Members of the National Woman's Party (NWP) took some of the most militant actions in the struggle for suffrage in the early 20th century. NWP members who had been imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse went on a hunger strike to draw international attention to their cause. Prison authorities responded with brutal force feedings. The excerpt included here, from the clandestine prison diary of NWP member Rose Winslow, described the rigors of that experience. Born in Poland, Rose Winslow (her given name was Ruza Wenclawska) started working in a Pennsylvania textile mill at age eleven, quitting eight years later when she developed tuberculosis.

The emergence of the sharecropping system in the South in the last three decades of the 19th century rested on an uneasy compromise between black farming families and the white landowners on whose land they labored. Sharecropping was an oppressive system but the experience of sharecropping families varied. In this interview done by historian Charles Hardy in 1984, Minnie Whitney, born in 1902, described the determined efforts of more progressive farmers like her father, who along with her mother struggled to maintain some self-sufficiency in the face of white determination to enforce African-American dependence on the sharecropping system.

Although middle- and upper-class observers viewed the leisure habits of working-class women with condescension, few of them actually knew much about what working women did with their spare time. One exception was Dorothy Richardson, a woman from a middle-class Iowa family who had to work in a factory to support herself. In 1905, she published a fictionalized version of her experiences under the title, The Long Day . In this excerpt, she described a discussion among her fellow workers about their favorite novels and music. Despite her disdainful view of their interest in "ungrammatical, crude, and utterly banal . . . cheap story books," her account demonstrated the importance of popular culture in the everyday lives of women factory workers. The novel that the women discussed, Little Rosebud's Lovers, was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a bestselling author of popular fiction. Libbey was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots.

In 1890, two competing organizations working to gain the right for women to vote joined forces to form the National American Women Suffrage Association (NAWSA). NAWSA 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. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines. Florence Kelley, a Chicago-born labor reformer, socialist, and woman suffrage advocate, employed pragmatic arguments in support of women's right to vote. In this selection from a speech to the 1898 NAWSA convention, Kelly argued that working women, particularly factory workers, needed the ballot to protect themselves from exploitation at the hands of their powerful employers. She also argued that working men needed their feminine counterparts to vote in order to strengthen labor's presence at the polls.

The Wampanoag Indians of New England began Metacom's War (also known as King Philip's War) in 1675 in an attempt to expel the English from the region. Metacom, leader of the Wampanoag, fashioned an alliance of many different groups, but Christian Indians and Iroquois who allied with the English proved to be a significant factor in the eventual colonial victory. In August 1676 colonial troops captured and killed Metacom, ending hostilities in southern New England. However, other Indians continued their attacks for another two years along the northern New England coast. In particular, they targeted fishing ketches operated out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Mariner Robert Roules narrated one such incident in July 1677 when his boat was captured by Indians, then recaptured by the settlers. When the settlers sailed Roules' boat into Marblehead harbor, the women of Marblehead took bloody revenge upon the Indian captives.

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. Drawing on domestic traditions of parlor plays and dramatic tableaux, suffragists used brief plays and monologues to enliven their own meetings and to enlist new members through performances at women's clubs and community theaters. Marie Jenney Howe wrote this Antisuffrage Monologue for the drama group of the New York Woman's Suffrage Party and other suffrage organizations. In it, she parodied anti-suffragist arguments that relied on stereotypes of female dependence, irrationality, and delicacy even as they also warned that women voters would exert too much power. Howe, a Unitarian minister, later founded Heterodoxy, a group of women intellectuals and radicals in New York City's Greenwich Village.

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. Suffragists also reached large audiences through newspapers. In Alice Duer Miller's "Unauthorized Interviews," originally published as newspaper columns in the New York Tribune, the pro-suffrage writer spoofed male legislators with clever reversals of gender stereotypes: the men were petulant and irrational, while the women suffragists remained cool and logical.

In 1909, the predominantly immigrant and female workers in New York City's garment industry staged a series of job walkouts that led to a massive general strike involving more than 20,000 workers. Fifteen-year-old shirtwaist worker Clara Lemlich, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, emerged as a key organizer and speaker. An unprovoked attack on Lemlich and her fellow female strikers by anti-union thugs was recorded by New York Sun correspondent McAlister Coleman. He retold the story years later in his article, "All of Which I Saw," published in the Progressive in 1950.

Susie King Taylor was born a slave in Savannah, Georgia, in 1848. In the summer of 1862, only 14 years old, she taught school to liberated slaves on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, behind Union lines. As this section of her Reminiscences began, King met Captain C.T. Trowbridge who, along with fellow Union officers, arrived on the island to gather black troops for what would become the First South Carolina Volunteers, the 33rd Regiment. When Trowbridge and the Volunteers left St. Simon's Island, King accompanied them. Initially taken as a laundress, her duties expanded to include clerical work and nursing. For the next few years, King assisted as the troops traveled and battled through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Taylor met her husband, Edward Taylor, a sergeant in the 33rd Regiment, on St. Simon's Island. After the war, the Taylors settled in Savannah. Later, after her husband died in an accident, King moved to Boston, where she remarried. She died in 1912.

In 1939, a federal Women's Bureau survey revealed that only one in fifteen union members was female. But the same observers also noted the truism that women workers, once organized, often became tenacious and militant unionists. Unionists saw women as temporary members of the work force (as indeed most were before 1940, when the average worker was a young single woman). They mistakenly assumed that such workers would not be dedicated union members. Some saw women as unwelcome competitors for "men's jobs" and worked to keep women out of better paid union jobs rather than recruiting them to join the union. Even the United Office and Professional Workers Association (UOPWA), a progressive union that focused its efforts on clerical workers, shared some of these demeaning views of women. A regular column in the UOPWA's publication, the Ledger, featured "Susie Steno," a condescending caricature of a clerical worker as a frivolous and naive young woman, albeit one who becomes a good unionist.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Asian and Latino immigrants flocked to the United States, rivaling in sheer numbers the trans-Atlantic immigration of a century earlier. Many came because even minimum wage work in the United States paid five to ten times more than they could earn in their homelands. These Asian workers, photographed in 1991 as they labored in a garment shop in lower Manhattan, typified the work experience of many immigrants: monotonous, low wage work in conditions reminiscent of clothing industry sweatshops from earlier in the twentieth century.

The slinky style of the flapper" was celebrated in the popular press during the 1920s

European observers generally commented critically upon the leading role of Indian women in work. Roger Williams proved an exception. The minister, once head of the Salem church, was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1635 for questioning the Puritan leadership. He helped found the colony of Rhode Island around Narragansett Bay on land purchased from the Narragansett people to the south, with whom he and the colony maintained generally good relations. He spent much of his life trying to understand the Indians 'customs and language, and published some of his sympathetic observations in his 1643 book Key into the Language of America where he offered a glossary of Algonquian words that revealed much about Indian life. Williams also criticized certain colonial practices, such as the occupation of Indian lands by Europeans, and advocated the separation of church and state and individual freedom in other writings.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. 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.

Although the 1970's saw an increase of women entering non-traditional and unionized jobs, many skilled and building trades remained effectively closed to women. As a result, in many cities throughout the 1970's and 1980's, private and city bus companies provided important opportunities for women interested in non-traditional jobs. Boasting large numbers of women and lesbians and an atmosphere of social tolerance, these jobs were seen as gay-friendly and provided female workers with a strong voice in union politics and a sense of community and solidarity. Shelley Ettinger took a bus job in the midst of a bus strike in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1977. Encouraged to join by other lesbians, Ettinger remembered an atmosphere of female and lesbian camaraderie that expanded beyond the bus yard into social gatherings and soft-ball games.

Ellen N. La Motte was one of the first American nurses to serve in a French field hospital during World War I. The Backwash of War, a series of fourteen vignettes of a French field hospital, recounting her 1915 service in Belgium, was first published in fall 1916, before American entry into the world war. Once the United States had entered the war, La Motte's unsparing view of the devastation of war was suppressed by the pervasive national propaganda effort of the home front, and the publishers withdrew the book. Republished in 1934, the book found a new audience among Americans determined to avoid involvement in foreign wars. Included here is her introduction to the 1934 republication, which gave the book's publishing history, and one of the sketches.

Strikes affect an entire community, and in the end they need that community's support to succeed. This is especially true in the case of a sit-down strike like the legendary sit-down strike at Flint, Michigan, in 1936, when the strikers occupied the GM plants. The strikers, isolated at first inside the Fisher Body Plant Number One, needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women's Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped found the Women's Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike's key leaders. In this interview, conducted by historian Sherna Gluck in 1976, Genora Johnson Dollinger described first how the strike affected her family.

Mary Ballou and her husband ran a boarding house in the gold mining town of Negro Bar, California. While most of the "Forty-niners" who rushed to California went to pan gold, others, like Ballou and her husband, went to reap high profits by providing services to the miners. Ballou's letter to her son, written in 1852, evoked the rough housing, violence, and high prices (from which the Ballous profited) in California during the gold rush. She also described the limited number of women among the flood of male miners, and how important they were to each other for companionship and consolation. Ballou's references to "the States" are an expression of how far from home California must have felt since California was a state÷it had been admitted to the union in 1850.

Charles Ball was born a slave around 1785 in Calvert County, Maryland. When he was four years old, his family was broken up by the sale of his mother. As a young man he was separated from his wife and children and sold to a slave trader. The journey described here occurred after that sale. Ball carefully observed his route and later used that knowledge to escape from a South Carolina cotton plantation and return to his family in Maryland. After his escape, Ball lived as a free man in Maryland and Washington, D.C. When his wife died, he remarried, established a new family, and farmed his own property near Baltimore. This period of happiness, however, did not last. Ball and his family were captured, separated, and dragged back into slavery. Although Ball managed to escape again, his family did not. He dictated this memoir while living in Philadelphia, free, but still fearful of recapture.

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. In the following testimony to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, Alba C. Thompson, a former servicewoman, pointed out that the present policy discriminated unjustly against women with children and entailed a squandering of valuable resources. Furthermore, she argued, the army had no right "to dictate the terms of motherhood." In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.