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Anne Hutchinson Born
Anne Hutchinson was a Massachusetts Bay Puritan believing in a covenant of grace, instead of works, banished for claiming to have spoken directly with God. She went to Rhode Island to establish a church with Puritan Roger Williams. -
Mercy Otis Warren Born
Mercy Otis Warren was an American author, historian, feminist, and Patriot. She argued patriarchy was an unnatural rule and was a social contrivance justified only for the sake of family order. During the debate over the United States Constitution in 1788, she issued a pamphlet opposing ratification of the document and advocated the inclusion of a Bill of Rights. In 1805, she published the first history of the American Revolution authored by a woman. -
Republican Motherhood Emerges in America
Republican Motherhood was the idea that women should ensure their husbands’ righteousness and instruct their sons in liberty and in government. Christian ministers urged their audiences to dismiss public roles of women, such as roles as voters and jurors, and instead let women focus on bearing children and caring for them. It emerged after women began to have fewer children because they married later, worked more, and used birth control or abstinence. -
Waltham-Lowell System Begins
The Waltham-Lowell System involved building factories and using young women as laborers for their capability and lower wages. Women were given boarding, lectures, and were monitored for drinking, curfew, and church attendance so their parents would allow them to go while factories had a cheap labor source. Women were treated well in factories and were able to leave the house while earning an income. -
Seneca Falls Convention Held
After being denied from an abolitionist convention on account of gender, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the Seneca Falls Convention, issuing a manifesto to extend egalitarianism to women. Women proposed laws allowing married women to institute lawsuits, testify in court, and get custody if widowed, and began the suffrage movement. They sympathized with slaves because of their own oppression and stated that all people were created equal under the law, so they should be equal. -
Carrie Chapman Catt Born
Carrie Chapman Catt was an American suffragette and a driving force behind the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and was the founder of the League of Women Voters and the International Alliance of Women. -
Florence Kelley Born
Florence Kelley was an American suffragette and socialist. She helped influence the Hull House established by Jane Addams so that the poorer classes of America could have resources to economically develop. Kelley was also a committed socialist who fought against child labor, believing that government oversight could protect exploited workers. She was a leader at the National Consumers’ League which became one of the most powerful progressive organizations advocating worker protection laws. -
Jane Addams Born
Influenced the Hampton institute in England to aid urban residents, Jane Addams established the Hull House in Chicago with Ellen Gates Starr. She expected Hull House to offer art classes and culture classes to the poor but eventually compromised between classes, offering settlements that gave people a place to live as neighbors. Hull House gave people resources (kindergarten, day care, libraries,kitchens) to fulfill their needs. -
Utah Gives Full Voting Rights to Women
Mormon women had egalitarian lives with their husbands, although many practiced polygamy, including Wells. In 1870, due to pressure from Mormon church elder Daniel Wells and from other Mormon women, Utah legislature granted full voting rights to women. It was the second state to do so, after Wyoming in 1869. Afterwards, polygamy and women’s rights became intertwined issues. When Utah won statehood in 1896, many women won seats in the new legislature. -
Comstock Act Passed
Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice Anthony Comstock secured the Comstock Act in 1873, banning obscene materials from U.S. mail to prohibit circulation of information about sex and birth control. Comstock appealed to fears of sexual education and censored pornography, sexual information, and contraception but could not stop the trade of contraceptives. -
Women’s Christian Temperance Union Established
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) aimed to curb alcohol abuse by prohibiting liquor sales, arguing alcoholism was unchristian because men abused their families and spent hard-earned money at bars. Although the WCTU was Christian, Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, and other groups condemned drinking for religious reasons, while Irish Catholics saw alcohol as part of their culture. -
Minor v. Happersett Decided
Suffragette Virginia Minor argued a voting registrar who denied her a ballot had violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights. However, the Minor v. Happersett decision ruined suffragette dreams of voting rights by ruling women were citizens but state legislatures could deny women the vote if they wished. -
Margaret Sanger Born
Margaret Sanger was an American nurse and the founder of Planned Parenthood. After understanding her Catholic mother died after having eleven children and being horrified by women’s suffering from constant pregnancies, Sanger launched a crusade for birth control with her newspaper column ‘What Every Girl Should Know.’ -
Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church Established
The Women’s Convention of the National Baptist Church (NBC) funded night schools, clinics, kindergartens, day care, and prison outreach programs. It was the largest African American women’s organization, led by Adella Hunt Logan, a women’s club leader, teacher, and suffrage advocate. -
Growth of the Flapper Movement
In the 1920s, because of America’s wealth after supplying other nations in WWI, America experienced more social openness. With the rise of the flapper movement, women began to wear shorter clothes and hairstyles, and they drank, smoke, and drove cars. Sex became more socially acceptable as women revolted against religious views of the clothes they should wear and the separate sphere they were expected to stay in. -
19th Amendment Ratified
Made in 1920, the 19th amendment legalized women’s voting rights, largely due to their large roles as American leaders and laborers during WWI. After a long history of suffrage, led by women such as Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the 19th amendment allowed women to legally vote in the Election of 1920 and in any future elections. -
Betty Friedan Born
Betty Friedan was an American feminist and author. Her books, such as The Feminine Mystique and Beyond Gender, centered on women’s rights in an era of sexism. For instance, The Feminine Mystique targeted college-aged, middle-class women stuck in a cycle of domesticity to encourage them to focus on education and work outside the home. -
Phyllis Schlafly Born
Phyllis Schlafly was an American constitutional lawyer and conservative activist, opposing feminism, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. Schlafly led the STOP ERA campaign, arguing it would take away gender-specific privileges for women such as exemption from the draft and dependent wife benefits under Social Security established by FDR. She was a driving force between the blockage and failure of the ERA’s passing. -
Presidential Commission on the Status of Women Formed
President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10980 established the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) concerning women’s roles in society, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Kennedy administration itself publicly positioned the PCSW as a Cold War era initiative: to win against the USSR, America needed its citizens. Sexism meant women were barred from important positions. -
“We Can Do It” Poster Bolsters Rosie the Riveter
Directed at housewives, Norman Rockwell’s drawing of Rosie the Riveter led many women during WW2 to abandon low-paying jobs as domestic servants or secretaries to join the defense industry as riveters, welders, and machine operators. Women did face sexual harassment and significantly lower wages than men. Child care was unavailable and, as soon as men returned, women lost their jobs. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965 Made Effective
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment and outlaw literacy tests or other devices preventing African Americans from registering to vote. The VRA also authorized the attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in any county where registration was less than 50 percent. -
Roe v. Wade Decided
Roe v. Wade ruled the Constitution protected abortion rights, which states couldn’t prohibit in early stages of pregnancy. The Court ruled privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment extended to abortion, but that this must balance against state interest in abortion regulation: protecting women's health and potentiality of life. Arguing state interests became stronger over pregnancy, the Court tied state regulation of abortion to the third trimester of pregnancy. -
Sandra Day O’Connor Becomes First Woman on Supreme Court
Sandra Day O’Connor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was made the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court Justice in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan appointed her. A moderate Republican, O’Connor paired well with Republican President Ronald Reagan and marked history as the only woman as a Supreme Court Justice until Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her in 1993.
