History of women in the United States

Pocahontas quickly became part of early American folklore, reflecting myth, culture, romanticism, colonialism, and historical events as well as narratives of intermarriage, heroic women, and gender and sexuality as metaphors for national, religious, and racial differences.

In March 1638, she was again brought before the court and formally excommunicated; she and her children soon joined her husband, who had prepared a home for them in the new colony of Rhode Island, which had been founded less than two years earlier by other dissidents exiled from Massachusetts.

[86] Since more direct participation in the public arena was fraught with difficulties and danger, many women assisted the movement by boycotting slave-produced goods and organizing fairs and food sales to raise money for the cause.

[99] However, scandals surrounding the personal lives of English contemporaries Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft pushed feminist authorship into private correspondence from the 1790s through the early decades of the nineteenth century.

[100] Feminist essays from John Neal, particularly those in Blackwood's Magazine and The Yankee in the 1820s, filled an intellectual gap between Murray and the leaders of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention,[101] which is generally considered the beginning of the first wave of feminism.

Acting as an advisory to Colonel James Montgomery and his 300 soldiers, Tubman led them in a raid in South Carolina from Port Royal to the interior, some twenty-five miles up the Combahee River, where they freed approximately 800 slaves.

[139] In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association, an organization for white and black women and men dedicated to the goal of suffrage for all.

[140] In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested and brought to trial in Rochester, New York, for attempting to vote for Ulysses S. Grant in the presidential election; she was convicted and fined $100 and the costs of her prosecution but refused to pay.

Women wanted to show their status through the extravagant interior design of their homes, but as Kristin Hoganson points out, 'their decision to do so through exhibiting imported objects and replicating distant styles illuminates something beyond local jostling'.

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.

For example, the Colored Women's Republican Club of Illinois Show their power in the 1928 primary, when their favorite Ruth Hanna McCormick outpolled former governor Charles S. Deneen three to one in the black wards and won the nomination for U.S. Senate.

[219] Black women, who had been historically closed out of factory jobs, began to find a place in industry during World War I by accepting lower wages and replacing the lost immigrant labor and in heavy work.

Many young girls from working-class backgrounds did not need to help support their families as prior generations did and were often encouraged to seek work or receive vocational training which would result in social mobility.

Many of the ideas that fueled this change in sexual thought were already floating around New York intellectual circles prior to World War I, with the writings of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Ellen Key.

Feminist organizations in Italy were ignored, as the editors purposely associated emancipation with Americanism and transformed the debate over women's rights into a defense of the Italian-American community to set its own boundaries and rules.

[267] The first six enlisted women to be sworn into the regular Navy on July 7, 1948 were Kay Langdon, Wilma Marchal, Edna Young, Frances Devaney, Doris Robertson.

Prior to Rosa Parks' action, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith had refused to give up their seats on buses to white women, but their cases were eventually rejected by civil rights lawyers as they were not considered sympathetic enough.

The Commission's Report, called "The American Woman" and issued in 1963, noted discrimination against women in the areas of education, home and community services, employment, social insurance and taxation, and legal, civil and political rights.

On November 22, 1963, following the assassination of President Kennedy, federal judge Sarah T. Hughes administered the Presidential Oath of Office to Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One, the only time a woman has done so, as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court normally has this honor.

[309] One EEOC director called the prohibition "a fluke...conceived out of wedlock," and even the liberal magazine The New Republic asked, "Why should a mischievous joke perpetrated on the floor of the House of Representatives be treated by a responsible administration body with this kind of seriousness?

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, which declared that federal employers must take affirmative action to ensure that employees receive equal treatment and opportunities regardless of gender, race, color, or religion.

This was the first time in history that the Supreme Court ruled that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution applied to differential treatment based on legal sex.

[323] The first three hundred thousand copies of Ms. sold out in eight days; the magazine name comes from the fact that the title Ms. was originally popularized by feminists in the 1970s to replace Miss and Mrs. and provide a parallel term to Mr., in that both Ms. and Mr. designate gender without indicating marital status.

In this match, on September 20, 1973, in Houston, Texas, women's tennis champion Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs 6–4, 6–3, 6–3, before a worldwide television audience estimated at almost 50 million.

According to Leandra Zarnow, Donald Trump made anti-feminism a central theme of his presidential campaign in 2016 against Democrat Hillary Clinton, the first woman candidate for president from a major party.

[401][406] Angry women marchers sometimes carried posters featuring offensive or obscene humor to ridule Trump's body, his misogyny and his pussy grabbing, with slogans such as, "Keep your tiny hands off my human rights!.".

They reported that when all the men left for war, the women took command, found ersatz and substitute foods, rediscovered their old traditional skills with the spinning wheel when factory cloth became unavailable, and ran all the farm or plantation operations.

[419] The overwhelmingly male new academic discipline saw its purview as relatively limited to the study of the evolution of politics, government, and the law, and emphasized research in official state documents, thus leaving little room for an examination of women's activities or lives.

For example, Sara Evans and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall wrote important dissertations addressing the historical intersections between women's social justice activism and race during the 1960s that were published in the 1970s.

Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) helped to open up analysis of race, slavery, abolitionism and feminism, as well as resistance, power, activism, and themes of violence, sexualities, and the body.