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Anne Hutchinson
She was a member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who who caused a major schism in the Puritan community. She was a Puritan spiritual advisor and mother of 15. Her convictions went against the Puritan community and she was banished from the colony. After her banishment, she fled to Rhode Island and founded the settlement of Portsmouth. -
Matriarchal
Power inherited through female lines of authority. Native Americans often had this in many of their societies. Matriarchal societies were not prevalent in European or United States societies. -
Seperate Sphere
Gender ideal where home life was strictly separated from the workplace and women’s roles were completely separated from men's. The idea was that women would stay and help in the house and men would go out and bring home money. Very patriarchal system. -
Mother Ann and the Shakers
Mother Ann was the leader of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or Shakers. The immigrated to the American colonies from England in 1774. Their belief was based upon spiritualism and included the notion that they received messages from the spirit of God which were expressed during religious revivals. -
Daughters of Liberty
The Daughters of Liberty displayed their loyalty to the American colonies and Patriots by supporting the non importation of British goods during the American Revolution. They refused to drink British tea and did tasks such as weaving the help out the colonial troops. -
Companionate Marriages
Companionate marriages were marriages designed to give wives true equality, both of rank and fortune, with their husbands. In reality, husbands were still dominate and hardly ever practiced equality. Companionate marriages were more Republican than arranged marriages. -
Republican Motherhood
Republican Motherhood is a 20th-century term for an attitude toward women's roles present in the emerging United States before, during, and after the American Revolution. It centered on the belief that the patriots' daughters should be raised to uphold the ideals of republicanism, in order to pass on republican values to the next generation. -
Grimke Sisters
Both sisters were major abolitionists in the early 19th century. In 1835, Angela wrote an anti-slavery letter to Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, who published it in The Liberator. In 1837, Angelina was invited to be the first woman to speak at the Massachusetts State Legislature. Sarah and Angelina Grimke wrote Letter on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1837), which objected male opposition to their anti-slavery activities. -
Dorothea Dix
Dix was the primary leader of the insane asylum and education movement in the 19th century. She traveled over 60,000 miles in 8 years gathering information for her reports that brought about changes in treatment, and also the concept that insanity was a disease of the mind. -
Waltham-Lowell System
The Waltham-Lowell System was a paternalistic textile factory system of the early 19th century that relied on young and unmarried women for work. A proper environment was established with strict curfews, mandatory church attendance, and cleanliness. Many women joined this because they saw great opportunity and freedom in the system. -
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Stanton was one of the leaders of the movement for women's suffrage and overall rights throughout the 19th century. She led the Seneca Falls Convention where she wrote her famous Declaration of Sentiments. Stanton was also the President of the National Women Suffrage Association from 1892-1900. -
Lucy Stone
After the movement was split between women Lucy led the majority in hopes that by remaining loyal to the Republican Party and once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women’s turn. She led the American Woman Suffrage Association. -
Susan B. Anthony
Anthony played a key role in the women’s suffrage movement as well as the Anti-Slavery movement. She was a trailblazer for strong and independent women around the country. She not only fought for suffrage but believed that men and women should be equal in society. -
Frances Willard
Leader of the WCTU and was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Her influence was instrumental in the passage of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. -
Seneca Falls Convention
Held in Seneca Falls, New York, the convention was a major turning point for the women’s rights movement. Led by important female figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony. Stanton made a Declaration of Sentiment, where she changed the Declaration of Independence to include women in it. The convention adopted eleven resolutions, one of which called for women’s suffrage. -
Declaration of Sentiments
This document was made and read off by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Seneca Falls Convention. The document was made to emulate the Declaration of Independence, except women were included with men in the document. This was a major part of the convention, which was one of the first pushes towards women’s suffrage. -
Feminism movement
Movement aimed at equal rights for women that started with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. -
Carrie Chapman Catt
Catt was a women’s suffrage activist who campaigned for the 19th amendment to be passed. She was the president of NAWSA and the founder of the League of Women Voters. She was one of the reasons women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th amendment. -
Ellen Gates Starr
Ellen Gates Starr was an American social reformer and activist. She and Jane Addams co-founded the Hull House in Chicago in 1889. She is considered one of the most influential social reformers of the 19th century. -
Ida B. Wells
Wells was a major abolitionists and women’s activist, especially at the start of the 20th century. She was strongly against the practice of lynching in the African American community. She spread awareness through the creation of organizations such as the National Association of Colored Women and through her publication of novels. -
Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement of New York
Lillian Wald was one of the most influential social reformers of the 19th century. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in 1893 for immigrants and native citizens who struggled with the weight of poverty. She offered health care and instruction to Henry Street Settlement members. The settlement expanded to thousands of members over the next decades. -
National Woman Suffrage Association
A suffrage group headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony that stressed the need for women to lead organizations on their own behalf. The NWSA focused exclusively on women’s rights — sometimes denigrating men of color, in the process — and took up the battle for a federal women’s suffrage amendment. -
American Woman Suffrage Association
A women’s suffrage organization led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and others who remained loyal to the Republican Party, despite its failure to include women’s voting rights in the Reconstruction Amendments. Stressing the urgency of voting rights for African American men, AWSA leaders held out hope that once Reconstruction had been settled, it would be women’s turn. -
Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
An organization advocating the prohibition of liquor that spread rapidly after 1879, when charismatic Frances Willard became its leader. Advocating suffrage and a host of reform activities, it launched tens of thousands of women into public life and was the first nationwide organization to identify and condemn domestic violence. -
Minor v. Happersett
It ruled that suffrage rights were not inherent in citizenship; women were citizens, but state legislatures could deny women the vote if they wished. -
Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement
Margaret Sanger was a nurse who moved to New York City in 1911 and volunteered with a Lower East Side settlement. Horrified by women’s suffering from constant pregnancies, Sanger launched a crusade for what she called birth control. This launched a national birth control movement. -
Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party
Alice Paul was the founder of the National Woman's party, she took a more militant approach to gaining the right to vote. She led women in mass pickets, parades, and hunger strikes to convince the government of women's suffrage. -
Helen Campbell’s Prisoner’s of Poverty
The book was written to expose the horrible living conditions of families living in tenements during the late 1800s. While the book brought public awareness to the issue, Campbell became an established and credible female author. -
Jane Addams’ Hull House
Jane Addams was the creator of the Hull House Movement, which educated and assisted thousands of immigrants across the U.S. -
Maternalism
The belief that women should contribute to civic and political life through their special talents as mothers, Christians, and moral guides. Maternalists put this ideology into action by creating dozens of social reform organizations. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
Established by Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the organization fought for voting rights for women around America. This organization, along with ones similar, was a key cause for the passing on the 19th amendment in 1920. -
Daughters of the American Revolution
The DAR is a direct lineage service organization run by women who were directly related to those who fought for American independence in the 18th century. -
United Daughters of the Confederacy
A national society founded for the women who descended for those who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Although supporting the Confederacy was frowned upon, the organization was made to support the women who were impacted by the war. -
Educational Changes for Women
After Booker T. Washington gave his Atlanta Compromise there was a rise in women’s higher education. In the Northeast and South, women most often attended single-sex institutions, including teacher-training colleges. For affluent families, private colleges offered an education equivalent to men’s — for an equally high price. -
National Association of Colored Women
The organization was founded by strong female abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. The NACW became involved in campaigns in favor of women's suffrage and against lynching and Jim Crow laws. They also led efforts to improve education, and care for both children and the elderly. -
National Audubon Society
Named in honor of antebellum naturalist John James Audubon, a national organization formed in 1901 that advocated for broader government protections for wildlife. Women played prominent roles in the movement, promoting boycotts of hats with plumage. -
Women’s Trade Union League
A labor organization for women founded in New York in 1903 that brought elite, middle-class, and working-class women together as allies. The WTLU supported union organizing efforts among garment workers. -
National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage
An organization that was firmly against women’s suffrage, created by a woman named Josephine Dodge in 1919. The organization created a newsletter called the “Women’s Protest” describing their issues with women’s suffrage. The NAOWS disbanded once the 19th amendment was passed, officially granting women the right to vote. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
A devastating fire that quickly spread throughout the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City killing 146 people. In wake of the tragedy, 56 state laws were passed dealing with such issues as fire hazards, unsafe machines, and wages and working hours for women and children. The fire also provided a national impetus for industrial reform. -
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
An organization founded by women activists in 1919. Its members denounced imperialism, stressed the human suffering caused by militarism, and proposed social justice measures. -
Flapper
A young woman of the 1920s who defied conventional standards of conduct by wearing short skirts and makeup, freely spending the money she earned on the latest fashions, dancing to jazz, and flaunting her liberated lifestyle. -
19th amendment
The 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. Was passed a result of the women’s suffrage movement. -
Sheppard-Towner Federal Maternity and Infancy Act
The first federally funded health-care legislation that provided federal funds for medical clinicals, prenatal education programs, and visiting nurses. -
Rosie the Riveter
The government directed its publicity at housewives, but many working women gladly took higher-paying work in the defense industry. Suddenly, the nation’s factories were full of women working as airplane riveters, ship welders, and drill-press operators. Women made up 36% of the labor force in 1945, compared with 24% at the beginning of the war. War work did not free women from traditional expectations and limitations, however. -
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton was the most influential First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. In 2000, and again in 2006, she won election to the U.S. Senate from New York. In 2008, she nearly captured the Democratic nomination for president, and in 2009 she was appointed secretary of state by the man who defeated her in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama. -
Mary Elizabeth Lease
Mary Elizabeth Lease was an American lecturer, writer, and political activist. She was an advocate of the suffrage movement as well as the temperance movement. She is best known for her work within the Populist Party. -
Women, work, and family
Two powerful forces shaped women’s relationships to work and family life in the postwar decades. One was the middle-class domestic ideal, in which women were expected to raise children, attend to other duties in the home, and devote themselves to their husbands’ happiness. The second force was the job market, most working class women had to earn a paycheck to help their family. -
Labor Feminists
The women’s movement had not languished entirely in the postwar years. Feminist concerns were kept alive in the 1950s and early 1960s by working women, who campaigned for such things as maternity leave and equal pay for equal work. These women were called “labor feminists,” because they belonged to unions and fought for equality and dignity in the workplace. -
Affirmative Action
Policies established in the 1960s and 1970s by governments, businesses, universities, and other institutions to overcome the effects of past discrimination against specific groups such as racial and ethnic minorities and women. Measures to ensure equal opportunity include setting goals for the admission, hiring, and promotion of minorities; considering minority status when allocating resources; and actively encouraging victims of past discrimination to apply for jobs and other resources. -
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women
Commission appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, which issued a 1963 report documenting job and educational discrimination. -
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
The title of an influential book written in 1963 by Betty Friedan critiquing the ideal whereby women were encouraged to confine themselves to roles within the domestic sphere. -
Equal Pay Act
Law that established the principle of equal pay for equal work. Trade union women were especially critical in pushing for, and winning, congressional passage of the law. -
National Organization for Women
Women’s civil rights organization formed in 1966. Initially, NOW focused on eliminating gender discrimination in public institutions and the workplace, but by the 1970s it also embraced many of the issues raised by more radical feminists. -
Women’s Liberation
A new brand of feminism in the 1960s that attracted primarily younger, college-educated women fresh from the New Left, antiwar, and civil rights movements who sought to end to the denigration and exploitation of women. -
Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm
Congresswomen who would join with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the founders of Ms. magazine, to create the NWPC. -
Women’s Activism
In the first half of the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement reached its historic peak. Taking a dizzying array of forms — from lobbying legislatures to marching in the streets and establishing all-female collectives — women’s liberation produced activism on the scale of the earlier black-led civil rights movement. -
National Women’s Political Caucus
Is a national multi-partisan grassroots organization in the United States dedicated to recruiting, training, and supporting women who seek elected and appointed offices. -
Phyllis Schlafly and the STOP ERA movement
Phyllis is an American constitutional lawyer and conservative activist. She was known for her staunchly conservative social and political views, her opposition to feminism and abortion, and her successful campaign against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. -
Equal Rights Amendment
Constitutional amendment passed by Congress in 1972 that would require equal treatment of men and women under federal and state law. Facing fierce opposition from the New Right and the Republican Party, the ERA was defeated as time ran out for state ratification in 1982. -
Title IX
A law passed by Congress in 1972 that broadened the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include educational institutions, prohibiting colleges and universities that received federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex. By requiring comparable funding for sports programs, Title IX made women’s athletics a real presence on college campuses. -
Women in the Workforce
Many Americans believed in the “family wage”: a breadwinner income, earned by men, sufficient to support a family. After 1973, fewer and fewer Americans had access to that luxury. Between 1973 and the early 1990s, every major income group except the top 10 percent saw their real earnings either remain the same or decline. To keep their families from falling behind, women streamed into the workforce. -
Abortion
Abortion was central to the battles between feminists and religious conservatives and a defining issue between Democrats and Republicans. Feminists who described themselves as prochoice viewed the issue from the perspective of the pregnant woman; they argued that the right to a legal, safe abortion was crucial to her control over her body and life. -
Roe v. Wade (1973)
The 1973 Supreme Court ruling that the Constitution protects the right to abortion, which states cannot prohibit in the early stages of pregnancy. The decision galvanized social conservatives and made abortion a controversial policy issue for decades to come. -
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services
1989 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the authority of state governments to limit the use of public funds and facilities for abortions. -
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey
A 1992 Supreme Court case that upheld a law requiring a twenty-four-hour waiting period prior to an abortion. Although the decision upheld certain restrictions on abortions, it affirmed the “essential holding” in Roe v. Wade (1973) that women had a constitutional right to control their reproduction. -
Defense of Marriage Act
A law enacted by Congress in 1998 that allowed states to refuse to recognize gay marriages or civil unions formed in other jurisdictions. The Supreme Court ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional in 2013. -
Lawrence v. Texas
A 2003 landmark decision by the Supreme Court that limited the power of states to prohibit private homosexual activity between consenting adults. The Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory.