfast work brought about changed minds and attitudes. Now these beliefs are commonly shared across U.S. society.

Another initially outlandish idea that has come to pass: United States citizenship for women. 1998 marked the 150th Anniversary of a movement by women to achieve full civil rights in this country. Over the past seven generations, dramatic social and legal changes have been accomplished that are now so accepted that they go unnoticed by people whose lives they have utterly changed. Many people who have lived through the recent decades of this process have come to accept blithely what has transpired. And younger people, for the most part, can hardly believe life was ever otherwise. They take the changes completely in stride, as how life has always been.

The staggering changes for women that have come about over those seven generations in family life, in religion, in government, in employment, in education – these changes did not just happen spontaneously. Women themselves made these changes happen, very deliberately. Women have not been the passive recipients of miraculous changes in laws and human nature. Seven generations of women have come together to affect these changes in the most democratic ways: through meetings, petition drives, lobbying, public speaking, and nonviolent resistance. They have worked very deliberately to create a better world, and they have succeeded hugely.

Throughout 1998, the 150th anniversary of the Women’s Rights Movement is being celebrated across the nation with programs and events taking every form imaginable. Like many amazing stories, the history of the Women’s Rights Movement began with a small group of people questioning why human lives were being unfairly constricted.

A Tea Launches a Revolution The Women’s Rights Movement marks July 13, 1848 as its beginning. On that sweltering summer day in upstate New York, a young housewife and mother, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was invited to tea with four women friends. When the course of their conversation turned to the situation of women, Stanton poured out her discontent with the limitations placed on her own situation under America’s new democracy. Hadn’t the American Revolution had been fought just 70 years earlier to win the patriots freedom from tyranny? But women had not gained freedom even though they’d taken equally tremendous risks through those dangerous years. Surely the new republic would benefit from having its women play more active roles throughout society. Stanton’s friends agreed with her, passionately. This was definitely not the first small group of women to have such a conversation, but it was the first to plan and carry out a specific, large-scale program.

Today we are living the legacy of this afternoon conversation among women friends. Throughout 1998, events celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Women’s Rights Movement are looking at the massive changes these women set in motion when they daringly agreed to convene the world’s first Women’s Rights Convention.

Within two days of their afternoon tea together, this small group had picked a date for their convention, found a suitable location, and placed a small announcement in the Seneca County Courier. They called “A convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman.” The gathering would take place at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls on July 19 and 20, 1848.

In the history of western civilization, no similar public meeting had ever been called.

A “Declaration of Sentiments” is Drafted These were patriotic women, sharing the ideal of improving the new republic. They saw their mission as helping the republic keep its promise of better, more egalitarian lives for its citizens. As the women set about preparing for the event, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used the Declaration of Independence as the framework for writing what she titled a “Declaration of Sentiments.” In what proved to be a brilliant move, Stanton connected the nascent campaign for women’s rights directly to that powerful American symbol of liberty. The same familiar words framed their arguments: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton carefully enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly. Eighteen was precisely the number of grievances America’s revolutionary forefathers had listed in their Declaration of Independence from England.

Stanton’s version read, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.” Then it went into specifics:

• Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law
• Women were not allowed to vote
• Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation
• Married women had no property rights
• Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity
• Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women
• Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation in the levying of these taxes
• Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they were paid only a fraction of what men earned
• Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law
• Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university would accept women students
• With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the church
• Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men

Strong words… Large grievances… And remember: This was just seventy years after the Revolutionary War. Doesn’t it seem surprising to you that this unfair treatment of women was the norm in this new, very idealistic democracy? But this Declaration of Sentiments spelled out what was the status quo for European-American women in 1848 America, while it was even worse for enslaved Black women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s draft continued: “Now, in view of this entire disenfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation, — in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

That summer, change was in the air and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was full of hope that the future could and would be brighter for women.

The First Women’s Rights Convention The convention was convened as planned, and over the two-days of discussion, the Declaration of Sentiments and 12 resolutions received unanimous endorsement, one by one, with a few amendments. The only resolution that did not pass unanimously was the call for women’s enfranchisement. That women should be allowed to vote in elections was almost inconceivable to many. Lucretia Mott, Stanton’s longtime friend, had been shocked when Stanton had first suggested such an idea. And at the convention, heated debate over the woman’s vote filled the air.

Today, it’s hard for us to imagine this, isn’t it? Even the heartfelt pleas of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a refined and educated woman of the time, did not move the assembly. Not until Frederick Douglass, the noted Black abolitionist and rich orator, started to speak, did the uproar subside. Woman, like the slave, he argued, had the right to liberty. “Suffrage,” he asserted, “is the power to choose rulers and make laws, and the right by which all others are secured.” In the end, the resolution won enough votes to carry, but by a bare majority.

The Declaration of Sentiments ended on a note of complete realism: “In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.”

The Backlash Begins Stanton was certainly on the mark when she anticipated “misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule.” Newspaper editors were so scandalized by the shameless audacity of the Declaration of Sentiments, and particularly of the ninth resolution — women demanding the vote!– that they attacked the women with all the vitriol they could muster. The women’s rights movement was only one day old and the backlash had already begun!

In ridicule, the entire text of the Declaration of Sentiments was often published, with the names of the signers frequently included. Just as ridicule today often has a squelching effect on new ideas, this attack in the press caused many people from the Convention to rethink their positions. Many of the women who had attended the convention were so embarrassed by the publicity that they actually withdrew their signatures from the Declaration. But most stood firm. And something the editors had not anticipated happened: Their negative articles about the women’s call for expanded rights were so livid and widespread that they actually had a positive impact far beyond anything the organizers could have hoped for. People in cities and isolated towns alike were now alerted to the issues, and joined this heated discussion of women’s rights in great numbers!

The Movement Expands The Seneca Falls women had optimistically hoped for “a series of conventions embracing every part of the country.” And that’s just what did happen. Women’s Rights Conventions were held regularly from 1850 until the start of the Civil War. Some drew such large crowds that people actually had to be turned away for lack of sufficient meeting space!

The women’s rights movement of the late 19th century went on to address the wide range of issues spelled out at the Seneca Falls Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and women like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth traveled the country lecturing and organizing for the next forty years. Eventually, winning the right to vote emerged as the central issue, since the vote would provide the means to achieve the other reforms. All told, the campaign for woman suffrage met such staunch opposition that it took 72 years for the women and their male supporters to be successful.

As you might imagine, any 72-year campaign includes thousands of political strategists, capable organizers, administrators, activists and lobbyists. The story of diligent women’s rights activism is a litany of achievements against tremendous odds, of ingenious strategies and outrageous tactics used to outwit opponents and make the most of limited resources. It’s a dramatic tale, filled with remarkable women facing down incredible obstacles to win that most basic American civil right – the vote.

Among these women are several activists whose names and and accomplishments should become as familiar to Americans as those of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of course. And Susan B. Anthony. Matilda Joslyn Gage. Lucy Stone. They were pioneer theoreticians of the 19th-century women’s rights movement.
• Esther Morris, the first woman to hold a judicial position, who led the first successful state campaign for woman suffrage, in Wyoming in 1869. Abigail Scott Duniway, the leader of the successful fight in Oregon and Washington in the early 1900s.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell, organizers of thousands of African-American women who worked for suffrage for all women.
• Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone’s daughter, who carried on their mothers’ legacy through the next generation.
• Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt, leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the early years of the 20th century, who brought the campaign to its final success.
• Alice Paul, founder and leader of the National Woman’s Party, considered the radical wing of the movement.
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a Supreme Court Justice, learned the story of the Women’s Rights Movement. Today she says, “I think about how much we owe to the women who went before us – legions of women, some known but many more unknown. I applaud the bravery and resilience of those who helped all of us – you and me – to be here today.”

After the Vote was Won After the vote was finally won in 1920, the organized Women’s Rights Movement continued on in several directions. While the majority of women who had marched, petitioned and lobbied for woman suffrage looked no further, a minority – like Alice Paul – understood that the quest for women’s rights would be an ongoing struggle that was only advanced, not satisfied, by the vote.

In 1919, as the suffrage victory drew near, the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconfigured itself into the League of Women Voters to ensure that women would take their hard-won vote seriously and use it wisely.

In 1920, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor was established to gather information about the situation of women at work, and to advocate for changes it found were needed. Many suffragists became actively involved with lobbying for legislation to protect women workers from abuse and unsafe conditions.

In 1923, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman’s Party, took the next obvious step. She drafted an Equal Rights Amendment for the United States Constitution. Such a federal law, it was argued, would ensure that “Men and women have equal rights throughout the United States.” A constitutional amendment would apply uniformly, regardless of where a person lived.

The second wing of the post-suffrage movement was one that had not been explicitly anticipated in the Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments.” It was the birth control movement, initiated by a public health nurse, Margaret Sanger, just as the suffrage drive was nearing its victory. The idea of woman’s right to control her own body, and especially to control her own reproduction and sexuality, added a visionary new dimension to the ideas of women’s emancipation. This movement not only endorsed educating women about existing birth control methods. It also spread the conviction that meaningful freedom for modern women meant they must be able to decide for themselves whether they would become mothers, and when. For decades, Margaret Sanger and her supporters faced down at every turn the zealously enforced laws denying women this right. In 1936, a Supreme Court decision declassified birth control information as obscene. Still, it was not until 1965 that married couples in all states could obtain contraceptives legally.

The Second Wave So it’s clear that, contrary to common misconception, the Women’s Rights Movement did not begin in the 1960s. What occurred in the 1960s was actually a second wave of activism that washed into the public consciousness, fueled by several seemingly independent events of that turbulent decade. Each of these events brought a different segment of the population into the movement.

First: Esther Peterson was the director of the Women’s Bureau of the Dept. of Labor in 1961. She considered it to be the government’s responsibility to take an active role in addressing discrimination against women. With her encouragement, President Kennedy convened a Commission on the Status of Women, naming Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair. The report issued by that commission in 1963 documented discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life. State and local governments quickly followed suit and established their own commissions for women, to research conditions and recommend changes that could be initiated.

Then: In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique evolved out of a survey she had conducted for her 20-year college reunion. In it she documented the emotional and intellectual oppression that middle-class educated women were experiencing because of limited life options. The book became an immediate bestseller, and inspired thousands of women to look for fulfillment beyond the role of homemaker.

Next: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race, religion, and national origin. The category “sex” was included as a last-ditch effort to kill the bill. But it passed, nevertheless. With its passage, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established to investigate discrimination complaints. Within the commission’s first five years, it received 50,000 sex discrimination complaints. But it was quickly obvious that the commission was not very interested in pursuing these complaints. Betty Friedan, the chairs of the various state Commissions on the Status of Women, and other feminists agreed to form a civil rights organization for women similar to the NAACP. In 1966, the National Organization for Women was organized, soon to be followed by an array of other mass-membership organizations addressing the needs of specific groups of women, including Blacks, Latinas, Asians-Americans, lesbians, welfare recipients, business owners, aspiring politicians, and tradeswomen and professional women of every sort.

During this same time, thousands of young women on college campuses were playing active roles within the anti-war and civil rights movement. At least,that was their intention. Many were finding their efforts blocked by men who felt leadership of these movements was their own province, and that women’s roles should be limited to fixing food and running mimeograph machines. It wasn’t long before these young women began forming their own “women’s liberation” organizations to address their role and status within these progressive movements and within society at large.

New Issues Come to the Fore These various elements of the re-emerging Women’s Rights Movement worked together and separately on a wide range of issues. Small groups of women in hundreds of communities worked on grassroots projects like establishing women’s newspapers, bookstores and cafes. They created battered women’s shelters and rape crisis hotlines to care for victims of sexual abuse and domestic violence. They came together to form child care centers so women could work outside their homes for pay. Women health care professionals opened women’s clinics to provide birth control and family planning counseling — and to offer abortion services — for low-income women. These clinics provided a safe place to discuss a wide range of health concerns and experiment with alternative forms of treatment.

With the inclusion of Title IX in the Education Codes of 1972, equal access to higher education and to professional schools became the law. The long-range effect of that one straightforward legal passage beginning “Equal access to education programs…,” has been simply phenomenal. The number of women doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals has doubled and doubled again as quotas actually limiting women’s enrollment in graduate schools were outlawed. Athletics has probably been the most hotly contested area of Title IX, and it’s been one of the hottest areas of improvement, too. The rise in girls’ and women’s participation in athletics tells the story: One in twenty-seven high school girls played sports 25 years ago; one in three do today. The whole world saw how much American women athletes could achieve during the last few Olympic Games, measured in their astonishing numbers of gold, silver, and bronze medals. This was another very visible result of Title IX.

In society at large, the Women’s Rights Movement has brought about measurable changes, too. In 1972, 26% of men and women said they would not vote for a woman for president. In 1996, that sentiment had plummeted to just over 5% for women and to 8% for men. The average age of women when they first marry has moved from twenty to twenty-four during that same period.

But perhaps the most dramatic impact of the women’s rights movement of the past few decades has been women’s financial liberation. Do you realize that just 25 years ago married women were not issued credit cards in their own name? That most women could not get a bank loan without a male co-signer? That women working full time earned fifty-nine cents to every dollar earned by men?

Help-wanted ads in newspapers were segregated into “Help wanted – women” and “Help wanted- men.” Pages and pages of jobs were announced for which women could not even apply. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled this illegal in 1968, but since the EEOC had little enforcement power, most newspapers ignored the requirement for years. The National Organization for Women (NOW), had to argue the issue all the way to the Supreme Court to make it possible for a woman today to hold any job for which she is qualified. And so now we see women in literally thousands of occupations which would have been almost unthinkable just one generation ago: dentist, bus driver, veterinarian, airline pilot, and phone installer, just to name a few.

Many of these changes came about because of legislation and court cases pushed by women’s organizations. But many of the advances women achieved in the 1960s and ’70s were personal: getting husbands to help with the housework or regularly take responsibility for family meals; getting a long-deserved promotion at work; gaining the financial and emotional strength to leave an abusive partner.

The Equal Rights Amendment Is Re-Introduced Then, in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, which had languished in Congress for almost fifty years, was finally passed and sent to the states for ratification. The wording of the ERA was simple: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” To many women’s rights activists, its ratification by the required thirty-eight states seemed almost a shoo-in.

The campaign for state ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment provided the opportunity for millions of women across the nation to become actively involved in the Women’s Rights Movement in their own communities. Unlike so many other issues which were battled-out in Congress or through the courts, this issue came to each state to decide individually. Women’s organizations of every stripe organized their members to help raise money and generate public support for the ERA. Marches were staged in key states that brought out hundreds of thousands of supporters. House meetings, walk-a-thons, door-to-door canvassing, and events of every imaginable kind were held by ordinary women, many of whom had never done anything political in their lives before. Generous checks and single dollar bills poured into the campaign headquarters, and the ranks of NOW and other women’s rights organizations swelled to historic sizes. Every women’s magazine and most general interest publications had stories on the implications of the ERA, and the progress of the ratification campaign.

But Elizabeth Cady Stanton proved prophetic once again. Remember her prediction that the movement should “anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule”? Opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, organized by Phyllis Schlafly, feared that a statement like the ERA in the Constitution would give the government too much control over our personal lives. They charged that passage of the ERA would lead to men abandoning their families, unisex toilets, gay marriages, and women being drafted. And the media, purportedly in the interest of balanced reporting, gave equal weight to these deceptive arguments just as they had when the possibility of women winning voting rights was being debated. And, just like had happened with woman suffrage, there were still very few women in state legislatures to vote their support, so male legislators once again had it in their power to decide if women should have equal rights. When the deadline for ratification came in 1982, the ERA was just three states short of the 38 needed to write it into the U.S. constitution. Seventy-five percent of the women legislators in those three pivotal states supported the ERA, but only 46% of the men voted to ratify.

Despite polls consistently showing a large majority of the population supporting the ERA, it was considered by many politicians to be just too controversial. Historically speaking, most if not all the issues of the women’s rights movement have been highly controversial when they were first voiced. Allowing women to go to college? That would shrink their reproductive organs! Employ women in jobs for pay outside their homes? That would destroy families! Cast votes in national elections? Why should they bother themselves with such matters? Participate in sports? No lady would ever want to perspire! These and other issues that were once considered scandalous and unthinkable are now almost universally accepted in this country.

More Complex Issues Surface Significant progress has been made regarding the topics discussed at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The people attending that landmark discussion would not even have imagined the issues of the Women’s Rights Movement in the 1990s. Much of the discussion has moved beyond the issue of equal rights and into territory that is controversial, even among feminists. To name a few:

• Women’s reproductive rights. Whether or not women can terminate pregnancies is still controversial twenty-five years after the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade affirmed women’s choice during the first two trimesters.
• Women’s enrollment in military academies and service in active combat. Are these desirable?
• Women in leadership roles in religious worship. Controversial for some, natural for others.
• Affirmative action. Is help in making up for past discrimination appropriate? Do qualified women now face a level playing field?
• The mommy track. Should businesses accommodate women’s family responsibilities, or should women compete evenly for advancement with men, most of whom still assume fewer family obligations?
• Pornography. Is it degrading, even dangerous, to women, or is it simply a free speech issue?
• Sexual harassment. Just where does flirting leave off and harassment begin?
• Surrogate motherhood. Is it simply the free right of a woman to hire out her womb for this service?
• Social Security benefits allocated equally for homemakers and their working spouses, to keep surviving wives from poverty as widows.

Today, young women proudly calling themselves “the third wave” are confronting these and other thorny issues. While many women may still be hesitant to call themselves “feminist” because of the ever-present backlash, few would give up the legacy of personal freedoms and expanded opportunities women have won over the last 150 years. Whatever choices we make for our own lives, most of us envision a world for our daughters, nieces and granddaughters where all girls and women will have the opportunity to develop their unique skills and talents and pursue their dreams.

1998: Living the Legacy In the 150 years since that first, landmark Women’s Rights Convention, women have made clear progress in the areas addressed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her revolutionary Declaration of Sentiments. Not only have women won the right to vote; we are being elected to public office at all levels of government. Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress, in 1916. By 1971, three generations later, women were still less than three percent of our congressional representatives. Today women hold only 11% of the seats in Congress, and 21% of the state legislative seats. Yet, in the face of such small numbers, women have successfully changed thousands of local, state, and federal laws that had limited women’s legal status and social roles.

In the world of work, large numbers of women have entered the professions, the trades, and businesses of every kind. We have opened the ranks of the clergy, the military, the newsroom. More than three million women now work in occupations considered “nontraditional” until very recently.

We’ve accomplished so much, yet a lot still remains to be done. Substantial barriers to the full equality of America’s women still remain before our freedom as a Nation can be called complete. But the Women’s Rights Movement has clearly been successful in irrevocably changing the circumstances and hopes of women. The remaining injustices are being tackled daily in the courts and conference rooms, the homes and organizations, workplaces and playing fields of America.

Women and girls today are living the legacy of women’s rights that seven generations of women before us have given their best to achieve. Alice Paul, that intrepid organizer who first wrote out the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, said, “I always feel the movement is sort of a mosaic. Each of us puts in one little stone, and then you get a great mosaic at the end.” Women, acting together, adding their small stones to the grand mosaic, have increased their rights against all odds, nonviolently, from an initial position of powerlessness. We have a lot to be proud of in this heroic legacy, and a great deal to celebrate on the occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Rights Movement.

© By Bonnie Eisenberg and Mary Ruthsdotter, the National Women’s History Alliance. 1998

Women's History Month

Every year, March is designated Women’s History Month by presidential proclamation. The month is set aside to honor women’s contributions in American history.

Did You Know? Women’s History Month started as Women’s History Week . . .

Women’s History Month began as a local celebration in Santa Rosa, California. The Education Task Force of the Sonoma County (California) Commission on the Status of Women planned and executed a “Women’s History Week” celebration in 1978. The organizers selected the week of March 8 to correspond with International Women’s Day. The movement spread across the country as other communities initiated their own Women’s History Week celebrations the following year.

In 1980, a consortium of women’s groups and historians—led by the National Women’s History Project (now the National Women's History Alliance)—successfully lobbied for national recognition. In February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring the Week of March 8th 1980 as National Women’s History Week. 

Subsequent Presidents continued to proclaim a National Women’s History Week in March until 1987 when Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as “Women’s History Month.” Between 1988 and 1994, Congress passed additional resolutions requesting and authorizing the President to proclaim March of each year as Women’s History Month. Since 1995, each president has issued an annual proclamations designating the month of March as “Women’s History Month.”

The National Women’s History Alliance selects and publishes the yearly theme. The theme for Women's History Month in 2021 captures the spirit of these challenging times. Since many of the women's suffrage centennial celebrations originally scheduled for 2020 were curtailed, the National Women's History Alliance is extending the annual theme for 2021 to "Valiant Women of the Vote: Refusing to Be Silenced.

Click here to download the NWHM 2021 Women's History Month Resource Toolkit , filled with links to biographies, events, and programming to celebrate this important month.

To learn more about the history of Women's History Month, please visit the Library of Congress .

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Women’s History Month 2024

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 20, 2024 | Original: December 30, 2009

Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s contributions to history, culture and society and has been observed annually in the month of March in the United States since 1987. Women’s History Month 2024 will take place from Friday, March 1 - Sunday, March 31, 2024. 

Why Do We Celebrate Women’s History Month?

Women’s History Month is a dedicated month to reflect on the often-overlooked contributions of women to U.S. history. From Abigail Adams to Susan B. Anthony , Sojourner Truth to Rosa Parks , the timeline of women’s history milestones stretches back to the founding of the United States.

The actual celebration of Women’s History Month grew out of a weeklong celebration of women’s contributions to culture, history and society organized by the school district of Sonoma, California , in 1978. Presentations were given at dozens of schools, hundreds of students participated in a “Real Woman” essay contest and a parade was held in downtown Santa Rosa.

A few years later, the idea caught on within communities, school districts and organizations across the country. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week. The U.S. Congress followed suit the next year, passing a resolution establishing a national celebration. Six years later, the National Women’s History Project successfully petitioned Congress to expand the event to the entire month of March.

International Women’s Day

International Women’s Day , a global celebration of the economic, political and social achievements of women, took place for the first time on March 8, 1911. Many countries around the world celebrate the holiday with demonstrations, educational initiatives and customs such as presenting women with gifts and flowers. 

The United Nations has sponsored International Women’s Day since 1975. When adopting its resolution on the observance of International Women’s Day, the United Nations General Assembly cited the following reasons: “To recognize the fact that securing peace and social progress and the full enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms require the active participation, equality and development of women; and to acknowledge the contribution of women to the strengthening of international peace and security.”

Women's History Month Theme 2024

The  National Women's History Alliance designates a yearly theme for Women's History Month. The 2024 theme celebrates  “ Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” This theme recognizes women who understand the need to eliminate bias and discrimination from individuals' lives and institutions.

Inspiring Quotes for Women's History Month

“Women are like teabags. We don’t know our true strength until we are in hot water.” – Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), political figure, diplomat, activist, First Lady.

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity," Amelia Earhart (1897-1937?), aviation pioneer.

“You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.” – Rosa Parks (1913-2005), civil rights activist.

"If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair." - Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005), U.S. Congresswoman.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive but to thrive and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” – Maya Angelou (1928-2014), memoirist, poet, civil rights activist.

“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.” – Madeleine Albright (1937-2022), U.S. Secretary of State.

“Champions keep playing until they get it right.” – Billie Jean King (1943 - ), tennis champion.

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." - Alice Walker (1944 - ), novelist, short story writer, poet, social activist.

“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” ―  Malala Yousafzai (1997- ), Pakistani female education activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

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