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Movement ▼
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Documents By
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Documents About
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| Age of Consent Movement, 1885-1920s | 0 | 47 | As part of a larger social purity campaign in the late nineteenth-century, women and men reformers initiated a movement in 1885 to petition legislators to raise the legal age at which girls could consent to sexual intercourse. Their goal was to prevent the sexual exploitation of young women by criminalizing sexual intercourse with them. By 1920 most states had raised the legal age of consent to either sixteen or eighteen. Reformers were mostly white middle-class women and the campaign drew support from the suffrage movement and women's groups including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. | 1885 |
| American Anti-Slavery Society, 1833-1870 | 0 | 23 | Radical abolitionist organization committed to the immediate emancipation of slaves. Led by William Lloyd Garrison, the organization split in 1839 over the participation of women at antislavery conventions. Women continued to play a leading role in the Society until it disbanded in 1870, following the abolition of slavery and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment providing suffrage for black men. | 1833 |
| American Association of University Women, Washington DC, 1881- | 9 | 25 | The American Association of University Women (AAUW) was founded in 1881 and today numbers over 100,000 members in the U. S. Local branches at the turn of the twentieth century focused on improving educational opportunities. Today the association continues to promote education, address current political issues, and work with with similar international organizations. | 1881 |
| American Birth Control League, 1921-1939 | 0 | 9 | Formed in 1921 at the First National Birth Control Conference, the ABCL was headed by Margaret Sanger until 1928. In its efforts to make contraception widely available, the ABCL allied with physicians in promoting bills at the state and federal levels that gave doctors the exclusive right to prescribe contraceptive devices. The ABCL opened the nation’s first legal birth control clinic in 1923. In 1926 membership was around 37,000. In 1939 the ABCL merged with an organization that in the 1940s became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. | 1921 |
| American Civil Liberties Union, 1920- | 1 | 26 | The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in 1920 to protect personal freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It grew out of a group that opposed U.S. participation in World War I and defended the rights of immigrants. | 1920 |
| American Equal Rights Association, 1866-1869 | 9 | 40 | Equal Rights organization that lobbied for black and woman's suffrage and paid particular attention to the plight of black women. The Association's leaders worked to expand the attention paid to black male suffrage in this period to women. The Association found that many abolitionists were willing to abandon woman suffrage on strategic grounds and focus their efforts entirely on winning the vote for black men. | 1866 |
| American Federation of Labor, 1886- | 0 | 7 | Founded in 1886, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) was a national organization that brought together skilled workers in a variety of crafts. The AFL's first president was Samuel Gompers who held the position from 1886 to 1924. In 1903 the Women’s Trade Union League was formed to organize women’s unions and encourage their affiliation with the AFL. In 1955 the AFL merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). | 1886 |
| American Female Moral Reform Society | 3 | 5 | The Society emerged in 1839 out of the New York Female Moral Reform Society and organized women to reform sexual mores and behavior. The organization published the Advocate of Moral Reform and sought to reform prostitutes and provide them training and occupational options. The group attacked the sexual double standard by exposing men who seduced women or frequented brothels. The Society was one of the leading organizations within the Female Moral Reform Movement (see below). In 1849 it was charted by the New York state legislature as the American Female Guardian Society and Home for the Friendless and continues in existence, though with a name change, as a neighborhood social service organization in the Bronx, New York. | 1839 |
| American Missionary Association, New Orleans, LA, 1839-1954 | 0 | 3 | Founded in 1839, the American Missionary Association (AMA) emerged from efforts to aid African slaves who mutinied on the Cuban slave vessel, the Amistad. The AMA was involved in a variety of programs including foreign missions for freedpeople before 1860, abolitionism, and the provision of teachers for post-civil war schools for freedpeople. Today it continues to provide education and social welfare for African Americans and other minority groups. | 1839 |
| American Woman Suffrage Association | 1 | 26 | This wing of the woman suffrage movement was formed by New England women opposed to the policies of Stanton and Anthony. Led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, the Association worked for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and aligned itself closely with the Republican party. The American and the National Woman Suffrage Association (see below) merged in 1890 to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (see entry below). | 1869 |
| Anti-Feminist Movement, 1920s | 0 | 38 | After Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which gave women the right to vote, female anti-suffragists did not fade into political obscurity. Instead, a coalition of anti-suffragists organized a broad political movement to oppose expansion of social welfare programs and women's peace efforts, and to foster a political culture hostile to progressive female activists. Antifeminists sought to limit the social reform movements energized by progressive and feminist women in the 1920s. | 1920 |
| Anti-Lynching Crusaders, 1922-1923 | 2 | 15 | The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, founded in 1922 under the aegis of the NAACP was largely a black women's organization that aimed to raise money to promote the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill and to prevent lynching generally. The Dyer Bill was the first anti-lynching bill to be voted upon by the Senate, despite many earlier attempts by anti-lynching groups. Lynching did not become a federal offense until the passage of the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1965. | 1922 |
| Anti-Lynching Movement, 1890-1940 | 0 | 80 | Between 1880 and 1930 more than 3,200 African Americans were lynched in the South. Opposition to lynching grew after 1890 with black women like Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell among the first Southerners to speak out. Women’s groups, including the largely Black Anti-Lynching Crusaders and the white Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching, played significant roles in the movement against lynching. | 1890 |
| Anti-Slavery Movement, 1820-1860 | 0 | 337 | From the second decade of the nineteenth century until the abolition of black slavery in the United States in the 1860s, black and white women were significant actors in the anti-slavery movement. Women helped found the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) in 1833 as well as their own societies, such as the Oberlin Female Anti-Slavery Society. The status of women in the movement was often contentious and in 1839 the AASS divided in part because of the election of a woman, Abby Kelley Foster, to its business committee. The anti-slavery movement provided the setting for the emergence of the women’s rights movement as women abolitionists created new public spaces for themselves as public speakers. Notable women abolitionists include Lucretia Mott, Sarah and Angela Grimké, Abby Kelley Foster, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. | 1820 |
| Anti-Sweatshop Movement, 1890-1915 | 0 | 53 | From 1890 to 1915 reformers in every American city sought to eliminate the low wages, long hours and unsanitary working conditions of home-based tenement industries and crowded workshops called “sweatshops.” Prominent in this movement were trade unionists and middle-class women’s organizations including the National Consumers’ Leagues founded in the 1890s, and women reformers like Florence Kelley who sought to encourage consumers, through their purchasing power, employers, through their work practices, and the government, through protective labor legislation, to eliminate sweating. Government responses to the anti-sweatshop campaign included the U.S. House of Representatives’ decision in 1893 to authorize the Committee on Manufactures to investigate “the effect of the so-called ‘sweating system’ of tenement-house labor.” | 1890 |
| Association of Collegiate Alumnae | 0 | 4 | The Association brought together college-educated women to advance the cause of higher education for women. Its goals included educational equity for women, equality for women, and internationalism. In 1921, its merger with the Southern Association of College Women led to the formation of the American Association of University Women [qv]. | 1882 |
| Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942 | 6 | 13 | Jessie Daniel Ames, head of the Woman’s Department in the Commission for Interracial Cooperation, called a meeting in November of 1930 that led to the formation of the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching. The Association organized middle- and upper-class white women to oppose lynching in their communities and throughout the South, often by congregating in large numbers where a lynching was rumored to be planned. In this organization white women created new places for themselves in Southern society. Membership in 1939 is said to have reached 40,000. | 1930 |
| Birth Control Movement, 1915-1936 | 0 | 120 | The Comstock Law, which made distribution of information about contraception illegal from 1873 to 1936, met with relatively little opposition until the second decade of the twentieth century, when reformers Mary Ware Dennett (1872-1947) and Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) took up the "birth control" cause. From 1916 onwards, Sanger and Dennett competed for leadership, each forming different organizations and promoting different solutions to the issue of making birth control accessible and legal. Dennett founded the National Birth Control League in 1915 and the Voluntary Parenthood League in 1919. Sanger founded the short-lived Birth Control League in 1914, the American Birth Control League in 1921, and helped form the Birth Control Federation of America (1939), renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation in 1942. The Birth Control Movement moved out beyond the borders of the United States with the founding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Bombay in 1952. | 1915 |
| Boston Female Reform Society, Boston, MA | 0 | 6 | The New York Female Moral Reform Society, (founded in 1834 and renamed the American Female Moral Reform Society in 1839) and the Boston Female Moral Reform Society (founded in 1835 and renamed the New England Female Moral Reform Society in 1838) were umbrella organizations that brought together more than 50,000 members in 600 societies in New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Part of the mobilization of women during the Second Great Awakening, moral reform societies worked in villages and cities to eliminate prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation of women, including the sexual double standard. Expressing values associated with the demographic transition from high to low birth rates (1800-1900), moral reform encouraged women to control access to their bodies. The nation's first explicitly female social movement, moral reform offered many middle-class women their first opportunity to venture into the public arena and agitate for social change on behalf of women. | 1835 |
| Civil Rights Movement, 1909- | 0 | 337 | The struggle for full citizenship rights began during Reconstruction following the Civil War, but most scholars associate the origin of the modern Civil Rights Movement with the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. African-American and white women were active in the early years of the NAACP and in successive efforts to end segregation in public transportation, public accommodations, and education. Voting rights were important during Reconstruction and then once again beginning in the 1960s. | 1909 |
| Colorado Woman Suffrage Association, 1876-1920. Colorado | 0 | 4 | This major woman suffrage organization in Colorado was affiliated with the American Woman Suffrage Association (see above). The ability of the Association to forge a broad suffrage coalition, drawing support from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, farmers' organizations, and labor organizations accounts for its success in winning woman's suffrage in its second referendum campaign in 1893. | 1876 |
| Colored Woman's League, 1892-1896 | 1 | 4 | Part of a larger movement of black women’s clubs aimed at improving the living conditions and status of African Americans, the Colored Woman’s League (CWL) was founded in 1892 with Hallie Q. Brown as its Secretary. The CWL participated in a series of national conventions that led to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896. | 1892 |
| Commission on Interracial Cooperation, 1918-1944 | 0 | 5 | Founded in 1918, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), based in Atlanta, publicly opposed lynching and the Ku Klux Klan and sought to foster a new positive image of African Americans. The successful work of women within the CIC and the overly-cautious leadership of white men within the Commission led Jessie Daniel Ames in November 1930 to form the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching. In 1944, the CIC merged with the Southern Regional Council. | 1918 |
| Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage, 1913-1916 | 0 | 3 | Alice Paul and others founded the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CUWS) in 1913 as an American version of the militant British Women’s Social and Political Union. CUWS members engaged in civil disobedience, chaining themselves to the White House fence and going on hunger strikes in jail, which catapulted them to prominence within the suffrage movement. In 1916 Paul and her CUWS allies launched the National Woman's Party (NWP). | 1913 |
| Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association | 0 | 5 | Led initially by Isabella Beecher Hooker, the Association worked for woman suffrage and in 1903 and 1909 gained voting rights for Connecticut women in school and library board elections. A younger generation of women came to the fore in the Association after 1910 and worked with the National American Woman Suffrage Association in support of a federal suffrage amendment. (See http://www.ctheritage.org/encyclopedia/ct1865_1929/women_suffrage.htm for a useful essay on woman suffrage in Connecticut.) | 1869 |
| Daughters of the American Revolution, 1891- | 27 | 49 | Founded in 1891, and still in existence today, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) was the female counterpart to numerous male patriotic societies that sprang up in the 1890s. Initially, the Daughters refrained from purely political activities, instead devoting themselves to promoting patriotic celebrations and erecting monuments and markers to honor Revolutionary forefathers. During World War I, DAR members supported war work. After the end of World War I, the DAR opposed women’s pacifist groups including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. | 1891 |
| Dress Reform, 1840-1880 | 0 | 41 | The dress reform movement of the 1840s and 50s responded to the fact that, while men's clothing had become more restrained and utilitarian in the decades before 1840, women's clothing became more ornamental and dysfunctional. Reformers promoted the wearing of trousers (popularly known as “Bloomers”) among women. Three different strands of reformers can be distinguished within this social movement: the water curists, the Oneida Community, and woman's rights reformers. Notable figures in this movement include John Humphrey Noyes of the Oneida community, and the women’s rights activists Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Bloomer. | 1840 |
| Edenton Ladies' Patriotic Guild, Edenton, NC, 1770s | 1 | 3 | On October 25, 1774, fifty-one women from prominent families in Edenton, North Carolina, created the Edenton Ladies' Patriotic Guild. Comprising one of the earliest instances of organized political activity by women in the American colonies, Guild members signed a boycott resolution, which they published with their names in a newspaper. | 1774 |
| Eight-Hour Day Movement, 1880s-1890s | 0 | 22 | Long a goal of labor activists and the issue around which numerous workers’ organizations had formed, the demand for an eight-hour work day increased in the 1880s and 1890s. Both men and women labor activists embraced the demand for an eight-hour day in manufacturing industries where the hours of labor commonly exceeded twelve. The campaign for an eight hour day was fought in two ways: unions sought contracts with employers and unions and reformers demanded workplace legislation that would limit working hours. In the 1880s the Knights of Labor were prominent in the movement for an eight-hour day. | 1880 |
| Equal Rights Amendment Movement, 1920- | 0 | 159 | After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party conceived of a plan for a new amendment to promote equal rights for women more generally. Written in 1921, and first introduced into Congress in 1923, it finally passed the House and Senate in 1972. Professional women’s organizations predominated in the early movement as women’s labor interests opposed the ERA until the 1960s, viewing it as a threat to protective legislation for women. By the 1970s a broader coalition of women’s groups came to support the ERA in the changed economic and social climate. | 1920 |
| Female Moral Reform Movement, 1830s-1840s | 0 | 31 | Moral reform was a campaign in the 1830s and '40s to abolish sexual licentiousness, prostitution, and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market. By 1841, approximately 50,000 women had joined more than 600 local Female Moral Reform Societies (FMRS). Moral reform was the nation’s first explicitly female social movement, comprised of women and led by women. | 1835 |
| Freedmen's Aid Movement, 1861- | 0 | 40 | After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, anti-slavery reformers went to the South to educate former slaves and supervise their work as free laborers. Women reformers often clashed with male government officials of the Freedmen’s Burueau who administered federal government programs for freedpeople. | 1861 |
| General Federation of Women's Clubs, 1890 | 11 | 121 | Founded in 1890 by Jane Cunningham Croly, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs became one of the largest women’s organizations in the country. As President in the 1890s, Ellen Herotin developed the Federation’s political and social interests. Members worked for a variety of social reforms that would benefit women and children. In 1955 membership peaked at 830,000. The Federation continues to be a significant voluntary organization today. | 1890 |
| Guerrilla Girls, 1985- | 22 | 23 | A group of women artists whose membership remains anonymous, the Guerrilla Girls grew out of the women’s art movement of the 1970s. In April 1985 the Guerrilla Girls began displaying posters that scolded art galleries, museums and critics for ignoring women artists and artists of color. Styling themselves as the gendered conscience of the art world the highly successful Guerrilla Girls presented themselves to the public in a unique way using gorilla masks, expressing their ideas clearly on black and white posters that listed the hard facts of sexism and racism in the art world, and used humor to show that feminists can be funny. | 1985 |
| Hull House, Chicago, IL, 1889- | 3 | 116 | Hull House, founded in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, grew into the leading social settlement in the United States. Hull House residents provided space and resources for health, education, recreation, and the exercise of citizenship rights in their poor, immigrant neighborhood. By 1910 more than 400 social settlements, staffed largely by college-educated women, were established in poor neighborhoods in American cities. | 1889 |
| Illinois Woman Suffrage Association | 0 | 2 | Drawing on the activism of Frances Willard, subsequently President of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Association launched its first campaign for woman suffrage in Illinois in 1870. Women in Illinois first won limited voting rights in school board elections in 1891 and the right to vote in presidential elections in 1913 | 1870 |
| Indiana State Woman Suffrage Association | 0 | 4 | Affiliated with the National Woman Suffrage Association, Indiana's state suffrage association sponsored numerous campaigns to convince the state legislature to adopt woman suffrage. | 1851 |
| International Committee of Women For Permanent Peace, 1915-1919 | 1 | 0 | The International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace grew out of the April 1915 International Congress of Women held in The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss ways to end World War I and achieve world peace. In 1919 the International Committee renamed itself the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. | 1915 |
| International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, 1900-1995 | 8 | 39 | Founded in 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) initially represented a largely immigrant workforce. The ILGWU and the women within the union gained significant strength during the 1909 shirtwaist strike. Throughout its history the ILGWU was a dominant force in the American labor movement with branches around the country. The Union became part of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) in 1995. | 1900 |
| International Women's Peace Movement, 1915- | 0 | 131 | From 1915 onwards women reformers, led by Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch, promoted disarmament and world peace through organizations like the United States Women’s Peace Party (1915-1919), and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1919-). | 1915 |
| Iowa State Woman Suffrage Association. Iowa | 0 | 3 | The Association began as the Iowa Equal Rights Association, founded in 1870 and sponsor of various woman suffrage campaigns thereafter. By the mid-1880s suffrage activist Carrie Chapman Catt had joined the Association as a writer and lecturer. Catt went on to become president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and to play a major role in lobbying effort that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. | 1870 |
| Juvenile Court Movement, 1890-1915 | 0 | 45 | From 1890 to 1915 a wave of juvenile reform (in which women played a prominent role) swept the nation and, within a few years, most states passed juvenile court legislation. Children were increasingly seen to have different needs from adults in the justice system and were provided for accordingly. | 1890 |
| Ladies Association of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, 1780-1781 | 2 | 23 | The Ladies Association of Philadelphia emerged during the Revolutionary War, 1780-81, as a patriotic organization among women in and near Philadelphia. Association members worked to supply material support to George Washington’s army -- in 1781, members sewed and delivered 2,000 linen shirts to soldiers. Through their work in the association, Esther Reed (1747-1780) and Sarah Franklin Bache (1743-1808), Benjamin Franklin’s daughter, created a public voice for women and anticipated the new democratic politics of the nineteenth century. | 1780 |
| League of Women Voters, 1919- | 1547 | 402 | Formed in 1919, largely by members of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, the League of Women Voters educated women about social and political issues and urged them to exercise their new voting rights voting citizens. In the mid-1920s the League began to focus less on social issues and more on the expansion of women’s political rights, such as the right to serve on juries. Today the non-partisan League educates voters about political issues facing their communities. | 1919 |
| Massachusetts Federation of Women's Clubs | 1 | 5 | The Massachusetts state affiliate of the General Federation of Women's Clubs (see above) provided a state federation for women's clubs offering social, literary and reform activities for women under the overall umbrella of the General Federation. Its first president was Julia Ward Howe, suffragist and founder of the New England Women's Club in 1868. | 1893 |
| Massachusetts Public Interest League, 1915- | 0 | 2 | he Massachusetts Public Interests League (MPIL) campaigned against woman suffrage in 1915 and later attacked women’s organizations during the so-called Red Scare. In 1925, membership was said to extend to 118 cities, 20 states and the District of Columbia. Margaret Robinson was a longstanding president. | 1915 |
| Movement to End Violence Against Women, 1960s-2000 | 0 | 34 | From the 1960s onward, women’s groups protested violence women suffered at the hands of men and the lack of protection offered to women victims by police and the legal system. Alongside providing shelters for battered women, women publicized the issue of violence, holding national conferences, and demanding legislative protections and reforms. As a result of this movement, in 1994 Congress enacted the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which responded to the inadequacies of state justice systems in dealing with violent crimes against women. | 1960 |
| National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1890-1920 | 3 | 64 | In 1890 the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, joined Lucy Stone’s American Woman’s Suffrage Association (AWSA) to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). The suffrage movement had split in 1869 over the issue of black male suffrage in the Fifteenth Amendment. From 1890 to 1920 when woman suffrage was finally added to the U.S. Constitution, NAWSA was the dominant national suffrage organization. | 1890 |
| National Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, 2nd : 1838 May 15-18 : Philadelphia, PA | 8 | 10 | Held in the newly built Pennsylvania Hall, May 15-18, 1838. The Hall was burned down by a mob the night of May 17, and the final day of the Convention was held in the Cherry Street school. This was the first anti-slavery convention to have both men and women in the audience. President was Mary L. Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. | 1838 |
| National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Baltimore, MD | 7 | 33 | In 1909 W.E.B. Du Bois, other participants in the Niagara Movement, women activists including Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and other African-American critics of Booker T. Washington united with white supporters to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Still an important representative of African American interests, the NAACP has a long history of defending and expanding black civil rights. | 1909 |
| National Association of Colored Women, Washington, DC | 1 | 54 | In the 1890s amid increasing racial tensions a national club movement emerged among black women that led to the formation of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in Washington, D.C. in 1896. The first president of the NACW was Mary Church Terrell. "Lifting As We Climb" became the Association's motto, and members coordinated their efforts to improve the condition of African Americans in the United States. In 1915 more than 100,000 women were NACW members. The NACW is still active today working toward improving the lives of African American women and children. | 1896 |
| National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 1911- | 1 | 3 | The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) was founded in New York in 1911 to lobby against woman suffrage on the state and federal levels. Membership peaked between 1911 and 1916, when NAOWS claimed a membership of 350,000. Beginning in 1916 the Association published a magazine, The Woman Patriot, to disseminate anti-suffrage views. Important leaders included Mrs. Alice Hay Wadsworth, Mrs. Robert Lansing, Margaret C. Robinson and Ann Squire. | 1911 |
| National Birth Control League, 1915-1919 | 0 | 4 | The National Birth Control League (NBCL) formed in 1915 under the leadership of Mary Ware Dennett, who lobbied for repeal of federal and state statutes that defined birth control as "obscene." By 1919, the National Birth Control League had disbanded due to financial difficulties and Dennett's decision to found the Voluntary Parenthood League. | 1915 |
| National Congress of Mothers, 1897-1924 | 30 | 47 | Founded by Alice McLellan Birney in 1897, the National Congress of Mothers was the forerunner of the National Congress of Parents and Teachers. The Congress mobilized thousands of largely white, middle-class women on behalf of child-saving activism in the early years of the twentieth century, most notably support for mothers’ pensions. In 1924 the Congress became the National Congress of Parents and Teachers in an effort to distance itself from accusations of radical politics. Inspired by such leaders as Hannah Schoff, Congress activists also lobbied for the creation of nationwide juvenile courts in the early twentieth century. | 1897 |
| National Council of Women of the United States, 1888-1947 | 0 | 81 | The National Council of Women (NCW) was founded in 1888 as the national section of the International Council of Women. The NCW aimed to "promote the welfare of all women of the country" and became an umbrella organization for numerous women’s organizations including the American Association of University Women and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. | 1888 |
| National Woman Suffrage Association | 2 | 52 | Founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony after the demise of the American Equal Rights Association, this woman suffrage organization supported a wide range of women's rights issues. Led by an all-women slate of officers, the Association promoted a conscious strategy of organizing women independently of male-dominated political parties. Competition between the National and the American Woman Suffrage Association (see above) divided the woman suffrage movement until the two organizations merged in 1890. | 1869 |
| National Woman's Party, Washington, DC | 14 | 75 | In 1916 Alice Paul, founder of the militant suffragist organization, the Congressional Union of Woman Suffrage (CUWS), mobilized her supporters to launch the National Woman's Party (NWP). The NWP used civil disobedience tactics to promote the passage of the woman suffrage amendment. Paul’s strategies contributed to the passage of the federal Suffrage Amendment in 1919 and its ratification in 1920. After 1920 the NWP turned its attention to the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). | 1916 |
| National Women's Conference : 1977 Nov. 18-21: Houston, TX | 21 | 261 | Held in Houston in 1977, the National Women’s Conference was funded by Congress and supported by leaders within the Democratic and Republican parties. The wives of four presidents attended along with more than 20,000 women, children, and men. Bella Abzug presided. The Houston conference marked a high point in the history of feminism during the second half of the twentieth century. State conventions preceded the national meeting, where delegates considered a "national plan" of legislation designed to improve women’s lives. | 1977 |
| New England Woman Suffrage Association | 1 | 10 | Founded in 1868, the Association concentrated its focus exclusively on woman suffrage and contributed to the emergence of the American Woman Suffrage Association (see above) to channel women reformers' support for the Fifteenth Amendment. Early leaders included Lucy Stone and Isabella Beecher Hooker. | 1868 |
| New York Female Moral Reform Society | 3 | 6 | The New York Female Moral Reform Society, (founded in 1834 and renamed the American Female Moral Reform Society in 1839) and the Boston Female Moral Reform Society (founded in 1835 and renamed the New England Female Moral Reform Society in 1838) were umbrella organizations that brought together more than 50,000 members in 600 societies in New England, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Part of the mobilization of women during the Second Great Awakening, moral reform societies worked in villages and cities to eliminate prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation of women, including the sexual double standard. Expressing values associated with the demographic transition from high to low birth rates (1800-1900), moral reform encouraged women to control access to their bodies. The nation's first explicitly female social movement, moral reform offered many middle-class women their first opportunity to venture into the public arena and agitate for social change on behalf of women. | 1834 |
| Oneida Community, Oneida, NY | 3 | 37 | New Harmony in Indiana, the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the Oneida Community in upstate New York were three of the best-known nineteenth-century utopian communities. Founders of these communities criticized private property and contemporary marriage practice. These experimental communities hoped to set an example that would inspire wider social reform in mainstream society. The Oneida Community survived in its original perfectionist form from 1848 to 1879. | 1848 |
| Populist Party, 1892-1896 | 0 | 3 | In the 1890s the Populist Party united farmers and urban dwellers into a significant third party through which members sought to gain relief from debt, promoted reform of the monetary system, opposed monopolies and big business, and advocated the nationalization of railroads. Reflecting the participation of women in its ranks, the Party strongly supported woman suffrage and temperance. | 1892 |
| Second Great Awakening, 1800-1860 | 0 | 34 | "The Second Great Awakening” was a religious movement within Anglo-American Protestantism that emphasized the power of human agency when released from the bondage of sin. The Second Great Awakening was named after the Great Awakening of the 1740s, which it resembled and amplified. Called evangelical because it emphasized the “good news” from the New Testament gospels, it created the largest subculture within American public life. Because the separation of church and state in the United States (1776-1840) forced churches to rely financially on voluntary contributions rather than taxes, churches competed with one another for members which made laypeople more powerful. Because religion embraced Romanticism’s emphasis on human emotions, subjective experience became as important as theological doctrines. Influenced by these trends, and because women constituted a majority of most congregations, the voices of women became much more important in American religious life and thereby in American public life in the 1830s. | 1800 |
| Social Purity Movement, 1870s- | 0 | 106 | The social purity movement began in the 1870s in response to efforts to regulate prostitution in American cities; social purists organized to defeat efforts to regulate prostitution, believing that prostitution was a social evil that needed to be abolished. The key organization in this movement was the New York Committee for the Prevention of the State Regulation of Vice, led by Abby Hopper Gibbons, Emily Blackwell, Aaron Macy Powell and his wife, Anna Rice Powell, and Elizabeth Gay and founded in the 1870s. The movement’s main supporters consisted of white middle-class women as well as supporters from the suffrage movement and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. | 1870 |
| Society of Friends, 1652- | 0 | 36 | Founded in the seventeenth century as a radical form of Puritanism, Quakers became active in nineteenth century reform. Notable women of the Society of Friends include Sarah and Angelina Grimke and Lucretia Mott. During the 1840s, Quaker meetings split over the participation in the organized anti-slavery movement and the position of women within the Society. New meetings called Congregational, Progressive, or Anti-Slavery Friends formed. Lucretia Mott took an active interest in the "seceders" and encouraged their commitment to religious liberty. One society of Progressive Friends met at Waterloo, near Seneca Falls, N.Y., in October 1848, several months after the first woman’s rights convention. | 1652 |
| Temperance Movement, 1800-1920 | 0 | 1693 | The movement to limit the consumption of alcohol began around 1800, when alcohol consumption was at an all-time high in the United States. Sobriety became a value associated with modernizing trends that included self control and individualism, and was supported by working-class as well as middle-class Protestants. Dominated by men before 1860, the temperance movement nevertheless offered women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton a forum where they developed public speaking skills. In the depression winter of 1873-74, the women’s temperance movement exploded in Ohio with public demonstrations in which women protested the effects of men’s alchohol consumption on women and families. Organized by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the women’s temperance movement worked closely with the woman suffrage movement and became the most important vehicle for the participation of both black and white women in public life between 1873 and 1900. Although WCTU membership remained high and their international efforts were notable after 1900, other women’s organizations emerged to shape women’s activism in the decades before 1920. The passage of the prohibition amendment to the U.S. constitution in 1919 was largely due to the efforts of men in the anti-saloon league, a much more conservative organization than the WCTU. | 1800 |
| Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, AL | 0 | 11 | Founded in 1881, Tuskegee Institute is today Tuskegee University. Booker T. Washington, the Institute’s first president from 1881 until his death in 1915, exercised unprecedented power among African Americans partly because his plan for black economic improvement without political rights was well funded by wealthy white donors. Called the "Atlanta Compromise," the plan emerged in 1895, stressing the need for practical, industrial training, such as that supplied by Tuskegee Institute, and minimizing the need for black political rights. | 1881 |
| U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Children's Bureau, Washington, DC, 1912- | 2 | 24 | The United States Children’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, a federal agency dedicated to monitoring and improving the lives of the nation’s children, was created in response to the urging of women reformers in 1912. Julia Lathrop, the first director, was followed by Grace Abbott in 1920. Bypassing male-dominated organizations such as the U.S. Public Health Service, the U.S. Children’s Bureau was the first governmental agency in the western world that was headed by women for women. | 1912 |
| U.S. Women's Bureau | 1 | 15 | The Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor was created in 1920 to investigate and recommend policies for the improvement of women’s working and living conditions. The first head of the Bureau was Mary Anderson (1920-1945). The Bureau has enjoyed some periods of influence since 1920, as it fought for women’s rights in the workplace including equal pay and from the 1970s onward the Equal Rights Amendment. | 1920 |
| Utopian Socialist Communities, 1820-1880 | 0 | 41 | The utopian Oneida Community survived in its original perfectionist form between 1848 and 1879. New Harmony in Indiana, the North American Phalanx in New Jersey and the Oneida Community in upstate New York were three of the most well-known nineteenth century utopian communities. Founders of these communities criticized private property and contemporary marriage practice and through their experimental communities intended to set an example to inspire wider social reform. | 1820 |
| Voluntary Parenthood League, 1918- | 0 | 8 | In 1918 Mary Ware Dennett and others formed the Voluntary Parenthood League (VPL) out of the National Birth Control League, formerly headed by Margaret Sanger. The main goal of the new group was the abolition of laws restricting access to birth control. Dennett left the League in 1925 when members voted to support Sanger’s effort to legalize birth control by giving doctors control of the distribution of contraception. | 1918 |
| Water Curists, 19th Century | 0 | 7 | Hydropathy was one of the most popular forms of medical care in the United States in the nineteenth century, particularly among women. Water-cure therapists rejected heroic treatments (such as bloodletting and purging to rid the body of “ill humors”) and emphasized healthy living practices: drinking plenty of water, application of cold water to the body, exposure to sunshine and fresh air, adequate physical exercise, and adoption of a simple diet and loose-fitting clothing. | 1840 |
| White Cross Society, England | 0 | 6 | Founded in England in the early 1880s to help young men practice sexual abstinence. This group emerged in the United States in 1886 and they advocated a single standard of morality. Also part of the age of consent movement. | 1886 |
| Woman Suffrage Movement, 1848-1920 | 0 | 1294 | Between 1848, when the woman suffrage movement was launched, and 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, the movement mobilized 480 campaigns in state legislatures, 277 campaigns in state conventions, and 19 campaigns in 19 successive congresses in addition to the ratification campaign of 1919-1920. Suffrage became the major vehicle for the advancement of women in American society more generally in this period. | 1848 |
| Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1873- | 2 | 1278 | Founded in 1873, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union quickly became the largest voluntary association in the United States. Working closely with the much-smaller woman suffrage movement, the WCTU endorsed woman suffrage in 1881, by which time it had become the most important vehicle for women’s participation in public life. Key to the WCTU’s prominence was Frances Willard’s leadership and her "Do Everything" policy, which enabled the Union to support a wide range of reform activities other than temperance, including prison reform, child welfare, women's employment, work among African Americans, public health, and woman suffrage. | 1873 |
| Woman's Joint Congressional Committee, 1920- | 1 | 4 | Formed after the passage of the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, the Women’s Joint Congressional Congress (WJCC) coordinated the political goals of a wide variety of women’s organizations. Affiliated with the League of Women Voters, the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Association of Colored Women, and other women’s organizations, the WJCC served as a lobbying clearinghouse for the political agendas of twelve million women. Their most successful effort was the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act in 1921, in which Congress first allocated funds for human health. Attacks by hyper-patriots and business interests reduced the WJCC’s effectiveness after 1925. | 1920 |
| Woman's National Loyal League | 0 | 2 | Under the leadership of Stanton and Anthony, the League organized women in support of the Union cause during the Civil War. Supporting first a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, the League kept up pressure for reform by supporting calls for black and woman suffrage. After the conclusion of the war, the group gave way to the American Equal Rights Association (see above) which promoted these causes. | 1863 |
| Woman's Peace Party, 1915-1919 | 0 | 9 | Founded in January 1915, after the outbreak of World War I, the Woman's Peace Party worked to control armaments and called for a mediated settlement to the war. Members traveled to The Hague in 1915 to meet with women peace supporters from European nations (see the document project, How Did Women Activists Promote Peace in Their 1915 Tour of Warring European Capitals? also on this website). At the conclusion of the war, Woman's Peace Party members traveled to an international conference in Zurich to protest the punitive stance of the Versailles Treaty toward defeated Germany. The conference led to the formation of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (see below) and the Woman's Peace Party became the American Section of WILPF. | 1915 |
| Woman's Rights Convention Movement, 1848-1869 | 0 | 560 | After the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848, the movement for women's rights accelerated. In 1850 the first National Woman's Rights Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts and similar conventions were soon held all over the United States continuing throughout the decade. At these conventions male abolitionist leaders, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, supported the movement while Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Stanton, the two women considered the organizers of the Seneca Falls convention, spoke at and attended many of these subsequent meetings. | 1848 |
| Women's Action Coalition, 1992-1995 | 0 | 2 | Formed in New York in 1992 as a direct-action protest group to advocate women’s rights, the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) highlighted a range of issues including sexual assault against women and women’s under-representation in the art world. WAC supporters numbered in the thousands, but internal divisions led to the group’s demise in 1995. | 1992 |
| Women's Art Movement, 1970s- | 0 | 68 | During the 1970s at the height of the feminist movement, the Women's Art Movement began helping women artists create, exhibit, and frequently control the flow of their artwork, by utilizing alternative or cooperative spaces. | 1970 |
| Women's City Club, New York, NY, 1915- | 8 | 9 | Building on innovations of women like Lillian Wald in the field of women’s and infants’ public health, the Women’s City Club of New York (WCCNY) was founded in 1915. Since its founding the WCCNY has monitored public policy and undertaken campaigns related to child health and sweatshops. | 1915 |
| Women's Columbian Association, 1890-1893 | 0 | 2 | The Women's Columbian Association protested the limited participation of African Americans in organizational committees for the planning of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. | 1890 |
| Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1915- | 7 | 80 | The International Committee of Women for Permanent Peace grew out of the International Congress of Women held in 1915 at The Hague in Holland and was renamed the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in 1919. The United States Woman’s Peace Party affiliated with the International League, becoming the U.S. Section of WILPF. After World War I, WILPF leaders promoted military disarmament and were falsely accused of complicity with communists during the Red Scares of the 1920s. Jane Addams was WILPF’s first president, and Emily Greene Balch ran the organization’s office in Geneva. | 1915 |
| Women's Labor Movement, 19th and 20th Centuries | 0 | 262 | Working women first organized to strike and defend their interests in the cotton textile mills of New England in the 1830s and 40s. Women shoeworkers were prominent in the 1860 New England shoe strike as well. Women’s factory employment expanded in the twentieth century and women participated in the 1909 New York City shirtwaist strike and the 1912 strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Women’s labor force participation expanded dramatically after World War II and women became increasingly active in labor unions, as exemplified by the creation of the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. | 1830 |
| Women's Peace Congress/International Congress of Women : 1915 : Hague, Netherlands | 5 | 16 | During World War I, from April 28 to May 1, 1915, 1,150 women from Europe and North America gathered at The Hague, Netherlands, and discussed peace proposals to end the war. Called the Women’s Peace Congress or the International Congress of Women, this gathering sent delegates to meet with government leaders of belligerent nations and demand an end to the war. Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and Alice Hamilton, leaders in the American delegation, also led this tour of the belligerent nations. | 1915 |
| Women's Rights within the Anti-Slavery Movement, 1830 to 1850 | 0 | 30 | Historians have traditionally dated the beginning of the women’s rights movement to the 1840 London World Anti-Slavery Convention, where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first formulated the idea for a woman’s rights convention. But the connections between anti-slavery and women’s rights flourished even before this meeting through the activism of Lucretia Mott, and Angelina and Sarah Grimke, leading anti-slavery advocates. Mott’s interest in women’s rights also predated her involvement in the anti-slavery movement, as she committed herself to women’s emancipation early on in her public career as a Quaker minister and reformer. | 1830 |
| Women's Trade Union League, 1903-1955 | 1 | 19 | Established by social settlement reformers and working women in 1903, and active until 1955, with branches in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the WTUL promoted unions of women workers in the garment and other semi-skilled industries. WTUL prospered during and after the 1909-10 strike of more than 20,000 shirtwaist workers in New York City. The League's presence during the strike attracted many working women to the organization and by 1910 working women had taken over leadership of the League’s trade committees. | 1903 |
| Young Women's Christian Association | 21 | 156 | During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), named after a similar men’s organization, was organized largely by middle-class white women in cities around the nation who built Association boarding houses, training schools, and day nurseries to protect and provide services for single women in cities. In more recent decades the YWCA has continued a wide range of activities including shelter for women and children and support for women’s reproductive rights. | 1858 |