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Business opportunities were very rare, unless it was a matter of a widow taking over her late husband's small business. However the rapid acceptance of the sewing machine made housewives more productive and opened up new careers for women running their own small millinery and dressmaking shops.
American women achieved several firsts in the professions in the second half of the s. In , Lucy Hobbs Taylor became the first American woman to receive a dentistry degree. Page became the first woman in America to earn a degree in architecture when she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
She covered sports, disasters, diseases, and was recognized as the first female war correspondent.
By the s Most of the large Protestant denominations developed missionary roles for women beyond that of the wife of a male missionary. European Catholic women in their role as religious sisters worked in the immigrant enclaves of American cities. The orphanages, schools and hospitals built by her order provided major support to the Italian immigrants. She was canonized as a saint in In , Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established the first settlement house in America a settlement house is a center in an underprivileged area that provides community services , in what was then a dilapidated mansion in one of the poorest immigrant slums of Chicago on the corner of Halstead and Polk streets.
During the Spanish—American War thousands of US soldiers sick with typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever overwhelmed the capabilities of the Army Medical Department, so Dr. McGee write legislation creating a permanent corps of Army nurses.
Across the nation, middle-class women organized on behalf of social reforms during the Progressive Era. They were especially concerned with Prohibition, suffrage, school issues, and public health. Focusing on the General Federation of Women's Clubs , a national network of middle-class women who formed local clubs, historian Paige Meltzer puts the women's clubs in the context of the Progressive Movement , arguing that its policies:. One representative woman of the Progressive Era was Jane Addams — She was a pioneer social worker, leader of community activists at Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher , sociologist, author, and spokesperson for suffrage and world peace.
Alongside presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, she was the most prominent reformer of the Progressive Era. She said that if women were to be responsible for cleaning up their communities and making them better places to live, they needed the vote to be effective in doing so. Addams became a role model for middle-class women who volunteered to uplift their communities.
In , she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. French Canadian women saw New England as a place of opportunity and possibility where they could create economic alternatives for themselves distinct from the expectations of their subsistence farms in Quebec. By the early 20th century some saw temporary migration to the United States to work as a rite of passage and a time of self-discovery and self-reliance. Most moved permanently to the United States, using the inexpensive railroad system to visit Quebec from time to time.
When these women did marry, they had fewer children with longer intervals between children than their Canadian counterparts. Some women never married, and oral accounts suggest that self-reliance and economic independence were important reasons for choosing work over marriage and motherhood. These women conformed to traditional gender ideals in order to retain their 'Canadienne' cultural identity, but they also redefined these roles in ways that provided them increased independence in their roles as wives and mothers.
Most young urban women took jobs before marriage, then quit. Before the growth of high schools after , most women left school after the eighth grade aged around fifteen. Ciani shows that type of work they did reflected their ethnicity and marital status. African-American mothers often chose day labor, usually as domestic servants, because of the flexibility it afforded. Most mothers receiving pensions were white and sought work only when necessary.
Across the region, middle-class society women shaped numerous new and expanded charitable and professional associations, and promoted mother's pensions, and expanded forms of social welfare. Many of the Protestant homemakers were active in the temperance and suffrage movements as well.
In Detroit, the Federation of Women's Clubs DFWC promoted a very wide range of activities for civic-minded middle-class women who conformed to traditional gender roles. The Federation argued that safety and health issues were of greatest concern to mothers and could only be solved by improving municipal conditions outside the home. The Federation pressured Detroit officials to upgrade schools, water supplies and sanitation facilities, and to require safe food handling, and traffic safety.
However, the membership was divided on going beyond these issues or collaborating with ethnic or groups or labor unions. Its refusal to stretch traditional gender boundaries, gave it a conservative reputation in the working-class. Before the s, the women's affiliates of labor unions were too small and weak to fill the gap. Rebecca Latimer Felton — was the most prominent woman leader in Georgia. Born into a wealthy plantation family, she married an active politician, managed his career, and became a political expert.
An outspoken feminist, she became a leader of the prohibition and woman's suffrage movements, endorsed lynching white Southerners should "lynch a thousand [black men] a week if it becomes necessary" to prevent the rape of white women , fought for reform of prisons, and filled leadership roles in many reform organizations. In , she was appointed to the U. She was sworn in on November 21, , and served one day; she was the first woman to serve in the Senate.
Thomas Paine Publishes Anti-Slavery Tract, Although Paine was not the first to advocate the aboliton of slavery in Amerca, he was certainly one of the earliest and most influential. Connecticut , U. She originally worked as a visiting nurse in the New York City's tenements and wrote about sex education and women's health. French Canadian women saw New England as a place of opportunity and possibility where they could create economic alternatives for themselves distinct from the expectations of their subsistence farms in Quebec. March 8, World War I had temporarily allowed women to enter into industries such as chemical, automobile, and iron and steel manufacturing, which were once deemed inappropriate work for women.
Although middle class urban women were well-organized supporters of suffrage, the rural areas of the South were hostile. The state legislatures ignored efforts to let women vote in local elections. Georgia not only refused to ratify the Federal 19th Amendment , but took pride in being the first to reject it. The Amendment passed nationally and Georgia women gained the right to vote in However, black women did not vote until federal Voting Rights Act of enforced their constitutional rights.
The woman's reform movement flourished in cities; however the South was still heavily rural before In Dallas, Texas , women reformers did much to establish the fundamental elements of the social structure of the city, focusing their energies on families, schools, and churches during the city's pioneer days.
Many of the organizations which created a modern urban scene were founded and led by middle-class women. Through voluntary organizations and club work, they connected their city to national cultural and social trends. By the s women in temperance and suffrage movements shifted the boundaries between private and public life in Dallas by pushing their way into politics in the name of social issues. During —19, advocates of woman suffrage in Dallas drew on the educational and advertising techniques of the national parties and the lobbying tactics of the women's club movement.
They also tapped into popular culture, successfully using popular symbolism and traditional ideals to adapt community festivals and social gatherings to the task of political persuasion. The Dallas Equal Suffrage Association developed a suffrage campaign based on social values and community standards. Community and social occasions served as recruiting opportunities for the suffrage cause, blunting its radical implications with the familiarity of customary events and dressing it in the values of traditional female behavior, especially propriety.
Black women reformers usually operated separately. She focused on working with black youths, organizing them as the vanguard in protests against segregation practices in Texas. The Progressive movement was especially strong in California, where it aimed to purify society of its corruption, and one way was to enfranchise supposedly "pure" women as voters in , nine years before the 19th Amendment enfranchised women nationally in Women's clubs flourished and turned a spotlight on issues such as public schools, dirt and pollution, and public health.
California women were leaders in the temperance movement, moral reform, conservation, public schools, recreation, and other issues. The women did not often run for office—that was seen as entangling their purity in the inevitable backroom deals routine in politics. Bristow shows there was a gendered response of health caregivers to the flu pandemic that killed over , Americans.
Male doctors were unable to cure the patients, and they felt like failures. Women nurses also saw their patients die, but they took pride in their success in fulfilling their professional role of caring for, ministering, comforting, and easing the last hours of their patients, and helping the families of the patients cope as well.
In March , the United States Congress passed the Comstock Act , which made it illegal to distribute birth control information or contraceptives through the U. She originally worked as a visiting nurse in the New York City's tenements and wrote about sex education and women's health. Sanger and her sister Ethel Byrne , also a nurse, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in , modeled after those Sanger had seen in the Netherlands.
The police quickly closed it down but the publicity surrounding Sanger's activities had made birth control a matter of public debate. One Package to the U. Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision in that case allowed physicians in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont to legally mail birth control devices and information to married people.
For unmarried people, the dissemination of birth control did not become legal until the Supreme Court decision Eisenstadt v. The campaign for women's suffrage picked up speed in the s as the established women's groups won in the western states and moved east, leaving the conservative South for last.
Parades were favorite publicity devices. A lifelong pacifist, she was one of fifty members of Congress who voted against entry into World War I in , and the only member of Congress who voted against declaring war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor in After , Paul spent a half century as leader of the National Woman's Party , which fought for her Equal Rights Amendment to secure constitutional equality for women.
It never passed, but she won a large degree of success with the inclusion of women as a group protected against discrimination by the Civil Rights Act of She insisted that her National Woman's Party focus exclusively on the legal status of all women and resisted calls to address issues like birth control. Women's support for international missionary activity peaked in the to era. The Great Depression caused a dramatic cut back in funding for missions.
Mainstream denominations generally transition to support for locally -controlled missions. Black women Increase their role in international women's conferences and their independent travels abroad. Leaders including Ida B. Wells , Hallie Quinn Brown , and Mary Church Terrell addressed issues of American race and gender discrimination when they traveled abroad.