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. The demand to change the Constitution to grant women the vote (raised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as early as 1878) was contentious enough; but the pressure for woman suffrage advocates to address other issues often gave the debate over the vote for women a particularly divisive tone. In an 1887 speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Democratic Senator George G. Vest of Missouri put forth traditional arguments that a woman's proper place was at home, not the ballot box.

In the early 20th century, new household technology was both accomplished and inspired by the tremendous increase in American industrial production. As in industry, mechanization and scientific management were part of a larger reorganization of work. And as in industry, efficient housekeeping was partially a response to labor unrest--both the "servant problem" and the growing disquiet of middle-class wives. A major proponent of the new housekeeping, Christine Frederick was consulting household editor for Ladies Home Journal from 1912 to 1919 and the author of numerous books and pamphlets on scientific management in the home. First published in 1913, Frederick's The New Housekeeping opened with her conversion to the "efficiency gospel" under the tutelage of her husband and a male efficiency expert. In chapter 12, Frederick exhorted middle-class women to escape the drudgery of housework by shedding their bad attitudes--and as she enumerated those, she revealed some of the pervasive discontents of women in the home.

Women who settled the West in the years after the Civil War often faced harsh and unremitting toil. Laboring from well before dawn until well after the sun had set, women helped plant and harvest crops, raised large families, and kept house with rudimentary equipment. Long periods of isolation from neighbors and kin were common; social occasions or visits by travelers and kin were rare and cherished events. Mary Ann Hafen immigrated from Switzerland to Utah with her Mormon family in 1860 at age six and her first husband died when she was barely twenty. In this account, she described her move from Utah to Nevada in 1891 with her second husband and their polygamous family, as well as their subsequent life there.

When Boston native Benjamin Franklin entered Philadelphia in 1723, he had few coins in his pocket and scarce entrepreneurial skills. However, Franklin did have valuable training as a printer, and he came armed with some significant introductions to local printers. Printers and other craftsmen relied upon a network of masters, journeymen, and patrons to learn the craft and support themselves. Colonial printers needed expensive imported equipment, yet they had to make do with a limited market for their services--perhaps publishing a newspaper, an occasional pamphlet, or government publication. Franklin wrote his autobiography, from which this account is excerpted, many years after his career as an active printer had ended and his renown as a statesmen, scientist, and moral philosopher had spread.

The climate of repression established in the name of wartime security during World War I continued after the war as the U.S. government focused on communists, Bolsheviks, and "reds." The Red Scare reached its height between 1919 and 1921. Encouraged by Congress, which had refused to seat the duly elected Wisconsin trade unionist and socialist Victor Berger, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of showy and well-publicized raids against radicals and leftists. Striking without warning and without warrants, Palmer's men smashed union offices and the headquarters of Communist and Socialist organizations. The Red Scare reflected the same anxiety about free speech and obsession with consensus that had characterized the war years. The Nation, on April 17, 1920, recounted how a clothing salesman received six months in jail for saying that Vladimir Lenin was smart. Connecticut had established a Sedition Act that made it illegal to utter any speech deemed "injurious" to the United States.

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. The following testimony of Women's Army Corps Director Colonel Irene O. Galloway, to the Senate subcommittee on S. 1492, presented the Department of Defense position opposing the bill. Galloway argued that in the event of an emergency mobilization, such women could not and should not be counted on to leave their duties as mothers to join activated units. In the 1970s, Congress finally passed a law that allowed women with dependent children to enlist.

Fears about the impact of movies on youth led to the Payne Fund research project, which brought together nineteen social scientists and resulted in eleven published reports. One of the most fascinating of the studies was carried out by Herbert Blumer, a young sociologist who would later go on to a distinguished career in the field. For a volume that he called Movies and Conduct (1933), Blumer asked more than fifteen hundred college and high school students to write "autobiographies"of their experiences going to the movies. This seventeen-year-old African American used his motion picture autobiography to describe how films not only led to dreams of fast cars but also made him "feel the injustice done the Negro race."

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), founded in 1905, sought to organize all workers into one big union" to abolish the wage system

In 1960, following student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the South, George E. McMillan, a reporter from Knoxville, Tennessee, traveled the region and analyzed its "current raw, ugly temper." Six years after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, and five years after the Court declared that desegregation should proceed "with all deliberate speed," only a small percentage of Southern schools had been affected. African Americans faced disenfranchisement, severely limited economic opportunities, prejudicial treatment in the criminal justice system, and attacks from mobs and police. McMillan contrasted black outrage at the philosophy of "gradual" change with white insistence on retaining the status quo, and also looked at the role of the military and business communities in fostering change. The Raleigh, North Carolina, meeting McMillan mentioned in passing marked the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent activist group intent on achieving racial equality.

As the principles of scientific management came to play a more significant role in the workplace, some reformers sought to apply these principles to any aspects of daily life that might be improved by standardization and routine. Perhaps no one applied the principles of scientific management to the home with as much passion as Christine Frederick, the household editor of Ladies Home Journal as well as the National Secretary of the Associated Clubs of Domestic Science. In 1912, she published a four-part series in the Ladies Home Journal that promised less housework. Each article opened with a box recounting Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. "Taylorization" made it possible for (compelled, really) steelworkers to quadruple their usual output, and Frederick implied that Taylor's principles would also result in a four-fold increase in home productivity. Frederick's articles were enormously popular. Although Frederick posed as an impartial efficiency expert, she had very close ties to appliance and kitchen-equipment manufacturers and helped lend scientific legitimacy to new products. In this excerpt from the first article in this series, Frederick described how to wash dishes correctly and efficiently.

Americans keenly followed the events of the French Revolution. Reactions to the growing violence and social upheaval split along emerging party lines--Federalists expressed horror while Democratic Republicans were more sympathetic. Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a journalist, the founder of the Philadelphia General Advertiser, and supporter of Jefferson's Republican party. In these two pieces he sympathetically summarized the situation in France during the period when Louis XVI was put on trial and executed. He defended the actions of the revolutionaries on the grounds that they were merely responding to the provocations of nobles and other "traitors." Newspapers in the 1790s quickly became party organs and contributors to the fierce polemics of this factious era. Bache was no exception. He attacked the Federalists mercilessly and was arrested under the Sedition Act, an act of Congress passed by Federalists to prosecute government critics for seditious speech or writings.

This 1903 police department arrest record reflects the faith in data and science espoused by some Progressives. The reputedly scientific measurements instituted by French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon claimed to detect innate criminality and other character flaws, many associated with particular ethnic and racial groups, through physical evidence. Although it bore the stamp of scientific approval, this and other contemporary techniques for differentiating people based on race or physical characteristics incorporated widely held beliefs that Southern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were inherently and biological different from and inferior to white Anglo Saxons. These beliefs, in turn, lent credence to the rise of Jim Crow and immigrant exclusion.

Fall River, Massachusetts, mill worker Thomas O'Donnell (who had immigrated to the U.S. from England eleven years earlier) appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor on October 18, 1883, to answer the panel's questions about working-class economic conditions. An unemployed mule spinner for more than half of the year, he described the introduction of new production methods at the Fall River, Massachusetts, textile factory where he worked as a mule spinner (a worker who tended the large yarn-making machines). These changes allowed the mill's owners to employ children, and they also left the mule spinner unemployed for much of the year. O'Donnell described the sharp decline in his family's living standards that followed and the ways they struggled to make ends meet.

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term "lynching" did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in the 1880s, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in U.S. history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, which were often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable. In April 1898, the Cleveland Gazette, a black newspaper, reported on the lynching of the black postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, who was burned out of his home and shot by a white mob incensed by his appointment to a federal post. The murder of Postmaster Baker galvanized the anti-lynching movement to seek federal intervention.

Pete Seeger, folksinger, songwriter, and activist, provides a remarkable link between the radical culture of the 1930's and the protest culture of the 1960's. In 1940 Seeger met Woody Guthrie and the two formed the Almanac Singers, a leftist singing group that recorded pacifist and pro-union songs. After the war, Seeger formed the Weavers, a popular folk music group, but his successful career was hurt by Cold War red-baiting. While he lived and worked under siege for his political views during the 1950's, Seeger had a large impact on the protest culture of the 1960's, penning some of the era's most important songs, including a variation on a spiritual that became the anthem "We Shall Overcome." In the 1970's and 1980's, Seeger focused on environmentalism, but he continued to appear at benefit concerts and rallies, and his musical legacy of protest singing continues to influence the way Americans speak out.

Workers sang during strikes not only to state their beliefs and goals, but because singing helped bind workers together. The Homestead strike of 1892 even had its own Homestead Strike Songster, and the story of the strike can be traced in the lyrics of the following four songs. "The Homestead Strike" explained that Carnegie's efforts to "lower our wages" was the basic cause of the strike. "The Fort That Frick Built" described Homestead manager Henry Frick's transformation of the mill on the eve of the strike into a fortress with barbed-wire fences. The death of nine strikers was chronicled in "Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men." And "Song of a Strike," written by George Swetnam, retrospectively commemorated the Homestead strikers' courage in defending their homes and their jobs against the overwhelming might of the Carnegie Steel Company and their hired "bum detectives."

Radio and other popular entertainments, like movies, created a truly national popular culture during the 1920s. Pausing to tune in to his favorite program, this farmer represents an extreme example of radio's broad popularity during the 1920s. For rural Americans, radios not only delivered music and sports but also vital information on commodity prices and weather reports. While they linked rural residents to the rest of the country, radio broadcasts and movie theaters also provided a vehicle for advertising and a spur for consumer culture.

Silicosis, a deadly lung disease caused when workers inhale fine particles of silica dust—a mineral found in sand, quartz, and granite—became a national cause célèbre during the Great Depression when it was recognized as a significant disease among lead, zinc, and silver miners, sandblasters, and foundry and tunnel workers. In 1938 the federal government declared silicosis America's number one industrial health problem and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a National Silicosis Conference in Washington, D.C. Despite such attempts to deal with the silicosis crisis, workers continued to complain of their plight. Hundreds of letters were sent to federal officials from across the country. The three letters included here (sent to Secretary Perkins) attested to workers' desperation and to their confidence that the government would agree to investigate.

In the 1820s and 1830s, a new democratic and individualistic Protestantism appealed to the emerging middle class of the northeastern United States. The chief spokesperson for that revivalist movement was Charles Grandison Finney. Born in Litchfield County, Connecticut, and transplanted like many others to western New York, Finney found the practice of law unsatisfying. The conversion experience that he narrates in this selection from his Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (1876) altered the course of his life. For the next decade he focused his energies on preaching in western New York, the region known as the "Burned Over District" for its reputation as a hotbed of revivalism. Middle-class Americans were attracted to his doctrine, which emphasized the individual's need to assume moral responsibility, and rejected older beliefs about divine providence as the only route to salvation. His Lectures on Revivals (1835) became a handbook for American revivalists and Finney became a professor at, and later president of, Oberlin College.

The end of the War of 1812 promoted a surge of migration to the territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1790, 95 percent of the population lived in the states along the Atlantic Ocean; by 1812 one-quarter lived west of the Appalachians. Farmers looking for new lands found these vast areas attractive after the War for Independence had forced many Indian peoples into land cessation and removal in the Michigan territory and other northwestern areas. Low land prices also enticed families from overpopulated eastern regions. Harriet Noble and her family took the northernmost of the major migration routes west, crossing upstate New York and Lake Erie to reach Detroit. She found multiethnic Detroit "the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen." While her husband faced sickness and other hazards on their isolated farm, Harriet voiced complaints familiar from many women's narratives of the frontier: the absence of society and social institutions.