Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born around 1818 in Virginia, a slave of the Burwell family. At fourteen she was loaned to the Rev. Robert Burwell, her master's son, who lived in North Carolina. There she gave birth to her son George, the product of an unwanted encounter with a white man. After several unhappy years with Robert Burwell and his family, Keckley was sent to live in St. Louis with Anne Burwell Garland, a married daughter of the Burwells. In this selection from her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, Keckley describes how she bought her freedom from the Garland family, a process that was completed in November 1855. Her sincere efforts to live within slavery's rules are striking and indicate how deeply the slave system's practices and values permeated both the black and white cultures of the South. After her emancipation Keckley earned her living as a dressmaker in Washington, D.C.; she died there in poverty in 1907.

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. This prolonged struggle entangled female activists in other important political and moral issues that divided the nation along racial, ethnic, and class lines, and debates over the vote for women often took a divisive tone. Some white women suffrage leaders were willing to use class, ethnic, and racial arguments to bolster the case for granting white women the vote. Belle Kearney, a white Mississippi suffragist who addressed the 1903 NAWSA convention, raised the specter of black male political power to argue for the enfranchisement of white women.

Explores the changing map of the public and the private in pre-industrial and modern societies and examines how that map affected men's and women's production and consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, is another major theme. How did an ideal of the "domestic" arise in the early modern west, and to what extent did it limit the economic position of women? How has it been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period? Focuses on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, but some attention to how these issues have played themselves out in non-Western cultures. This course will explore the relation of women and men in both pre-industrial and modern societies to the changing map of public and private (household) work spaces, examining how that map affected their opportunities for both productive activity and the consumption of goods and leisure. The reproductive strategies of women, either in conjunction with or in opposition to their families, will be the third major theme of the course. We will consider how a place and an ideal of the "domestic" arose in the early modern west, to what extent it was effective in limiting the economic position of women, and how it has been challenged, and with what success, in the post-industrial period. Finally, we will consider some of the policy implications for contemporary societies as they respond to changes in the composition of the paid work force, as well as to radical changes in their national demographic profiles. Although most of the material for the course will focus on western Europe since the Middle Ages and on the United States, we will also consider how these issues have played themselves out in non-western cultures.

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. Ferber's shop-girl heroines were strong-willed, and though they expressed vulnerability and desire for male companionship, they valued their careers. In this 1912 Ferber short story, titled "One of the Old Girls," the head of the corset department in Spiegel's department store is faced with a hard decision when her longtime swain "pops the question."

Through a range of political, social, and organizational venues, African-American women struggled to participate in the racial awareness and pride that characterized the "New Negro" movement of the 1920s. Alain Locke's important 1925 compilation of Harlem Renaissance writings, The New Negro, included an essay by Elise Johnson McDougald, a prominent black educator, social investigator, and journalist. McDougald's essay, originally published in the Survey, employed socioeconomic analysis to explore the particular problems, as well as contributions to society, of four groups of black women, from wealthy to working-class. Seeking to repudiate the monolithic way in which black women were perceived and represented by white America, McDougald not only focused on economics but also challenged stereotypical representations of blacks in the arts and advertising, as well as those surrounding black women's sexuality.

Survey of the social, cultural, and political development of western Europe between 500 and 1300. Topics include: the Germanic conquest of the ancient Mediterranean world; the Carolingian Renaissance; feudalism and the breakdown of political order; the crusades; the quality of religious life; the experience of women; and the emergence of a revitalized economy and culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In the 1920s, new sexual ideologies reshaped prescriptions for marriage, incorporating moderate versions of feminism. Neith Boyce and Hutchins Hapgood shared the romantic radicalism of Floyd Dell and other Greenwich Village bohemians in the early 20th century. They practiced open marriage, though not without pain and confusion. Written in 1916 for the Provincetown Players, an innovative theater group that operated between 1915 and 1922, Enemies was an autobiographical meditation on the emotional struggles of a couple in a non-monogamous marriage. The characters expressed considerable bitterness, yet in the end affirmed their partnership. In the first draft of the play the characters bore the names of their authors, clearly suggesting its autobiographical inspiration.

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for women.

During the Civil War, when Union forces occupied the South Carolina sea islands of St. Helena and Port Royal, white slaveowners fled but their slaves remained. It was here, in October 1862, that Charlotte Forten arrived under the auspices of the Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Association to teach the newly liberated slaves. Forten (later Charlotte Forten Grimke) was born in Philadelphia in 1837 into a family of well-to-do, free blacks who were active in the abolitionist movement. Forten was a teacher and a writer, known today for her extensive diaries and her articles. An educated woman and a product of free black society, Forten hovered uneasily between the worlds of blacks and whites. In this article for a white audience she expressed her jubilation about the freedom her students were newly experiencing. She also revealed her ambivalence about these people who were similar to herself, yet at the same time so different.

This anonymous worker articulated common grievances of domestic workers in her 1912 article in Outlook magazine. A veteran of thirty-three years of household labor, she protested the unsystematic work and arbitrary supervision of domestic service, the most common category of female employment until World War II. She advised,"If the mistress of the house . . . would treat housework like a business, and treat their maids like the employees of a business, many of the problems of domestic service would be solved." Explicitly comparing domestic service and industrial work, this writer articulated the reasons that young women increasingly left household labor for the regular wages, fixed hours, and less intrusive supervision of factory jobs.

In this activity, students will analyze documents pertaining to the woman suffrage movement as it intensified following passage of the 15th Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote for African American males. Documents were chosen to call attention to the struggle’s length, the movement’s techniques, and the variety of arguments for and against giving women the vote.

The labor struggles of the early 20th century, many of which ended in violence and death, engendered deep concern at all levels of society and led to a series of governmental investigations. The most important--the Commission on Industrial Relations--was appointed by newly elected Democratic president Woodrow Wilson early 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 erupted in southern Colorado. On Easter night, 1914, three women and eleven children were killed at a mining encampment in Ludlow, Colorado. One of the most famous accounts of what came to be called the "Ludlow massacre" was the statement of a young electrical engineer, Godfrey Irwin, who was traveling through southern Colorado and provided an eyewitness account to a New York World reporter, reproduced here.

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 statement submitted to the Senate hearing on the EPA, the National Retail Merchant Association (NRMA), an organization representing retail employers, claimed that the legislation was unnecessary, expensive, and impossible to enforce. While professing that equal pay for women was "an admirable principle," the NRMA also argued that high rates of absenteeism and protective legislation made women more expensive to employ than men.

In 1870, two years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing freedpeople rights as U.S. citizens, Congress responded to racial violence in the South by providing additional constitutional protection for the black electorate. The Fifteenth Amendment declared that the right of U.S. citizens to vote could not be abridged or denied" by any state "on account of race

During World War I, wartime inflation severely taxed the limited budgets of working-class families. Although wages also rose during the war, they could not keep up with prices. On February 20, 1917, after confronting pushcart peddlers who were charging exorbitant rates for necessities, thousands of women marched to New York's City Hall to demand relief. The food riot" precipitated a boycott campaign that eventually forced pushcart prices down. Women in Boston and Philadelphia took similar action."

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, Mrs. Anna Gordon, a Reserve officer in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service--U.S. Navy Women's Reserve), emphasized that many mothers successfully combined motherhood and careers. She further argued that skilled, experienced women dedicated to military careers were too valuable for the nation to discard at a time of Cold War uncertainty. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born in slavery in Virginia around 1818 and purchased her freedom in 1855. In 1862 she was living in Washington DC and working as a skilled dressmaker; her principal client was Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the president. Keckley sympathized with the former slaves, or "contraband," as they were called, who fled to the relative safety of Washington during the Civil War. The Contraband Relief Association, which Keckley founded and headed, gathered funds and clothing for the poor former slaves. Yet, as her rather condescending remarks make clear, Keckley felt superior to the people she helped. Keckley's memoir Behind the Scenes was published in 1868. The book included revelations about Mary Lincoln's private life, and, feeling betrayed, the former First Lady shunned Keckley. Her dressmaking business declined, and she died in poverty in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children in Washington, one of the institutions she had helped to found.

Little Rosebud's Lovers was written in 1886 by Laura Jean Libbey, a popular author of popular fiction. Between 1882 and 1902, she wrote more than 50 different serials for the story papers. She was particularly known for placing working-girl heroines within sensational and melodramatic plots. In this selection, the first chapter of Little Rosebud's Lovers, the heroine finds herself the unwitting object of desire of a wealthy Bostonian. The selection ends on a note of foreboding--in subsequent chapters Little Rosebud becomes homeless and impoverished before her inevitable redemption. What did women workers take away from their reading of the novels of Libbey and others? Historian Michael Denning has speculated that these stories were "an interruption in the present, a magical fairy tale transformation of familiar landscapes and characters, a death and rebirth that turned the social world upside down, making proud ladies [into] villains, and working-girls [into] ladies."

Soon after passage of the Fugitive-Slave Law, Margaret Garner fled from her Kentucky master with her four children. Slave patrollers followed her to Ohio. Faced with capture, Garner killed two of her children rather than have them return to slavery. The surviving children were taken from her and, on the return trip to Kentucky, Garner drowned herself in the Ohio River. Her story inspired an acclaimed nineteenth-century painting by Thomas S. Noble (on which this engraving was based) and Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize novel, Beloved.

This seven-minute video and accompanying lesson plan looks at how throughout the 1960’s and 70’s the second wave feminism movement worked to address gender inequality across the United States. While the movement had several important victories, the Equal Rights Amendment was not passed. Was the second wave feminist movement a success nonetheless?