Most people have a clear stereotype of the urban political boss of the early 20th century, and in many ways Murray Hall, a leader of New York City's notorious "Tammany Hall," was its embodiment. Hall was known as a poker-playing, cigar-chomping, whiskey-drinking, "man about town." But in one significant way, Hall departed from the stereotype: she was actually a woman (by the name of Mary Anderson) who "passed" as a man for more than a quarter century. Tragically, Hall died of untreated breast cancer and her deception was only discovered at her death in 1901. "Passing" was a strategy that some lesbians (a term that was not in use at that time) used both to avoid public condemnation and to increase their earnings so that they could live independently. It could also be an assertion of political independence--Hall managed to vote and serve as a political leader in an era when women were denied the franchise.

At the turn of the century the group of black women most subject to sexual exploitation and abuse were those who lived under the system of quasi-slavery known as "peonage."Under contract labor laws, which existed in almost every southern state, a laborer who signed a contract and then quit his or her job could be arrested. The horrors of this system of forced labor (as well as the equally horrific system of convict labor) are detailed in this stark, turn-of-the-century personal account of life under the "peonage" system in the South, published in the Independent magazine in 1904. Although this account by an African-American man did not focus especially on the sexual exploitation suffered by his wife and others, his report described how his wife was forced to become a mistress to the plantation's owner.

Department stores 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 short story, titled "The Frog and the Puddle," Ferber described the lonely life of a young sales girl in a Chicago department store and the attentions of a male neighbor, whom she meets unexpectedly one night in the boarding house in which both reside.

In the 1890s, Charles Dana Gibson's magazine illustrations of fashionable young women gained wide popularity. The physical type he portrayed became the standard of beauty, a romantic ideal that suggested a new female independence while also celebrating the privileges and glamour of elite society. Within a few years, women who viewed Gibson's illustrations in magazines were more likely to work for wages. Growing opportunities for white collar work in stores and offices attracted white women who spoke English, although they were paid roughly half of what their male counterparts received and were often subjected to discrimination and harassment.

Women's suffrage activists used a variety of tactics during World War I to advance their cause. While the more conservative North American Woman Suffrage Association energetically supported the war by knitting socks, selling war bonds, and preparing Red Cross supplies, members of the more militant National Women's Party were arrested for picketing the White House. During a July, 1917, visit from representatives of the new Russian government, demonstrators in front of the White House appealed to the envoys to support suffrage for American women as a condition for Russia's remaining in the Allied camp. The banner roused the ire of patriotic passersby, and soon after this photograph was taken an angry crowd attacked the suffragists.

Rationing was one way that World War I affected people on the home front. Seeking to manage domestic consumption in order to feed the U.S. Army and to assist Allied armies and civilians., the U.S. Food Administration declared "Food Will Win the War." In this droll reminiscence, Ethel George recalled one kind of home-front conservation effort: the hard work of chewing whole-grain foods. Born in 1903, George told her story to John Terreo, who interviewed her for the New Deal Oral History Project of the Montana Historical Society.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law on June 25, 1938, as the last major piece of New Deal legislation, outlawed child labor and guaranteed 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--including agricultural workers, public employees, and domestic workers--from its provisions. The landmark law, nevertheless, helped establish a precedent for the Federal regulation of work conditions. In the following testimony to a Senate subcommittee, Ruth Green, a worker in an interstate company serving business laundry needs, argued that despite efforts by her union to raise wages, a federal law mandating a minimum wage of at least 75 cents an hour was needed to insure adequate wages during hard times. In addition, she maintained that competition from non-unionized laundries made it difficult for the union to obtain "decent contracts." On October 26, 1949, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949, which established the new minimum at 75 cents an hour. Some groups, however, remained excluded from the Act"s protection.

When the United Automobile Workers won a six week sit-down strike in 1937 against General Motors, the largest corporation in the United States, a fever of organization and a sense of empowerment spread throughout working-class communities in the Northeast and Midwest. That year, 5 million workers took part in some kind of industrial action, and nearly 3 million joined a union. Denys Wortman's cartoon in the March 25, 1937 New York World-Telegram captures the excitement and sense of power felt by many working men and working women when they participated in militant labor action.

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. In this 1891 speech to the National Council of Women, African-American abolitionist, lecturer, and writer Frances Ellen Watkins Harper answered the racist charges of white suffragists who saw the vote for (white) women as a way to maintain white supremacy. The vote for African-Americans, both men and women, Harper argued, was a matter of "justice, simple justice."

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 women 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. It did not, however, prevent companies from hiring only men for higher paying jobs. The following year, Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 further prevented sex discrimination in employment, but did not include educational institutions. The following testimony to a Congressional hearing in 1970 emphasized the need to extend sex discrimination legislation to the academic world. In 1972, Congress passed the Higher Education Act. Title IX of this Act forbade federal financial assistance to educational institutions that practiced sex discrimination.

This illustration from the widely-circulated 1950 book How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, which designated "appropriate" civil-defense jobs for men and women, reflected the contemporary labor market. While more women worked outside the home, they were largely confined to a female job ghetto, where wages were low, and prestige and opportunities for career advancement limited. Their subordination in the labor market coincided with a new postwar sexual ideology marked by rigidly defined gender roles that emphasized women's submissiveness and confinement to housework.

The canteen girl stood as symbol of American volunteerism and femininity in World War I. Sponsored by the YMCA and other charitable organizations, canteens were efforts to maintain soldiers' morale and to keep them from vice. In Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl, Kathleen Morse described the challenges of dispensing hot chocolate and planning entertainments with sparse supplies. At the same time, her letters revealed the less tangible work of the canteen girls: to boost morale by providing reminders of the comforts of home and by representing the sweethearts, sisters, and mothers left behind.

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, some employing military analogies to promote the recommendations of the Food Administration. Presenting domestic work as patriotic effort, this U.S. Food Administration campaign in Good Housekeeping offered women a membership shield and even provided instructions for sewing a "patriotic" housekeeping uniform.

The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women was held in Beijing, China during September 1995. The conference, which called for gender equality, development, and peace, grew out of the international women's movement and marked the end of the official United Nations decade of Women. For women like May Chen, Vice President of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), the conference was an opportunity to share their activist experiences and learn about issues confronting women around the world, including political and domestic violence against women and families, economic and cultural marginalization, and unfair labor practices. Chen, a long-time activist in the Asian-American community, relished the opportunity to meet and learn from well-prepared women who insisted that women's rights – and worker's rights – were human rights.

Improved birth control was one crucial element in women's exercise of sexual freedom. Though people had practiced methods of fertility control for hundreds of years, the 20th century saw the advent of more reliable technologies that allowed a sharper separation between sex and reproduction. Before World War I, birth control advocates confronted a large and often hostile audience of opponents. By the 1920s, though, changing sexual ideologies made such ideas more widely acceptable. The major figure in the American birth control movement, Margaret Sanger, began her crusade as a militant radical whose birth control agitation grew out of her nursing experience in working-class communities. Sanger received 250,000 letters from women asking for advice about birth control. In 1928 Sanger published a selection of the letters in her book Motherhood in Bondage. The letters remain a powerful testament to the vulnerability of women without access to reliable contraception.

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. Machines offered salvation through technology; scientific housework promised satisfaction through systematic and efficient methods. But middle-class wives themselves voiced a discontent that could not be addressed through new purchases or better systems. In 1923, Woman's Home Companion solicited readers' letters for a series that offered the magazine as a clearinghouse for women's household problems and solutions. In response, nearly two thousand women wrote letters to the magazine. Skeptical of the solutions afforded by washing machines and efficiency methods, many of them called for cooperative housekeeping, paid work, help from children and husbands, and equality in marriage--solutions not contemplated by the enthusiasts of either scientific housekeeping or the new household technology.

The women's movement of the 1970's had a far-reaching impact that was felt in every recess of American society. Working class women began to enter non-traditional jobs in trades and craft unions, and lesbians found a larger community in which to express their sexuality. In both cases, women faced resistance and sometimes violence as they charted new gender territory. Faith Robinson, one of those brave enough to break the gender barrier in the predominantly male telephone technician field, was also a lesbian – she faced a particularly difficult challenge. Robinson remembered one incident in 1979 in which anti-gay talk escalated to violence on the job site.

In the early nineteenth century a woman in the emerging middle class was often dependent on her father or husband's position. Many women, however, chose or were forced to seek independence and autonomy in their work and family lives. Anne Carson was one such person. With an alcoholic father and a timid mother, her middle status in port city Philadelphia was always shaky. She attended one of the first coeducational academies in the new nation but her unemployed father forced the 15-year-old to marry a 41-year-old ship captain. Her husband's frequent abuse and absences left her without financial support, and Anne worked as a seamstress and opened a china shop to support her parents, siblings, and four children. She achieved modest success, but economic distress after the War of 1812 and her involvement in a murder case sent her spiraling into Philadelphia's underclass. In an effort to earn money she published her autobiography, where she recorded the variety of work available to women in the commercial cities of the early Republic.

Born in Forreston, Illinois, in 1868, Sylvie Thygeson taught and worked as a stenographer and typist before her marriage at the age of twenty-three. She and her husband, a lawyer, lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. An activist for women's rights, including suffrage and the legalization of contraception, Thygeson felt that birth control was both a crucial part of egalitarian marriage and a major political commitment. In this interview, conducted in 1972 by her daughter Mary Thygeson Shepardson and historian Sherna Gluck, Thygeson described her and her husband's decision to limit their family, a choice that enabled her to work in the suffrage and birth control movements. Her account offered an intriguing glimpse of how birth control advocates circulated information about contraception at a time when many physicians refused to do so, and when both law and public opinion constrained such practices.

From the rocky soil of Vermont's hill towns, many young men and women in the nineteenth century went looking for new opportunities. Often they made a series of moves between farm, factory, and city. Their leave-taking pitted the responsibilities of maintaining family farms against the new attractions of financial and social independence. Sally Rice, born in 1821 in Dover, Vermont, was typical. In 1838 she found work as a domestic servant in New York, not far over the border from her family's hardscrabble farm, securing for herself much valued wages and independence. Several years later she worked as a weaver in one of the many cotton mills that lined the Blackstone Valley of central Massachusetts and Connecticut. Her letters home to her mother and father in Vermont carefully weighed issues of family and independence, farm and factory life.