In August 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th amendment to the U.S. constitution, assuring that it became law in time for women to vote in the presidential election, many feminists predicted great advances for women. "We are no longer petitioners," declared suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, "we are not wards of the nation, but free and equal citizens." The promised gains proved elusive, however, especially in the crucial realm of employment. Among working women, all but a tiny number of well-paid professionals faced the burdens of a double shift of both paid jobs and unpaid household labor. In a 1929 story for the Nation, Paul Blanshard recorded the daily routine of a South Carolina cotton mill worker. Her narrative intertwined her home duties with her work in the mill, as her long day at the mill was punctuated by equally burdensome domestic chores.

Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) began life as a vivacious girl with a "wild and airy" temperament and ended it as a sober Quaker. Born in England, Ashbridge eloped at fourteen and was widowed five months later. After rejection by her family and a three-year sojourn with relatives in Ireland, she sailed for America as an indentured servant, arriving in New York in July, 1732. This selection from her autobiography begins as Ashbridge sets out from her home in Long Island to visit relatives in Philadelphia. By then she had undergone an intensely felt spiritual search and had married her second husband, a teacher with a penchant for violence and drink. Ashbridge's dispute with her second husband over her Quakerism ended only with his enlistment in the army and subsequent death. She married a third time, to a Quaker named Aaron Ashbridge, and died while visiting Quakers in England and Ireland.

In an interview, conducted by oral historian Allyson Knoth for the Feminist History Research Project, Elizabeth Anderson, born in Germany in the late 1880s, described the twelve abortions she endured as a young married woman living in New York City with a husband who refused to use birth control devices such as condoms. Anderson detailed a series of painful and dangerous procedures, including the use of ergot pills, and pricking the cervix with a hat pin. Anderson also suggested that abortion was used by working-class women as well as those better off; the typical abortionist charged $25 (a decent week's wage) to perform the illegal procedure.

This collection uses primary sources to explore Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior. 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.

Women are not often thought of in association with the Populists, but the best-known orator of the movement in the early 1890s was a woman, Mary Elizabeth Lease. Born in Pennsylvania in 1850 to Irish parents, Lease became a school teacher in Kansas in 1870. She and her husband, a pharmacist, spent ten years trying to make a living farming, but finally gave up in 1883 and settled in Wichita. Lease entered political life as a speaker for the Irish National League, and later emerged as a leader of both the Knights of Labor and the Populists. Lease mesmerized audiences in Kansas, Missouri, the Far West, and the South with her powerful voice and charismatic speaking style. In this speech before the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1890, Lease championed the power of women in late-19th century grassroots political movements.

Writing about gender roles of the 1950s, Betty Friedan once defined the "suburban housewife" as "the dream image of the young American woman." Just as prescriptive literature of the 19th century geared to the middling classes emphasized women's "true" place in society as mother and wife, the 1950s saw an ideal perpetuated in books, magazines, movies, television, songs, and ads that depicted the white, middle-class woman fulfilled only by a happy marriage. The following article from a popular magazine of 1960 offered a sociological survey of the more than one-third of adult American women whose lives did not fit this domestic norm. Based on interviews with single, divorced, and widowed women, and a host of "experts", the author detailed the "frenzied" mating efforts of women who tried, but failed, to marry as well as the adverse psychological effects of being single. Despite the evidence presented that unmarried women could be happy--sometimes even happier than their married counterparts--the article's rhetorical emphasis on "frantic hordes of unwed women" relentlessly searching for husbands perpetrated a stereotypical depiction at odds with some of the statistics and testimonies quoted.

This collection uses primary sources to explore women in the Civil War. 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.

During the Civil War women played an important role both on the battlefield and on the home front. They helped after battles as nurses, ran businesses and farms, and worked in munitions factories while their fathers and brothers were off at war. They supported the war effort by contributing to organizations like the United States Sanitary Commission, and in rare cases even disguised themselves as soldiers and participated in battles.
Students will be able to:
1. Name four roles that women had during the Civil War.
2. Describe four contributions women made to the war effort.
3. Explain three difficulties women faced during the Civil War.

This collection uses primary sources to explore women in the antebellum reform movement. 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.

During World War II, a number of states passed legislation to combat salary inequities suffered by women workers. Many unions also adopted standards to insure that female employees received the same salaries as males who performed similar jobs. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, the first Federal legislation guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, prohibited firms engaged in interstate commerce from paying workers according to wage rates determined by sex. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment. Many jobs traditionally identified as women's work, however, continued to pay lower salaries than those historically classified as jobs for men. The following studies included in testimony to a 1970 Congressional hearing investigating employment discrimination against women presented a statistical snapshot of women workers. The battle for equal pay for work of comparable worth emerged as the "issue of the eighties," in the words of Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). By the end of the 1980s, the EEOC had initiated lawsuits against more than 40 states for employment discrimination. More than 1,700 localities passed legislation to address pay inequity.

The New Left facilitated the emergence of a new women's movement in the late 1960's. The rebirth of American feminism emerged in part from the New Left's probing of the political dimension of personal life, but also from the discrimination many young women faced within the movement itself. While thousands of young women joined political groups with fervor and dedication, many were dismayed to find that their male comrades did not view them as equals. As SDS activist Cathy Wilkerson remembered, poor treatment from men within the movement sparked heated debates among women as to whether they should create a separate women's movement. Such a movement appeared, with tremendous impact, in the late 1960's and early 1970's. [The material in brackets was added to the transcript shortly after the recorded interview.]

A number of states established bureaus of labor during the Gilded Age to investigate working and living conditions among industrial workers. In the first half of the 19th century, some moral reformers had believed that the new Lowell mills would be a place of educational and moral uplift for women workers. But by the late 19th century, many worried that factories were breeding grounds for prostitution and other forms of "degenerate" behavior. As a result, investigations about working women often focused obsessively on the question of morality. This excerpt from the 1884 Fifteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics presented bureau head Carroll Wright's assessment of the working and living conditions of the young working women of Boston. To secure first-hand information, the agency interviewed 1,000 female workers on subjects ranging from their relations with employers to their after-hours activities.

Agnes Nestor's mother was a textile mill worker. Her father was a machinist and a one-time member of the Knights of Labor who became a city alderman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The family migrated to Chicago during the depression of the 1890s, and the teenage Agnes went to work in a glove factory. The sixty-hour work weeks exhausted her. "I have been so tired all day I could hardly work," she regularly noted in her diary. This reminiscence by Nestor described how the oppressive conditions of the glove factory pushed her to take a leading role in a successful strike of female glove workers in 1898. Soon she became president of her glove workers local and later a leader of the International Glove Workers Union. She also took a leading role in the Women's Trade Union League, serving as president of the Chicago branch from 1913 to 1948.

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 is a WEP worker who has been working with WEP Workers Together to demand improvements to the program.

In this oral history interview conducted by historian Joan Morrison, Pauline Newman told of getting a job at the Triangle Company as a child, soon after arriving in the United States from Lithuania in 1901. Newman described her life as an immigrant and factory worker. Like many other young immigrant workers, she chafed at the strict regulations imposed by the garment manufacturers. One of the greatest industrial tragedies in U.S. history occurred on March 26, 1911, when 146 workers, mostly young women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Although she was not working in the factory at the time of the fire, many of her friends perished. Newman later became an organizer and leader of the International Ladies Garment Workers' Union.

This collection uses primary sources to explore women's work on the home front during World War II. 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.

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 Senate hearing testimony, union leader Murray Plopper argued that the "race against the Communist bloc of nations" demanded an end to gender discrimination. Plopper used specific examples of retail clerks' working conditions and earnings to argue for passage of the law. He also noted that "women work because they must" and challenged the provisions of the law that would exempt small stores.

In the 1820s, operatives in the Lowell cotton mills, mostly women, worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Holidays were few and short: July Fourth, Thanksgiving, and the first day of spring. In the 1830s, with increased competition, conditions worsened as owners cut wages, raised boarding house rents, or increased workloads. To protest these changes, women went out on strike in 1834 and 1836. This promotional engraving showed a mill woman standing in unlikely repose beside a Fale and Jenks spinning frame. The benign relationship of the figure to the machine may have served to reassure nineteenth-century observers that factory work would not debase virtuous womanhood.""

Cheap prints depicting current events were in great demand in both England and the colonies. This 1775 British print presented a scene in Edenton, North Carolina. Fifty-one women signed a declaration in support of nonimportation, swearing not to drink tea or purchase other British imports. Boycotts of British goods became a widespread form of protest to the Townshend Duties, enacted in 1767 to tax goods such as paint, paper, lead, glass, and tea when they arrived in America. Abstaining from European products and fashions became a mark of patriotism, and merchants who violated nonimportation were subjected to public ridicule. Tarring and feathering was common, as were attacks on conspicuous symbols of wealth. As this print suggests, ridicule existed on both sides of the Atlantic. The artist treated the Edenton women with scorn, portraying them as ugly, impressionable, and neglectful of their children.