With U.S. entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Herbert Hoover to head the newly created U.S. Food Administration. A mining engineer who had successfully organized the massive effort to get food to Belgium's citizens after the German army's sweep through that country in 1914, Hoover was now charged with managing domestic agriculture and conservation in order to feed the U.S. Army and assist Allied armies and civilians. "Food Will Win the War," declared the Food Administration through its ubiquitous posters and publicity efforts. Planting gardens, observing voluntary rationing, avoiding waste--these efforts at food conservation all came to be known as "Hooverizing." In a campaign sponsored by the Food Administration, Good Housekeeping magazine published a December 1917 editorial seeking recruits for an army of "kitchen soldiers." The editorial portrayed women's domestic work as part of the U.S. military effort and solicited women's direct participation, asking readers to sign a pledge to conserve food.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the poetry of Maya Angelou. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

Nineteenth-century laborers faced a variety of work-related ailments: from rheumatism and pneumonia to lead palsy and carbon monoxide poisoning. Yet governments rarely regulated workplace conditions and the United States lagged far behind industrialized European nations in such regulation. In the Progressive era, however, a movement to regulate dangerous industrial working conditions arose, and one of its most prominent leaders was a physician named Alice Hamilton. In this selection from her 1943 autobiography, Hamilton described her residency at Jane Addams's Hull House in the late 1890s and her participation in the Illinois Occupational Disease Commission.

When women first voted in national elections following ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, participants in the women's movement and others predicted that women voters would be an important factor in a shift toward increased social legislation and anti-corruption in politics. An estimated one-third of the eligible female voters actually voted in 1920, compared to two-thirds of eligible male voters. Women's impact on national elections was not felt to a significant degree until the 1952 election, when the proportion of women voting for Dwight D. Eisenhower was six percent higher than the percentage the candidate pulled among men. Before the 1956 presidential election, the popular magazine Collier's sent writer Walter Davenport to bipartisan Marion Country, Indiana, to survey women's attitudes on candidates and issues. Many of the women whose views Davenport included in the resultant article refuted accepted beliefs of seasoned male politicians. Their paraphrased opinions, however, also employed essentialist gender stereotypes of the time--that "women are all house cleaners at heart" and that "a woman lacks the administrative qualities of a man"--to explain perceived voting tendencies. Davenport's findings ignored factors that social scientists have considered to be important in accounting for voting patterns, such as education, income level, age, and race. He did, however, report the opinion of two female teachers that the formation of women's groups during and since World War II--when more women joined the workforce--had resulted in increased political consciousness among women, an opinion that scholars have since found valid. Although by the 1964 election, more women were voting than men, a viable national female voting bloc has not surfaced in the U.S.

The September 18, 1762 edition of the South Carolina Gazette included notices of stray animals, runaway wives, and escaped slaves. Along with breaking tools, feigning illness, and slowing work, running away, individually or in groups, was a common form of resistance to slavery. Most of those who ran away did so for short periods, often to visit spouses or relatives on other farms, or to escape punishment. Chances were slim for permanent escape, and most of those who ran away were eventually reenslaved. Still, some escaped slaves found refuge with Native American groups or in small, isolated maroon colonies.

From the late 1920s, when the first rival radio broadcasting networks were formed, until the present day, as network television competes for viewers with cable and satellite fare, broadcasters and advertisers have sought ways to quantify information about their audiences. The first ratings system, devised by Archibald Crossley in 1929 for the Association of National Advertisers, relied on random telephone surveys. Interviewers asked what programs and sponsors listeners remembered from the previous day. By the late 1930s, C. E. Hooper successfully challenged this method by surveying only the shows respondents were listening to at the time of the phone interview. Hooper's method dominated until the A. C. Nielsen Company began attaching Audimeters directly to television sets. The following Collier's article from 1954 offered a critique of the four ratings methods in use at that time and discussed adverse consequences caused by the industry's reliance on ratings. This assessment by author Bill Davidson and the men in the industry whom he quoted showed signs of an assumed disparagement of ordinary American housewives, identified implicitly as the predominant audience for mass media consumption. Both the reliability of housewives as part-time interviewers and their ability as viewers to maintain accurate diaries were deemed suspect in this piece.

John L. Lewis' dramatic walkout from the October 1935 American Federation of Labor (AFL) convention and the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later the Congress of Industrial Organizations) that soon followed marked a new stage in labor's drive to organize industrial unions in depression-era America. Here Alice Dodge Wolfson, who was working as a stenographer in 1935, recalled her own contribution to the Lewis walkout and the creation of the CIO. Attending the October 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City as a delegate from her stenographers local of the United Office and Professional Workers Union (a left-wing New York union aligned with the supporters of industrial unionism around Lewis), Wolfson played a small but decisive role in helping launch the CIO when she rose to challenge an AFL official from the convention floor.

Domestic service was the most common category of employment for women before World War II; it was particularly important for black women, who were excluded from most other occupations. By 1920 some 40 percent of all domestic workers were African American--and more than 70 percent of all wage-earning African-American women worked as servants or laundresses. The struggles of domestic workers were sometimes recorded in songs like Hattie Burleson's 1928 "Sadie's Servant Room Blues," a musical version of common complaints of domestic workers about long hours, low pay, and lack of privacy.

Women participated actively in a variety of ways during the War for Independence; some even traveled with the Patriot army. Sarah Osborn was a servant in a blacksmith's household in Albany, New York, when she met and married Aaron Osborn, a blacksmith and Revolutionary war veteran, in 1780. When he re-enlisted as a commissary sergeant without informing her, Sarah agreed to accompany him. They went first to West Point, and Sarah later traveled with the Continental army for the campaign in the southern colonies, working as a washerwoman and cook. Her vivid description included a meeting with General Washington and memories of the surrender of British forces at Yorktown. This account comes from a deposition she filed in 1837, at the age of eighty-one, as part of a claim under the first pension act for Revolutionary war veterans and their widows.

Sarah Smith Emery, in her nineties when she wrote this memoir, grew up around the turn of the 19th century in the Massachusetts countryside. Her family lived on a farm near the port town of Newburyport, on the Merrimack River. Life on the farm, as she described it, was a series of peaceful routines organized by season, time of day, age, and gender. Emery described the home production of food, such as butter and cheese, and household items, including candles, soap, and clothing. Spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dressmaking, cooking, preserving food, and housecleaning filled this early nineteenth-century girl's life, while the men in her family farmed, butchered, and chopped wood. Militia training took place twice each year, in spring and fall. At the time that Emery was writing, the United States was rapidly shifting from an agricultural to an urban industrial economy, and nostalgia for rural life thus colored her recollections.

Department stores not only became a major source of employment for young urban white women beginning in the late 19th century; they also offered a new focus for stories and novels about life in America's burgeoning cities. Writers as diverse as Theodore Dreiser, Edna Ferber, and O. Henry often used the world of department stores and the shop girls who worked there to create a modern fiction (including a brand new form--the short story) that allowed readers to feel the texture of urban life. In "The Trimmed Lamp" (1906), O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) offered a sentimental and moralistic portrait of the after-hours lives of young New York working women. While Porter's stories often focused on shop girls' predicaments (he was considered, in the words of fellow writer Vachel Lindsay, "the little shop girls' knight"), they were typically bathed in a sentimental glow.

The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), established in 1903 by reformers seeking to combine the forces of trade unionism and feminism, faced particular obstacles when organizing women into unions. In this 1915 essay, published in The Trade Union Woman, WTUL leader Alice Henry discussed some of those problems and advocated separate women's locals as a possible solution. Another important organizing problem, which Henry did not discuss, was the tension between the middle-class reformers of the WTUL and the working-class women they wanted to organize but sometimes viewed with condescension. Henry was an Australian journalist of pro-labor and anti-imperialist sympathies. In 1906, she immigrated to the U.S., joined the fight for suffrage, and became a leader of the WTUL. Although she started out sharing the racist views of many Australians (where a "White Australia" policy was widely accepted), her time in America led her to adopt more favorable views of African Americans and immigrants.

Metacom, or King Philip as he was called by the English, led a confederation of Indian groups in 1675 in a military effort to roll back the encroaching English settlements of southern New England. For several months the Indians led raids and secured victories against the English, who found it difficult to combat the Indian style of warfare. Mary Rowlandson, a minister's wife, was captured along with several of her children in one of those raids on the frontier outpost of Lancaster, Massachusetts. For eleven weeks she traveled with the Wampanoags and Nipmucs in central Massachusetts. Her account provided great insight into the relationship of English and Indian cultures at this critical point. While Rowlandson relied heavily upon her faith to see her through her troubles, she also came to understand some of the workings of Indian society, as in her account of Weetamoo. Mary was ransomed in 1676, the same year that the English, with their greater numbers and the support of their Indian allies, achieved Philip's defeat and the scattering of the region's remaining Indian settlements.

Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth, published in 1791, was the first American bestseller. The author, Susanna Haswell Rowson, was born in England circa 1762, and died in Massachusetts, where she spent most of her life, in 1824. Charlotte Temple tells the story of a young English girl who is lured away from her school by an army officer, Montraville. On board ship to his posting in revolutionary-era New York, Montraville seduces Charlotte. Once in New York, Montraville gradually abandons the "ruined" Charlotte who, after a downward spiral into remorse, illness, poverty, and the birth of a child, dies. Seduction novels were popular in the 18th century, and the widely read Charlotte Temple went through more than two hundred editions. But Rowson, who despite her childhood as the daughter of an English revenue officer became a committed republican, used her novel to protest the sexual double standard that ruined the lives of women like Charlotte.

In 1920, after more than seventy years of struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted women the right to vote. While nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns gained partial voting rights for women in twenty states, beginning in 1910 the push for suffrage took on a new urgency under the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the more radical National Woman's Party (NWP). Their campaigns reached wide audiences, in part because suffragists had learned to spread their messages through imaginative use of various media. Supporters held old-fashioned pageants and street parades as well as statewide tours, thanks to the relatively new technology of automobiles. "Der Sufferegetsky," a Yiddish suffrage song, illustrates yet another medium used in the campaign for women's enfranchisement. In the lyrics, a female suffragist imagined the days when women would be treated like people and men would do the cooking. Her male interlocutor glumly predicted that emancipated women would mistreat men. [English translation follows Yiddish.]

These six family budgets collected by the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1884 show the range of family incomes and spending patterns within the working class. Although skill level was probably the most important determinant of wages, relatively few male breadwinners were able to earn a "family wage"--enough to support their wives and children decently. Most families pooled their members' wages in what historians call the "family economy." The wages of children and teenagers often meant the difference between a modicum of comfort and mere survival, and women who were not working for wages sometimes brought in money by operating home-based businesses such as washing clothes or keeping boarders. Women also contributed to the family's economic survival by managing the household budget, sharing resources with other female householders, and scavenging for discarded food, clothes, and fuel. Unlike current times, prices were not constantly rising in the late-19th century, and the period's declining prices (particularly food prices) allowed a modest, gradual improvement in working-class living standards.

In the 1920s, advertisements sought to create consumer demand by manufacturing new wants. Some advertisements associated products with a desirable lifestyle, while others, like this 1928 cigarette advertisement, made use of celebrity endorsements. Here, aviator Amelia Earhart, the first woman to successfully fly solo across the Atlantic, testifies to the pacifying virtues of Lucky Strikes. Although advertisers suggested that everybody needed the latest of everything, most families set their own priorities and purchased the things they wanted most.

The northern Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper presented an unflattering portrait of southern white womanhood in a May 1863 illustration. The depiction contrasted sharply with the view promoted by plantation elites of virtuous southern white mothers and wives who obeyed and deferred to men. The panel on the left showed southern women hounding their men on to Rebellion." The panel on the right depicted them "feeling the effects of Rebellion and creating Bread Riots." The latter panel referred to the Richmond bread riot

This course will explore the rich diversity of women's voices and experiences as reflected in writings and films by and about Latina writers, filmmakers, and artists. Through close readings, class discussions and independently researched student presentations related to each text, we will explore not only the unique, individual voice of the writer, but also the cultural, social and political contexts which inform their narratives. We will also examine the roles that gender, familial ties and social and political preoccupations play in shaping the values of the writers and the nature of the characters encountered in the texts and films.

During the 1820s, large scale production of fabric centered in New England. Perhaps the best known of such cotton mill towns was Lowell, Massachusetts. The Lowell mills mechanized each stage of cloth production, and most mill workers were young, single women from rural New England families struggling to make ends meet. This illustration from T. S. Arthur's reform tract Illustrated Temperance Tales (1850) presented a young woman leaving her farm family to work in a cotton mill. This picture was accurate in showing that New England farm families often had to rely on income from factory labor. But reformers blamed economic hardship on personal weaknesses--in the case of Arthur's story, the father's alcoholism.