Settlement houses first began appearing in the immigrant and working-class districts of American cities in the 1890s. Over the next four decades, immigrant men and women had a wide range of experiences with settlement house reformers. Some immigrants encountered the settlement houses as places of refuge and caring; at other times, they found reformers to be arrogant and patronizing. Born in Russian Poland around 1885, Anzia Yesierska came to America as a young girl in the 1890s. She rejected the traditional notions of womanhood and marriage dictated by her Jewish immigrant family. She toiled in sweatshops and laundries while she taught herself English and began writing. She married twice but both unions were brief. In her first story, "The Free Vacation House," published in 1915, Yesierska painted the middle-class reformers who tried to help the immigrant heroine as meddling busybodies who disregarded her right to dignity and privacy.

The original Constitution did not specifically protect the right to vote—leaving the issue largely to the states. For much of American history, this right has often been granted to some, but denied to others; however, through a series of amendments to the Constitution, the right to vote has expanded over time. These amendments have protected the voting rights of new groups, including by banning discrimination at the ballot box based on race (15th Amendment) and sex (19th Amendment). They also granted Congress new power to enforce these constitutional guarantees, which Congress has used to pass landmark statutes like the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While state governments continue to play a central role in elections today, these new amendments carved out a new—and important—role for the national government in this important area.

Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands (northeastern North America) followed a seasonal schedule of hunting, fishing, gathering wild food, and the cultivation of crops. They relied upon cultivated crops such as corn, beans, and squash for much of their food. Men primarily provided the meat and fish, while women were responsible for supplying cultivated vegetables along with wild berries, nuts, and fruit. While men helped clear the fields, women did the planting, weeding, and harvesting in the warm months. Many European observers remarked upon what they saw as drudgery inflicted upon Indian women. However, Joseph-Franois Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary and writer, was also a keen ethnographic observer of the details of Iroquois life. In this account, he noted the similarities between farm women's work in Europe and among the Iroquois.

Municipal workers led a wave of strikes that made the 1960's and early 1970's a highpoint for organized labor militancy in New York City. Teachers, social workers, sanitation workers, and parks employees all fought to improve work conditions, low-paying wage scales, and to reform the city's social services. Lillian Roberts arrived in New York in 1965 to organize low-paid and often disrespected hospital workers for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). At the time, AFSCME was competing with the Teamsters to represent the health workers, and the struggle was intense enough for Roberts to carry a brick in her purse. An African-American woman who had grown up on welfare in Chicago, Roberts proved adept at organizing hospital workers, many of whom were African-American women. She and AFSCME prevailed, paving the way for their local D.C. 37 to become the dominant New York municipal union.

The struggle for woman suffrage lasted almost a century, beginning with the 1848 Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, and including the 1890 union of two competing suffrage organizations to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA and other organizations campaigned diligently for the vote in a variety of ways but did not achieve success until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. The demand to change the Constitution to grant women the vote (raised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as early as 1878) was contentious enough; but the pressure for woman suffrage advocates to address other issues often gave the debate over the vote for women a particularly divisive tone. In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman's proper place was at home, not the ballot box.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. First published in 1913, Frederick's The New Housekeeping opened with her conversion to the "efficiency gospel" under the tutelage of her husband and a male efficiency expert. In chapter 12, Frederick exhorted middle-class women to escape the drudgery of housework by shedding their bad attitudes--and as she enumerated those, she revealed some of the pervasive discontents of women in the home.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with rudimentary equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Mary Ann Hafen immigrated from Switzerland to Utah with her Mormon family in 1860 at age six and her first husband died when she was barely twenty. In this account, she described her move from Utah to Nevada in 1891 with her second husband and their polygamous family, as well as their subsequent life there.

The issue of protective legislation for women and mothers has divided reformers, labor unionists, legislators, courts, the military, and feminists since the end of the 19th century when a number of states passed statutes to limit women's work hours. At issue--equal treatment versus biological difference. During the Cold War era, this question informed the debate on the role of women in the military. Although the Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948 established a permanent presence for women in all branches of the armed forces, a new Army regulation in October 1949 required the discharge of female servicewomen with children under the age of 18. To guarantee passage of the Armed Forces Reserve Act of 1952, during the Korean War, a provision was dropped that would have reversed this regulation. Thus mothers of dependent children were ineligible to enlist in reserve units and were discharged after childbirth or adoption. In the following Congressional session, the Senate passed S. 1492, allowing the reinstatement of women with dependent children. The bill, however, died in the House Committee on Armed Services and failed to become law. The following testimony of Women's Army Corps Director Colonel Irene O. Galloway, to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, presented the Department of Defense position opposing the bill. Galloway argued that in the event of an emergency mobilization, such women could not and should not be counted on to leave their duties as mothers to join activated units. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

As the principles of scientific management came to play a more significant role in the workplace, some reformers sought to apply these principles to any aspects of daily life that might be improved by standardization and routine. Perhaps no one applied the principles of scientific management to the home with as much passion as Christine Frederick, the household editor of Ladies Home Journal as well as the National Secretary of the Associated Clubs of Domestic Science. In 1912, she published a four-part series in the Ladies Home Journal that promised less housework. Each article opened with a box recounting Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. "Taylorization" made it possible for (compelled, really) steelworkers to quadruple their usual output, and Frederick implied that Taylor's principles would also result in a four-fold increase in home productivity. Frederick's articles were enormously popular. Although Frederick posed as an impartial efficiency expert, she had very close ties to appliance and kitchen-equipment manufacturers and helped lend scientific legitimacy to new products. In this excerpt from the first article in this series, Frederick described how to wash dishes correctly and efficiently.

The end of the War of 1812 promoted a surge of migration to the territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1790, 95 percent of the population lived in the states along the Atlantic Ocean; by 1812 one-quarter lived west of the Appalachians. Farmers looking for new lands found these vast areas attractive after the War for Independence had forced many Indian peoples into land cessation and removal in the Michigan territory and other northwestern areas. Low land prices also enticed families from overpopulated eastern regions. Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. She found multiethnic Detroit "the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen." While her husband faced sickness and other hazards on their isolated farm, Harriet voiced complaints familiar from many women's narratives of the frontier: the absence of society and social institutions.

In this video segment from Wide Angle, meet Nanavi, a young girl in Benin who has a rare opportunity to go to school.

As immigration dropped sharply during World War I and many native-born women left domestic service for wartime jobs, middle-class women lamented the shortage of domestic workers. This spurred efforts to reorganize housework and a fostered a new breed of home economists who argued for "scientific" housekeeping. By applying the methods and theory of scientific management to the home, these experts argued, housework could be rendered less arduous and time-consuming. The "new housekeeping" often relied solely on the unpaid work of the middle-class wives. A leading proponent of household scientific management, Christine Frederick answered common criticisms of domestic workers by turning a critical eye on their employers. The "servant problem," she argued, was a problem of bad management--middle-class women needed to abandon unsystematic methods and arbitrary supervision for the new principles of scientific management. She expressed unusual empathy for women in domestic service, perhaps because she herself had cleaned houses to help pay her expenses as a college student at Northwestern University.

As immigration dropped sharply during World War I and many native-born women left domestic service for wartime jobs, middle-class women lamented the shortage of domestic workers. New experts offered their advice to the middle-class woman who decided to tackle housework without the assistance of paid help. Gladys Hutton Chase, writing in Good Housekeeping in 1918, explained the new middle-class housekeeping. Chase celebrated her newfound freedom from the "work and worry" of employing domestic workers. Notably, her solution was doing her own work with the help of a professional home economics course, rather than getting other household members to pitch in. And even as she enthused about the efficiency of her new methods, Chase revealed the escalating standards that expanded and complicated middle-class housekeeping.

The "new woman" of the 1910s and 1920s rejected the pieties (and often the politics) of the older generation, smoked and drank in public, celebrated the sexual revolution, and embraced consumer culture. While earlier generations had debated suffrage, political discussions of feminism were seldom the stuff of popular media in the 1920s. Instead, magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Pictorial Review presented readers with the debate: "To Bob or Not to Bob?" The short, sculpted hair of the "bob" marked a startling visual departure from the upswept and carefully dressed hair of the early twentieth-century Gibson Girl. Dancer Irene Castle (Treman) inadvertently helped set the fashion when she cut her hair for convenience before entering the hospital for an appendectomy. In these magazine excerpts, Castle, singer Mary Garden, and film star Mary Pickford (known as "America's Sweetheart"), described their decisions to adopt, or not adopt, the new style.

Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted numerous and often hostile opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. In her short-lived journal, The Woman Rebel, Sanger proclaimed, "A woman's body belongs to herself alone" and openly defended unwed motherhood. In these excerpts from The Woman Rebel, Sanger announced the journal's feminist and radical commitments and reported on "The Post Office Ban," the U.S. Post Office's suppression of the journal under the Comstock laws (which prohibited the use of the U.S. mails to distribute information about contraception).

In this excerpt from Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson told the story of black soldiers and canteen workers. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. Their account commemorated and celebrated African-American participation in the war, even as it noted segregation and discrimination within the effort to "save the world for democracy." The YMCA was one of a very few examples of interracial effort and cooperation during this period; nonetheless, Hunton and Johnson note that some workers of the organization failed to live up to its ideals. German propaganda directed to African-American soldiers used such examples of racism to decry the hypocrisy of the United States and to exhort black soldiers to surrender to the German army.

One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City. In this brief excerpt from their testimony before the Factory Investigation Commission, New York City Fire Chief Edward F. Croker and Fire Marshall William Beers commented on the safety lapses--the locking of an exit door, the inadequate fire escapes, and the overcrowded factory floor--that led to the deaths of the Triangle workers.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education—most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act—and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states—three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, a representative of working women and members of the National Woman's Party, including founder Alice Paul (1885–1977), argued that protective legislation harmed, rather than helped, working women by restricting their opportunities to acquire higher-paying jobs.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. Frederick's pamphlet, You and Your Laundry (1922), instructed women in the daunting complexities of washing clothes--a process comprising fifteen different steps. You and Your Laundry also illustrated the close alliance between scientific housework and consumption. Written under the sponsorship of the Hurley Machine Company, Frederick's pamphlet frequently invoked its brand name and products. The pamphlet ended with a pitch for buying on installment, a payment plan that helped to spur consumption.

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education--most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act--and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states÷three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, Representative Margaret M. Heckler argued that passage of the ERA was necessary to halt sex discrimination and present women with the full measure of rights and responsibilities equally attendant to all Americans. Heckler later served the Reagan administration as Secretary of Health and Human Services.