Women's History Midterm
Muller v. Oregon
1908 - Supreme Court upheld Oregon state restrictions on the working hours of women as justified by the special state interest in protecting women's health. Though with the state winning in shorter hours for women, and the popular progressives being happy with the outcome, equal-rights feminists were against this because it worked so heavily on the separation of the sexes into two stereotyped gender-roles and restricted women's financial independence.This labor law gave white women more protection, but it excluded women of color, food processors, agricultural workers, and white collar educated women. The governmental interest in public welfare outweighed the freedom of contract that is displayed in the 14th Amendment and the effects of Muller v. Oregon did not change until the New Deal days in the 1930s. It was also a watershed in the development of maternalist reforms.[2][3][4][5]The ruling was criticized because it set a precedent to use sex differences, and in particular women's child-bearing capacity, as a basis for separate legislation, supporting the idea that the family has priority over women's rights as workers.[1]
Miscegenation Laws
In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws (also known as miscegenation laws) were state laws passed by individual states to prohibit miscegenation, nowadays more commonly referred to as interracial marriage and interracial sex. Typically defining miscegenation as a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different races and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies.
AWSA
The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was formed in November 1869[1] in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association over the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Its founders, who supported the Fifteenth Amendment, included Lucy Stone,[1] Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe. The AWSA founders were staunch abolitionists, and strongly supported securing the right to vote for the Negro. They believed that the Fifteenth Amendment would be in danger of failing to pass in Congress if it included the vote for women. On the other side of the split in the American Equal Rights Association, opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, were "irreconcilables" Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to secure women's enfranchisement through a federal constitutional amendment. AWSA believed success could be more easily achieved through state-by-state campaigns.[2] In 1890 the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Breadwinner ideology
The idea that men should make more because they are the sole income of the traditional nuclear family where women stay home.
Zitkala Sa
Zitkala-Ša (1876-1938) (Dakota: pronounced zitkála-ša, which translates to "Red Bird"),[1] also known by the missionary-given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a Sioux writer, editor, musician, teacher and political activist. She wrote several works chronicling her struggles in her youth as she was pulled back and forth between the influences of dominant American culture and her own Native American heritage, as well as books in English that brought traditional Native American stories to a widespread white readership for one of the first times. With William F. Hanson, Bonnin co-composed the first American Indian opera, The Sun Dance (composed in romantic style based on Ute and Sioux themes), which premiered in 1913.[2] She founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926 to lobby for the rights of Native Americans to American citizenship, and served as its president until her death in 1938.[3]Zitkala-Ša was highly politically active throughout most of her adult life, in addition to and often in conjunction with her literary career. During her time on the Uintah-Ouray reservation in Utah she joined the Society of American Indians, a progressive group formed in 1911 and dedicated to preserving the Native American way of life while lobbying for their right to full American citizenship.[34] Zitkala-Ša served as the SAI's secretary beginning in 1916 and edited its journal American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919.[35] The SAI and Zitkala-Ša have since been criticized as misguided in their approach, their strong advocacy of citizenship and employment rights for Native Americans contributing to the further deterioration of cultural identity as Native Americans were brought more and more into mainstream American society.[36] Part of her duty as the secretary for the SAI was to correspond with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Increasingly, however, Zitkala-Ša began to criticize the corrupt practices of the BIA, such as their prohibition of the use of native languages and practices within the school systems set up for Native American children and reported incidences of abuse resulting from children's refusal to pray in the Christian manner.[34] Her sharp criticism of the BIA resulted in the dismissal of her husband from it in 1916, following which the couple relocated with their son to Washington D.C. From Washington Zitkala-Ša began lecturing nation-wide on behalf of the SAI to promote the cultural and tribal identity of Native Americans. During the 1920s she devoted a great amount of effort to promoting a pan-Indian movement that would unite all of America's tribes in the cause of lobbying for citizenship rights and in 1924 saw the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act which granted citizenship rights to many though not all indigenous peoples. In 1926 she and her husband founded the National Council of American Indians, dedicated to the cause of uniting the tribes throughout the U.S. in the cause of gaining full citizenship rights through suffrage.[37] From 1926 until her death in 1938 Zitkala-Ša would serve as president, major fundraiser, and speaker for the NCAI, running the organization almost single-handedly, though her efforts were largely disregarded when the organization was revived in 1944 under male leadership.[34] Zitkala-Ša was also active in the 1920s in the movement for women's rights, joining the General Federation of Women's Clubs in 1921,[34] a grassroots organization dedicated to diversity in its membership and to maintaining a public voice for women's concerns. Through the GFWC she created the Indian Welfare Committee in 1924, launching a government investigation into the exploitation of Native Americans in Oklahoma and the attempts being made to defraud them of drilling rights to their oil-rich lands.[34] This investigation led to the publication of an article that Zitkala-Ša co-authored, entitled "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribe-Legalized Robbery". The article exposed several corporations that had robbed and even murdered Native Americans in Oklahoma to gain access to their lands and was pivotal in moving the government in 1934 to adopt the Indian Reorganization Act,[38] which returned the management of their lands to Native Americans. In her work for the NCAI in 1924 Zitkala-Ša ran a voter-registration drive among Native Americans in order to raise their support for the Curtis Bill, which was subsequently passed by Congress. Though the bill granted Native Americans citizenship it did not grant them the right to vote and Zitkala-Ša continued to work for civil rights and better access to health care and education for Native Americans up until her death in 1938.[34]
Family Wage
A family wage is a wage that is sufficient to raise a family. This contrasts with a living wage, which is generally taken to mean a wage sufficient for a single individual to live on, but not necessarily sufficient to also support a family. As a stronger form of living wage, a family wage is likewise advocated by proponents of social justice. Family wage campaign was aiming to maintain the traditional family structure, as a concept connecting economics and family structure it is one of the examples of how economic structure of family, which is a subject of the fieldfamily economics, affects overall economy beyond the family. The notion of a family wage traditionally proposes a household consisting of a nuclear family with a single wage-earner, namely the man, with the wife staying home and raising the children, and thus the premise that the man's wage should support his wife and their children. This is in contrast to a multi-generation household, consisting also of the previous generation, or to single parent households or dual-earners. With the entry of women into the paid labor force, this model has been complicated, with some households having two wage earners, some one, and others none; seefeminist movement for context and discussion.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A major feminist prophet during the late 19th and early 20th century. She published "Women and Economics" which called on women to abandon their dependent status and contribute more to the community through the economy. She created centralized nurseries and kitchens to help get women into the work force.Charlotte Perkins Gilman (/ˈɡɪlmən/; July 3, 1860 - August 17, 1935) was a prominent American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist during a time when her accomplishments were exceptional for women, and she served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
Rosie the Riveter
A propaganda character designed to increase production of female workers in the factories. It became a rallying symbol for women to do their part. Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of the United States, representing the American women who worked in factories during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies.[1][2] These women sometimes took entirely new jobs replacing the male workers who were in the military. Rosie the Riveter is commonly used as a symbol of feminism and women's economic power.[3] Use of similar images of women war workers appeared in other countries such as Britain.
New Deal
A series of reforms enacted by the Franklin Roosevelt administration between 1933 and 1942 with the goal of ending the Great Depression.The New Deal was a series of domestic programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1938. They involved laws passed by Congress as well as presidential executive orders during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were in response to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": Relief, Recovery, and Reform. That is Relief for the unemployed and poor; Recovery of the economy to normal levels; and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.[1]At first the New Deal created programs primarily for men. It was assumed that the husband was the "breadwinner" (the provider) and if they had jobs, whole families would benefit. It was the social norm for women to give up jobs when they married; in many states there were laws that prevented both husband and wife holding regular jobs with the government. So too in the relief world, it was rare for both husband and wife to have a relief job on FERA or the WPA.[142] This prevailing social norm of the breadwinner failed to take into account the numerous households headed by women, but it soon became clear that the government needed to help women as well.[143] Many women were employed on FERA projects run by the states with federal funds. The first New Deal program to directly assist women was the Works Progress Administration (WPA), begun in 1935. It hired single women, widows, or women with disabled or absent husbands. While men were given unskilled manual labor jobs, usually on construction projects, women were assigned mostly to sewing projects. They made clothing and bedding to be given away to charities and hospitals. Women also were hired for the WPA's school lunch program.Both men and women were hired for the arts programs (such as music, theater and writing). The Social Security program was designed to help retired workers and widows, but did not include domestic workers, farmers or farm laborers, the jobs most often held by blacks. Social Security however was not a relief program and it was not designed for short-term needs, as very few people received benefits before 1942
Split of the Suffrage Movement
Although the harbingers of dissent within different factions of the woman suffrage movement may be seen in the National Woman's Rights Convention of 1860 (the last national convention before the outbreak of the war, woman's rights activism largely ceased during the Civil War. The movement re-emerged to the national scene in 1866 to organize formally under a new name - the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) - and defined by a new platform.[7] Confronted by the proposal of the reconstruction amendments, which introduced the word "male" to the United States Constitution, the AERA eventually dissolved over whether suffrage for emancipated slaves and women would be pursued simultaneously.[7] The schism was cemented by the decision of Republican lawmakers and their former abolitionist allies that this was "the Negro's hour," leaving woman suffrage to be deferred to a more opportune moment. Following the May 1869 American Equal Rights Association convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association (hereafter referred to as "the National").[4] Feeling misguided and deceived, Stanton and Anthony resorted to such bold action largely due to their belief that the preponderance of men composing the AERA leadership had betrayed women's interest.[2] In addition to a feeling of betrayal, deep differences between the factions of the movement centered on numerous issues. The most important of which focused on how AERA funds were to be used, and whether the reconstruction amendments should be supported despite their failure to include women.[8] Meeting at the Women's Bureau in New York City, Stanton, Anthony and delegates from nineteen states of the AERA convention, appointed Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the National's President.[5] Other prominent activists forming the National were Lucretia Mott, Martha Coffin Wright, Ernestine Rose (part of the Executive Committee), Pauline Wright Davis (Advisory Counsel of Rhode Island), Reverend Olympia Brown, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Anna E. Dickinson (Vice-President of Pennsylvania), Elizabeth Smith Miller and Mary Cheney Greeley among others.[9] The women immediately turned their efforts toward passage of a Constitutional Amendment giving women the right to vote. In response, Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe and Wendell Phillips among others established the American Woman Suffrage Association in September of that year in Boston. The death knell had rung upon the American Equal Rights Association.[7]
Charlotte Hawkins Brown
Author and educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in Henderson, North Carolina on June 11, 1883, but moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts at a very early age.[1] She attended public schools in Cambridge, where she excelled as a student. When she was a high school senior, Brown had a chance meeting with the prominent educator Alice Freeman Palmer, who was impressed to find the young woman reading Virgil while pushing the stroller of a child she was babysitting. Palmer would play a profound role in Brown's life, first by paying for her college education at the State Normal School at Salem, Massachusetts, and then by encouraging Brown to return to her native North Carolina to help improve education for African Americans.[2] After a year of college, Brown was hired to work at the Bethany Institute, a small school in Sedalia, North Carolina run by the American Missionary Association.[3] When the American Missionary Association decided to close the school a year later, Brown decided to create a school on her own, which would include elements of industrial training combined with a standard curriculum. She returned to Massachusetts where, through connections provided by Palmer, she met with prominent figures at Harvard and elsewhere from whom she sought to raise money for her effort. She successfully obtained enough money to keep the school running for another year.[4] The new school started small, in an old log cabin with just two teachers and few students. Brown continued to raising money, eventually securing enough to erect a new building, which was completed in 1905. The school was named the Palmer Memorial Institute in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer.[5] While the school grew, it continued to attract attention and money from Boston-area philanthropists. A "Sedalia Club" was organized in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1914, and in the prominent financier and philanthropist Galen L. Stone learned of her work and became the Institute's most important benefactor. Stone and his wife would eventually give more than $100,000 to the Institute.[6] In 1911, Charlotte Hawkins married Edward S. Brown. By the 1920s, the Palmer Memorial Institute was an established and successful boarding school attracting students from around the country, many of whom went on to become educators. Brown attracted national attention for her efforts, lecturing frequently at colleges around the country and receiving several honorary degrees. In 1941 she published The Correct Thing To Do--To Say--To Wear, committing many of her educational philosophies and maxims in print.[7] She continued to run the school until her retirement in 1952.[8] In addition to her work at the Palmer Institute, Brown was active in national efforts to improve opportunities for African Americans, including the Southern Commission for Interracial Cooperation and the Negro Business League. She was the first African American woman named to the national board of the YWCA.
Flappers
Flappers were a "new breed" of young Western women in the 1920s who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for what was then considered acceptable behavior. Flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, driving automobiles, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.[1] Flappers had their origins in the liberal period of the Roaring Twenties, the social, political turbulence and increased transatlantic cultural exchange that followed the end of World War I, as well as the export of American jazz culture to Europe.
Florence Kelley
Florence Kelley (September 12, 1859 - February 17, 1932) was an American social and political reformer. Her work against sweatshops and for the minimum wage, eight-hour workdays,[1] and children's rights[2] is widely regarded today. From its founding in 1899, Kelley served as the first general secretary of the National Consumers League. In 1909 Kelley helped create the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Ida B. Wells
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931) was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist and, with her husband, newspaper owner Ferdinand L. Barnett, an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing how it was often a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.[1]In 1892 she published a pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and A Red Record, 1892-1894, which documented research on a lynching. Having examined many accounts of lynching based on alleged "rape of white women," she concluded that Southerners concocted rape as an excuse to hide their real reason for lynchings: black economic progress, which threatened not only white Southerners' pocketbooks, but also their ideas about black inferiority.
Josephine Baker
Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 - April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress who came to be known in various circles as the "Black Pearl," "Bronze Venus" and even the "Creole Goddess". Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, Josephine later became a citizen of France in 1937. She was fluent in both English and French. Baker was the first African-American woman to star in a major motion picture, Zouzou (1934) or to become a world-famous entertainer. Baker, who refused to perform for segregated audiences in America, is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. She was once offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King in 1968, following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination. Baker, however, turned down the offer. She was also known for assisting the French Resistance during World War II,[3] and received the French military honor, the Croix de guerre.[4]
New Feminists
New feminism is a philosophy which emphasizes a belief in an integral complementarity of men and women, rather than the superiority of men over women or women over men.[1] New feminism, as a form of difference feminism, supports the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles, while advocating for the equal worth and dignity of both sexes. Among its basic concepts are that the most important differences are those that are biological rather than cultural. New Feminism holds that women should be valued in their role as child bearers, both culturally and economically, while not being viewed as a "home maker" in the broader sense of the meaning.[citation needed] Its main aim is to promote the idea that women are individuals with equal worth as men; and that in social, economic and legal senses they should be equal, while accepting the natural differences between the sexes
Prohibition
Prohibition in the United States focused on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages; however, exceptions were made for medicinal and religious uses. Alcohol consumption was never illegal under federal law. Nationwide prohibition did not begin in the United States until 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect, and was repealed in 1933, with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment.
Works Progress Administration-
The Works Progress Administration (renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration; WPA) was the largest and most ambitious New Deal agency, employing millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out public works projects,[1] including the construction of public buildings and roads. In much smaller but more famous projects the WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.[1]
Comstock Act
The Comstock Act,[1] enacted March 3, 1873, is a United States federal law which amended the Post Office Act[2] and made it illegal to send any "obscene" materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices and information. In addition to banning contraceptives, this act also banned the distribution of information on abortion for educational purposes. Twenty-four states passed similar prohibitions on materials distributed within the states.[3] These state and federal restrictions are collectively known as the Comstock laws.
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the Wobblies, is an international revolutionary industrial labor organization that was formed in 1905. The origin of the nickname "Wobblies" is uncertain.[3] The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union", contends that all workers should be united as a social class and that capitalism and wage labor should be abolished.[4] They are known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their managers[5] and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented. IWW membership does not require that one work in a represented workplace,[6] nor does it exclude membership in another labor union.[7] In the 1910s and early '20s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American west, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in 1923, IWW membership has been estimated at about 40,000.[8] However, the extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated at 133% per decade) makes it difficult to state membership totals with any certainty, as workers tended to join the IWW in large numbers for relatively short periods (e.g., during labor strikes and periods of generalized economic distress).[9] Nonetheless, membership declined dramatically in the 1920s due to several factors. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which regarded the IWW as too radical while the IWW regarded the AFL as too staid and conservative.[8] Membership also declined in the wake of government crackdowns on radical, anarchist and socialist groups during the First Red Scare after WWI. The most decisive factor in the decline in IWW membership and influence, however, was a 1924 schism, from which the IWW never fully recovered.[8][10] In 2012, the IWW moved its General Headquarters offices to 2036 West Montrose, Chicago.[11]
NAWSA
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an American women's rights organization formed in May 1890 as a unification of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).[1] The NAWSA continued the work of both associations by becoming the parent organization of hundreds of smaller local and state groups,[2] and by helping to pass woman suffrage legislation at the state and local level. The NAWSA was the largest and most important suffrage organization in the United States, and was the primary promoter of women's right to vote. Like AWSA and NWSA before it, the NAWSA pushed for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women's voting rights, and was instrumental in winning the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920. Susan B. Anthony was the dominant figure in NAWSA from 1890 to 1900, at which time she stepped down in favor of Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt was president of NAWSA from 1900 to 1904 and again from 1915 onward. Anna Howard Shaw was president of NAWSA from 1904 to 1915.[2] After success in 1920, the NAWSA was reformed as the League of Women Voters, which continues the legacy.
NWSA
The National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was formed on May 15, 1869 in New York City.[1] The National Association was created in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association[2] over whether the woman's movement should support the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[3] Its founders, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment unless it included the vote for women.[4] Men were able to join the organization as members; however, women solely controlled the leadership of the group.[5] The NWSA worked to secure women's enfranchisement through a federal constitutional amendment.[3] Contrarily, its rival, the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), believed success could be more easily achieved through state-by-state campaigns.[2] In 1890 the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).[6]
19th Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. It was ratified on August 18, 1920. The Constitution allows the states to determine the qualifications for voting, and until the 1910s most states disenfranchised women. The amendment was the culmination of the women's suffrage movement in the United States, which fought at both state and national levels to achieve the vote. It effectively overruled Minor v. Happersett, in which a unanimous Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not give women the right to vote.Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the amendment and first introduced it in 1878; it was forty-one years later, in 1919, when the Congress submitted the amendment to the states for ratification. A year later, it was ratified by the requisite number of states, with Tennessee's ratification being the final vote needed to add the amendment to the Constitution. In Leser v. Garnett (1922), the Supreme Court rejected claims that the amendment was unconstitutionally adopted.
Jane Crow
The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 - July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was also the first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest.[1] Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia segregation laws after they sat in the whites-only section of a bus. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, inspired her to become a civil rights lawyer, and she enrolled at Howard University. During her years at Howard, she became increasingly aware of sexism, which she called "Jane Crow", the sister of the Jim Crow racial segregation laws. Murray graduated first in her class, but was denied the chance to do further work at Harvard University because of her gender. In 1965 she became the first African American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color the "bible" of the civil rights movement.[2] Murray served on the 1961 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966 was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg later named Murray a coauthor on a brief for Reed v. Reed in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination.[3] Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University. In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church, becoming a priest, and was named an Episcopal saint in 2012. Murray struggled with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct"; she had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several relationships with women, and in her younger years, occasionally passed as a teenage boy.[4] In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry.
The Social Security Act
The Social Security Act was drafted during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term by the President's Committee on Economic Security, under Frances Perkins, and passed by Congress as part of the Second New Deal. The act was an attempt to limit what was seen as dangers in the modern American life, including old age, poverty, unemployment, and the burdens of widows and fatherless children. By signing this act on August 14, 1935, President Roosevelt became the first president to advocate federal assistance for the elderly.[2]
Women's Suffrage
Women's suffrage in the United States was achieved gradually, at state and local levels during the late 19th century and early 20th century, culminating in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provided: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." On June 1848, the Liberty Party, composed entirely of men, made women's suffrage a plank in their presidential campaign. The next month, the Seneca Falls Convention issued the first formal demand authored by US women for suffrage. During the 1850s the National Woman's Rights Conventions and Lucy Stone organized women's suffrage petitions campaigns in several states, and Stone became the first person to appeal for woman suffrage before a body of lawmakers when she addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1853.[2] Agitation was suspended during the Civil War but resumed in 1865 when the National Woman's Rights Committee issued a petition asking Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit states from disfranchising citizens "on the ground of sex."[3] Disagreement among movement leaders over whether to support ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave the vote to black men but not to women, resulted in the formation of two rival organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), founded by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Both organizations initially campaigned for a Sixteenth Amendment to give women the vote, but the AWSA gradually turned to building support for the federal measure by winning the right of women to vote at the state and local levels. In 1889 the groups merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which, after 1900, argued for reforms of the Progressive Era. Women's contributions to American participation in the First World War (1917-18) contributed to the passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920.
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
a fire in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Company in 1911 killed 146 people, mostly women. They died because the doors were locked and the windows were too high for them to get to the ground. Dramatized the poor working conditions and let to federal regulations to protect workers.The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911, was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in the history of the city of New York and resulted in the fourth highest loss of life from an industrial accident in U.S. history. It was also one of the deadliest disasters that occurred in New York City - after the burning of the General Slocum on June 15, 1904 - until the destruction of the World Trade Center 90 years later. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers - 123 women and 23 men [1] - who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Jewish and Italian immigrant women aged sixteen to twenty-three;[2][3][4] of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was Providenza Panno at 43, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and "Sara" Rosaria Maltese.[5] Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits - a common practice at the time to prevent pilferage and unauthorized breaks[6] - many of the workers who could not escape the burning building jumped from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors to the streets below. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers. The factory was located in the Asch Building, at 23-29 Washington Place, now known as the Brown Building, which has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.[7]