In 1937, the Supreme Court reversed a position taken in 1923 that a state minimum wage law was unconstitutional. The following year, the Fair Labor Standards Act was signed into law outlawing child labor and guaranteeing covered workers a minimum wage of 40 cents an hour and a maximum 40-hour work week. Although more than 22 million workers benefited, conservative forces in Congress saw to it that the Act exempted many others from its provisions. Due to the persistence of low wages during the Depression, the Federal government charged three agencies, including the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, to recommend procedures to determine cost-of-living budgets so that adequate minimum wage legislation could be written. In the following document, the Women's Bureau devised budgets for self-supporting women without dependents living in a variety of states and defined a "minimum-adequate standard of living" distinct from a subsistence or luxury standard. In doing so they took into consideration specific cultural, sociological, and psychological factors. They reasoned that wage standards should enable "conformity with group-approved habits or behavior patterns" in the area in which an individual lives so that persons affected can feel that they "belong" to their group. The document was included in the record of Senate hearings in 1949 to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The often violent labor struggles of the early 20th century engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations, including the federal Commission on Industrial Relations, appointed in 1913. The commission was in the midst of taking testimony from owners, workers, and reformers in dozens of industrial communities around the country when a coal strike broke out in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. The United Mine Workers of America, the union that represented the striking Colorado miners, quickly printed and sold (for 25 cents) thousands of copies of a pamphlet (excerpted here) entitled The Ludlow Massacre by Walter Fink, director of publicity of UMWA District 15. In addition to providing a dramatic retelling of the events leading up to the tragedy, the title of the pamphlet became the commonly accepted term for the event.

Recommendations by the National War Labor Board during World War II to pay male and female workers equal wages yielded few changes in the gender wage gap. Women continued to receive less money for comparable work, and into the 1960s want ads characterized jobs as "male" or "female" with resulting salary differences based on gender. The Equal Pay Act (EPA) made it illegal to pay men and women differently for similar work. Although the EPA was passed in 1963, it was debated in workplaces and courtrooms for decades thereafter. In this passionately argued Senate hearing testimony, Caroline Davis, Director of the United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW) Women's Department declared wage discrimination immoral and inefficient. She rebutted EPA's critics who claimed that women were more expensive to employ than men and compared unequal pay based on gender to workplace discrimination against immigrants, African Americans, industrial workers, and workers in colonial societies.

The passage and enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law meant that no escaped slave was safe, since even those living in the free North could be arrested and reenslaved. After passage of the Law, escaped slave women living in the North sometimes wore veils when they appeared in public to avoid identification by slave-catchers.

Women's magazines published between the Civil War and World War II frequently featured articles on "the servant problem" for their middle-class readers. For mistresses, the "problem" was the inadequate supply of "competent" household help. Over the years, the solution to the problem changed. Whereas in the 19th century women were counseled to follow the ideals of Christian maternal benevolence, in the 20th century women were advised to follow principles of scientific management. As this 1912 article by Christine Frederick, an advocate of scientific management for housewives, makes clear, none of these reforms touched the heart of the real problem: servants were poorly paid (eight cents an hour in this "enlightened" household) and treated with little respect. Even so, scientific management did have some potential benefits for domestic servants. Many household workers complained about the lack of a regular schedule, constantly changing orders, and conflicting demands. If household work were truly rationalized, it might free them of some of the arbitrary, demeaning, and disorderly conditions of their work lives.

This documentary tells the story of one remarkable woman and the struggles she undertook to build a better community. Discover the story of civil rights activist Vel Phillips, Wisconsin's first African American woman elected secretary of state.

Lesson plans, video segments, and other resources available at: pbswisconsineducation.org/vel-phillips-dream-big-dreams

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." Women's magazines also took up the home conservation crusade. Good Housekeeping printed menus, offering housewives directions for preparing tasty meals that met conservation standards. Contributed by readers, this "month's worth of recipes" printed in August 1917 demonstrated conservation in action, as well as women's ingenuity in redesigning menus to observe rationing guidelines.

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.

The American Revolution divided Indian communities as well as Euro-American ones. Captured at the age of fifteen along the Pennsylvania frontier and adopted and integrated into a Seneca community, Mary Jemison watched the war through the eyes of a wife and mother. The Iroquois attempted to remain neutral in the conflict, and Jemison watched tribal leaders return from a meeting with Patriot colonists at German Flats, secure in their belief that Indian neutrality would be respected. Instead, the British sought to attract Iroquois support and four of the six Iroquois nations declared their allegiance to the crown. Soon, Seneca lands became a battleground and their fields were laid waste by the colonists' scorched earth tactics. Jemison described the ensuing destruction and disease in 1823 when she related her life story to James Seaver, a local doctor near her home among the Iroquois of western New York.

In folklore the black nursemaid was seen as a dutiful, self-sacrificing black woman who loved her white family and its children every bit as much as her own. Yet the popular images of the loyal, contented black nursemaid, or "mammy," were unfortunately far from the reality for the African-American women who worked in these homes. In 1912 the Independent printed this quasi-autobiographical account of servant life, as related by an African-American domestic worker, which dispelled the comforting "mammy" myth.

Moving to the Great Plains meant building a home on broad, flat, and treeless prairies. Borrowing from the Plains Indians and earlier pioneers in Kansas, Mattie Oblinger and other homesteaders built sod houses. They cut the prairie sod deep and wide, laid it up like giant bricks, and fit the bricks together snugly without mortar. Mattie and her husband Uriah obtained their land through the Homestead Act of 1862, claiming and improving their 160 acres over five years. Other lands for farmers became available from the vast acreages of public land given to the railroad companies as subsidies. The Oblingers and other settlers formed communities of young families with a rough social equality and common concerns about crops, religion, and social isolation. They faced a series of hardships on the land in the 1870s: blizzards, droughts, and grasshoppers, as well as low crop prices. Mattie died in childbirth at the age of thirty-six.

On George Washington's birthday, 1860, the largest industrial strike to date in the United States started in Lynn, Massachusetts, a coastal town north of Boston. The efforts of the Lynn strikers encouraged shoe and textile workers--including many women--in the nearby town of Marblehead. In Marblehead, as in Lynn, workers invoked the republican values of the American revolution to press their cause. Carrying banners proclaiming "we are not slaves," they referred both to the rhetorical slavery employed by revolutionary leaders and to the real slave system that would collapse in the imminent Civil War. The New York Times reporter who wrote this article, however, was less interested in the historical resonance of the events he witnessed than he was in the loss of revenue to Lynn merchants, the novelty of women gathering in public, and having a good time with his Boston colleagues.

The burgeoning textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, brought increasing competition among the owners and declining conditions for the workers. In the 1830s the women working in the mills turned to economic protests and collective action; their "turn outs" or strikes proved unsuccessful in combating the wage cuts. In the 1840s mill workers turned to political organization as they mounted annual petition campaigns calling on the state legislature to limit the hours of labor within the mills. These campaigns reached their height in 1845 and 1846, when 2,000 and 5,000 operatives respectively signed petitions. to reduce the hours of labor in the mills. Women operatives organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association in 1845. An important part of the campaign was their periodical The Voice of Industry. Another publication, Factory Tracts, was part of their effort to expose conditions in the mills and advocate a ten hour day. Male mechanics and other workers in industrial communities joined the Lowell women operatives' campaign.

The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was one of a constellation of federal agencies that made up President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program to help Americans recover from the Great Depression. Established in 1933 in an effort to spur industrial recovery, the NRA sought to use government power to restrain competition and end the downward cycle of wage cuts and price reductions, without abolishing the free market. The administration asked businesses, labor, and consumers to help write new codes for hour limits, minimum wages, and production standards. To encourage voluntary adoption of these new codes, participating businesses were allowed to display a blue eagle logo, and consumers were urged to spend money only where the symbol was displayed. This photograph captures three unlikely spots for the display of the otherwise ubiquitous NRA eagle.

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 1983 House committee hearing, Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights argued that the ERA was still necessary due to the lack of clear constitutional guidelines for court decisions and enforcement efforts regarding sex discrimination legislation.

Among the social movements joined and led by women in the late 19th century, including unionization and women's suffrage, none had either the widespread fervor or success enjoyed by the temperance movement. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1873, drew widespread support from labor movements such as the Knights of Labor by linking the fight against liquor with the desire to protect home and family against the ravages of the new industrial order. Frances Willard was one of the leaders of the WCTU who vocally sought the alliance of the temperance movement with Labor. In this selection from her autobiography Glimpses of Fifty Years, Willard described the WCTU's most widely known tactic, the praying-in-saloons crusade.

While some planters in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake began to build spacious mansions and rely on the labor of increasing numbers of white and black dependents, most white southerners lived in far humbler circumstances. In Maryland most small farmers were tenants, renting their land from larger landowners. Landless men and women worked as agricultural tenants, laborers, or domestic servants. Elizabeth Sprigs, a servant in a Maryland household, financed her passage from England in exchange for a term as an indentured servant (a frequent practice in the seventeenth century but more rare by the eighteenth). She wrote to her father in 1756 and complained bitterly of the brutal treatment by her master and the harsh privations of daily life, begging him to send clothing.

During the 1960's and 1970's welfare reform movements from the left sought to increase benefits and expand community power, but in 1996 critics from the right passed the federal Welfare Reform Act to limit the program by imposing time-limits and restrictions on welfare benefits. In New York City, the Work Experience Program (WEP), or workfare, initiated in conjunction with the 1996 act, required welfare recipients to "pay off" their welfare benefits by working menial jobs for the city at well below minimum wage. Participants in the program do not receive wages, but simply continue to receive their welfare benefits. In addition, the program confines people who often have skills to do mindless, unskilled work while they are deprived of basic rights such as the right to unionize. Brenda Steward and Sandra White are WEP workers who have been working with WEP Workers Together to demand improvements to the program.

In October 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight set off on what would be a five month journey, by herself, from her home in Boston to New York and back again. Madam Knight, as she was called, was an unusually independent woman for her time. During her husband's lifetime she supported herself and her family by running a shop, teaching handwriting to children, copying legal documents, and taking in boarders. After his death she continued to do very well for herself, buying and selling land and keeping an inn. In this section of the journal she kept of her trip, Knight described what it was like to travel on horseback, accompanied by a mail carrier and other travelers, from Kingston, Rhode Island, to New London, Connecticut. Her frank humor and often bigoted descriptions of people she met, anxiety about river crossings, displeasure with the rough inns she stayed in, and habit of turning experience into poetry were all expressed here.

Frances Willard (1839-1898), leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), was a complex and energetic figure in American feminism and social reform. Willard and the WCTU upheld traditional notions of gender and Victorian ideals of the "true woman," but she was also willing to use these notions as part of a larger demand for female citizenship. Although Willard proclaimed the virtues of traditional domesticity for women, she was not bound by those conventional ideas in her own private life. After an unhappy engagement to Charles Henry Fowler, she never married. For many years, she lived with Anna Gordon, who served as her secretary as well as her aide and confidante. Willard's spirit of personal adventure and liberation led her to take up bicycle riding in her fifties, the last decade of her life. As she described in her enthusiastic book about the experience, A Wheel within a Wheel; How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, she viewed the "conquest" of the bicycle as similar to the mastery that women needed to achieve over the "wider world."