My Project
What's my goal and impact?
My goal is to educate people about women's history and fight for equality and rights. I've been working very hard on this project for about a year now, making a website, making a TikTok page, and holding live presentations through zoom sharing my research. I hope you enjoy reading all my provided information! Thanks!
Women's Suffrage
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were not allowed into the World Anti-Slavery Convention that was held in London. This made them hold their own convention (the first Women’s Rights Convention) in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and California is the first state is extend property rights to women in 1849. Worcester, Massachusetts is the first (1850) and second (1851) site of the National Women’s Rights Convention. Some of the attendees of the first one: Frederick Douglass, Paulina Wright Davis, Abby Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth delivers her speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” at this convention.
This movement forms a strong alliance with the abolitionist movement because both of their audiences and groups had overlap. The suffrage movement has to pause for the Civil War (1861-1865). Women focus their attention on the war effort.
The American Equal Rights Association is formed in 1866 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. This organization was for suffrage for all regardless of gender or race.
The 14th Amendment is ratified in 1868 in order to define “citizens” and “voters” as exclusively male.
In 1869, “the American Equal Rights Association is wrecked by disagreements over the Fourteenth Amendment and the question of whether to support the proposed Fifteenth Amendment which would enfranchise Black American males while avoiding the question of woman suffrage entirely”.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869. Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and other more conservative activists form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in 1869. In 1871, the Anti-Suffrage Party is founded.
Women, including Susan B. Anthony, were arrested for casting ballots in 1872. In 1872, Abigail Scott Duniway helps pass legislation in Oregon to help with women’s rights pertaining to property, money, etc.
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is founded by Annie Wittenmyer in 1874. In 1878, a Women’s Suffrage Amendment was proposed to Congress and is defeated by the first vote in 1887.
NWSA and AWSA merge and the National American Woman Suffrage Association is formed in 1890. Stanton is the first president.
In 1910, the Women’s Political Union organizes the first suffrage parade in NYC. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS) is formed in 1911. Led by Mrs. Arthur Dodge, its members included wealthy, influential women, some Catholic clergymen, distillers and brewers, urban political machines, Southern congressmen, and corporate capitalists.
In 1912, Woman Suffrage is supported for the first time at the national level by a major political party -- Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party.
In 1913, suffragists organized a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The parade was the first major suffrage spectacle organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1915, 40,000 march in an NYC suffrage parade. Many wore white and carried signs of where they were from/the states they represented.
In 1916, Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. Woodrow Wilson states that the Democratic Party platform will support suffrage. In 1918, Representative Rankin opens a debate on a suffrage amendment in the House. The amendment passes; however, it fails to win the required two-thirds majority in the Senate. In 1919, the Senate finally passes the Nineteenth Amendment and the ratification process begins.
The amendment is fully ratified in 1920. The suffrage movement took a total of 72 years.
Women in WWI
So during the time of WW1, women couldn’t vote or serve in the military, so many women saw WWI as an opportunity to serve their country and gain more rights and independence. Similar to in WW2, women filled manufacturing and agricultural roles at home, and many other women were nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, translators, and on the battlefield, but never really on the front lines. By 1917, women made up nearly 30% of its war workforce with 175,000 female workers in the U.S.
However, we were much behind other countries. For example, in Germany, almost 1.4 million women were employed in the war labor force. And in Britain, in the middle of 1914, they had 3.3 million women working, and three years later, there were 4.7 million women working. British women also served in the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.
Back in the U.S., African American women were able to make their first major shift from domestic employment to work in offices and factories because of white women taking traditional male jobs.
The Salvation Army, the Red Cross, and many other organizations needed thousands of women volunteers. These organizations operated hospitals to help care for wounded soldiers. Many women that knew how to drive volunteered to go overseas to be ambulance drivers and truck drivers or mechanics who helped to deliver medical supplies, transport patients to hospitals, and retrieve wounded from the battlefield.
Marie Curie was one of the woman drivers of the Red Cross. She invented a mobile X-ray unit and trained 150 women to be X-ray operators on the battlefront.
There was vague wording in part of the Naval Act of 1916 that allowed for a loophole that allowed women to join the Navy ranked as Yeomen -- non-commissioned officers. About 12,000 women enlisted and served on naval bases in the U.S. (replacing men who had deployed to Europe). They mostly performed clerical duties, worked as truck drivers, mechanics, radio operators, telephone operators, translators, camouflage artists, and munition workers. They had the same responsibilities as their male counterparts and actually received equal pay which was $28.75 per month.
During the war, there were also these women called “Hello Girls” (aka Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit). They recruited women who were bilingual in French and English, and these women served as switchboard operators on the Western front.
The women that served didn’t receive veteran benefits when they came home until 1977, just like the women that served in WW2 when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation (only a few surviving women by this point in time).
Women in WWII
WW2 is one of my favorite “women in history” events because of how much they assisted on and off the battlefield.
At the beginning of the war, the only women allowed in uniform were members of the Army Nurse Corps and Navy Nurse Corps; however, by the end of the war, 350,000 women were serving in the military. During the war, particularly during the years 1942 and 1943, many different branches of the military were created for women because we weren’t allowed to serve in the same branches as the men. There was the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, the Women Reservists (aka the women’s marines), the women’s Coast Guard unit, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots.
Although there were so many women serving and so many different women branches, none of them were for combat. The main purpose of all of these branches was to put women in the places of jobs that men previously held so that the men could go off to different combat roles. Similar things happened back in the U.S. as well. And this is where we see Rosie the riveter coming into play.
Rosie the Riveter was the star of a campaign aimed at recruiting female workers for defense industries during WWII so that they could take the places of men and the men could be drafted. More than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry in 1943 which was actually 65% of the industry’s total workforce, compared to just 1% pre-ww2.
However, even though women were so vital during this time, we didn’t even earn half of the wages that men received in the same jobs.
The call for women to join the workforce was supposed to be temporary. However, some women did continue to work after the war, but they were usually demoted to make space for their male counterparts and were paid even less. But this is where we really start to see an uprising in the number of women working outside of the home.
Now, back to the women in the military. The men in the military didn’t really seem to like the women that were there. They would constantly harass and demean their purpose there and claim that their branches were meaningless.
The women that served actually didn’t end up getting veteran status until the late 1970s which was more than 30 years after the war ended.
The Wage Gap
The wage gap is the difference in earnings between men and women. The gap is even wider for women of color. From the Census Bureau data from 2018, women (of all races) earned 82 cents on average for every dollar earned by men (of all races).
The wage gap is calculated to reflect the ratio of earnings for women and men across all industries, not of them doing identical work. This can give us data on many different things.
First, differences in industries or jobs worked. We can see occupational segregation (like women being sent into lines of work that are considered women’s jobs and vice versa). “Women’s jobs” are seen to offer less pay -- child care workers, health aids, etc.
Also, differences in years of experience. Women are driven out of the workforce in order to have babies, resulting in them having fewer years of work experience.
Additionally, differences in hours worked. Women tend to work fewer hours to accommodate child care (something that is unpaid might I add). Women are also more likely to work part-time, resulting in fewer benefits.
Lastly, discrimination. Gender-base pay discrimination has been illegal since 1963, but people still ignore that and pay women a lot less.
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A woman working full time, year-round earned $10,194 less than her male counterpart, on average, in 2018. This would result in her earning $407,760 less than a man over the course of a 40-year career. More than 55 million full-time working women earned an estimated $545.7 billion less than their male counterparts in 2019.
The gender wage gap is currently being closed by only 4 cents a year. So, at this current pace, women would only reach equal pay in 2059. I would be 55 years old!
We need legislation to strengthen the existing protections and further combat discriminatory practices. We also need to shift cultural attitudes toward this kind of discrimination towards women and people of color!
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Women In History I Look Up To
First, my great grandmother. My great-grandmother was one of these women working during the war. My great grandfather was drafted into the war and while he was away, my great grandmother got her master’s in biology and her teaching credentials and ended up being a college biology professor during this time.
I look up to her because of my dreams of becoming a doctor and majoring in biology, and the fact that she achieved so much in a time where this was so uncommon is so inspiring.
Second, Virginia Apgar. Virginia Apgar is another person that, for me, is very inspiring because she created the Apgar Score. This test is for newborns and it is taken right after birth and then a few times after at set increments. It helps tell the general health of the baby. Now, I have an interview with my mom about the Apgar Score, its importance, and its purpose.
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