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Lecture #1

We’re now starting week 2 and are moving into a time of enormous change, not only for American women, but for the nation and for the world.  We'll examine women in the early decades of the 20th century, when the U.S. and the world—underwent tremendous changes due to the First World War and the rapid growth of industrialism, technology and urbanization. In other words, the world became “modern”—and so did women. 

How does change occur in the position of women in society? The formula for change includes a complex mesh of economic, social, and power relationships that varies with the issue and the times. In that shifting formula, one of the most important elements is women's desire and determination to create change, to use power directly and indirectly to improve their lives and the lives of others. Women were not merely victims or second-class citizens allowing things to happen to them throughout history. That idea is no longer a viable historical concept. We know that women have ceaselessly worked to change laws, working conditions, and political systems. As one historian has said, "The history of women is a history of struggle.

This module introduces women who led some of those struggles. They were women who defined themselves differently and moved beyond traditional roles, breaking barriers and overcoming obstacles to create change. As leaders in public life, these women shared certain characteristics. Many came from middle-class or comfortable backgrounds and were well-educated for women of their time. 


During this time period, the demographics of women’s lives changed:

• They tended to marry less often, had fewer children, and divorced more frequently.

• Almost 40 percent never married. 

• Thirty-five percent of the married women had no children who survived infancy.

• Of those who married, 40 percent were divorced, some more than once. 

• More than 10 percent were widowed within the first 10 years of marriage, making those with young children, single mothers.

• Many began their serious public work only after their children were grown.

• No matter what their marital circumstances, many of these women formed close and long-lasting friendships with other women, continuing the tradition of mutual support that had marked women's lives in earlier times.

This information comes from a remarkable four-volume biographical dictionary of women, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary. The volumes include women who died between 1607 and 1975, over 11,800 entries! It is a rich resource for women's history. A companion volume to this set is Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia edited by Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. This latter volume contains 640 biographical essays on African American women who were active leaders in political activities, reform, religious work, the professions, and education.

What do these characteristics tell us about how women prominent in public life differed from other women? The statistical information shows us how their life cycles differed from those of ordinary women as well as those of men. We can see that throughout much of the twentieth century, women who forged new paths and deviated from the life stages prescribed by dominant cultural norms—bypassing marriage or motherhood, for example—achieved goals we usually associate historically with men. Those women who did become mothers, housewives, and spouses achieved their goals later in life. Unlike men, their domestic obligations appeared to hinder their active participation in public life.

What these group characteristics do not tell us, however, is what motivated women to set nontraditional goals for themselves and what they, themselves, thought about what they did. That's where women's life stories come in. Whether through autobiographies or biographies, women's stories literally "give life" to movements that often seem a collection of forces, events, and abstract ideas. Below, we discuss the value of life histories in understanding women's history

Lecture #2

I’d like to examine the major domestic and international events in sections this week: women’s roles in the Progressive era and the “New Woman’;  the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920; and then World War I, called “the war to end all wars"--but unfortunately, it didn’t—it just opened the way for the bloodiest century in the history of humankind the 20th century. More people were killed in wars during the 20th century than in the whole of recorded history. Here's an overview of how women in all nations pitched in for the war effort: