17. The New Woman

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Draw your own conclusions

Learn how to teach with inquiry.
What were women's priorities after suffrage?
In this inquiry, students examine primary material from women in the 1920s. Zitkala Sa stepped up to advocate for their citizenship, Alice Paul proposed the Era... the fight goes on, but was there consensus? 
What were women's priorities after suffrage?
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What made the twenties roaring for women?​
Suffrage, the postwar period, and economic boom led to new opportunities for women. Women did not sit idle. They went after discriminatory legislation and worked to remedy other issues. 
What made the twenties roaring for women?
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What arguments did Native women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
The 19th Amendment passed, but Native Americans were not considered citizens. Native women had long held positions of power and reverence in their communities. It was time the United States recognized them. In this inquiry, students explore the arguments Native women used to fight for suffrage and citizenship.
What arguments did Native women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
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What arguments did Chinese women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
The 19th Amendment passed, but many Chinese Americans were unable to vote due to the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act. White suffragists capitalized on progressive reforms happening in China and brought Chinese immigrants into the fold to teach them about women's status in China. In this inquiry, students explore the arguments Chinese women made to fight for suffrage and citizenship.
What arguments did Chinese women use to fight for suffrage and citizenship?
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Who Was The Real Lady Lindy?
Who was the true Lady Lindy? In this inquiry students will be able to examine primary sources by women, to decide for themselves who the true Lady Lindy was: Amelia Earhart or Anne Morrow Lindberg.
Who Was The Real Lady Lindy?
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Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
Period Specific Lesson Plans from Other Organizations
Remedial Herstory Editors. "17. THE NEW WOMAN." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 20, 2022. www.remedialherstory.com. 

Primary AUTHOR:
Dr. Barbara Tischler

Primary ReviewerS:
Dr. Deanna Beachley

Consulting Team

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant
​Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University

Dr. Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, Consultant
Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

Dr. Deanna Beachley
Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada

Editors

 

Reviewers

Colonial
Dr. Margaret Huettl
​Hannah Dutton
​Dr. John Krueckeberg

19th Century
Dr. Rebecca Noel
Michelle Stonis, MA
Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA
Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate
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​20th Century
Dr. Tanya Roth
​Dr. Jessica Frazier
Mary Bezbatchenko, MA
  • Published Books
  • Historical Fiction
  • Films
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Survey's on U.S. Women's History
Berry and Gross tell a survey of black women in the United States.
Susan Ware tells a short introduction to women's history in the United States.
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz tells a survey of indigenous people in the United States.
Jill Lepore tells a survey of the United States.
Gail Collins tells a survey of Women in the United States.
Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies, spanning early colonialism through the civil war.
In From Back Alley to the Border, Alicia Gutierrez-Romine examines the history of criminal abortion in California.
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Jan Manion tells the history of women in male clothing who married other women between the Colonial Era and WWI.
Native American Cultures
Stockel interviews Apache women and stories are told of women warrior ancestors.
A collection of essays examining power and gender status in native cultures.
Dive into the history of Cherokee women, and their long standing traditions. 
American Indian women have traditionally played vital roles in social hierarchies at the family, clan, and tribal levels. In the Cherokee Nation, specifically, women and men are considered equal contributors to the culture. With this study, however, we learn that three key historical events in the 19th and early 20th centuries—removal, the Civil War, and allotment of their lands—forced a radical renegotiation of gender roles and relations in Cherokee society.
Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future.
 A collection of historical and contemporary women of Indigenous heritage who have contributed to the survival and success of their families, communities--and the United States of America.
Colonial Era    1600-1775
When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies.
In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. Its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women. Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property.
By examining the lives of six specific women in the Salem Witch Trials, Marilynne Roach shows readers what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged. Roach believes that the individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation.
In The Jamestown Bride, Jennifer Potter recounts the lives of the women in Jamestown, but without the resource of letters or journals she turns to the Virginia Company's merchant lists -- which were used as a kind of sales catalog for prospective husbands -- as well as censuses, court records, the minutes of Virginia's General Assemblies, letters to England from their male counterparts, and other such accounts of the everyday life of the early colonists.
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia.
​Carol Berkin's multicultural history reconstructs the lives of American women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-women from European, African, and Native backgrounds-and examines their varied roles as wives, mothers, household managers, laborers, rebels, and, ultimately, critical forces in shaping the new nation's culture and history.
Revolutionary Period  1763-1783
Women of all classes and races were not only supporters and opponents of the American Revolution, they actively promoted, engaged, wrote, fought, and were deeply impacted by the outcome of the American Revolution. There are a lot of perspectives to consider, and we can only brush the surface.
Liberty's Daughters is widely considered a landmark book on the history of American women and on the Revolution itself. Norton brilliantly portrays a dramatic transformation of women's private lives in the wake of the Revolution. This fascinating human story includes lively anecdotes and revealing details from the personal papers of 450 eighteenth-century families.
Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease.
They baked New England's Thanksgiving pies, preached their faith to crowds of worshippers, spied for the patriots during the Revolution, wrote that human bondage was a sin, and demanded reparations for slavery. Black women in colonial and revolutionary New England sought not only legal emancipation from slavery but defined freedom more broadly to include spiritual, familial, and economic dimensions.
The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American. In this book, Carol Berkin shows us how women played a vital role throughout the conflict. This incisive and comprehensive history illuminates a fascinating and unknown side of the struggle for American independence.
On a rainy night in 1777, sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington mounted her beloved horse and rode forty miles through enemy-infested Putnam County to warn her father's regiment of impending British raids. Riding twice the distance of Paul Revere and under more dire circumstances, her heroic efforts helped position the Continental army in subsequent battles. A widow at a young age, Sybil became a successful businesswoman in a male-dominated profession and lived in the region for her remaining years. Through family documents and correspondence, author Vincent T. Dacquino charts the incredible life and legacy of Sybil Ludington.
In 1772, the High Court in London freed a slave from Virginia named Somerset, setting a precedent that would end slavery in England. In America, racist fury over this momentous decision united the Northern and Southern colonies and convinced them to fight for independence. Meticulously researched and accessible, Slave Nation provides a little-known view of the birth of our nation and its earliest steps toward self-governance.
Mercy Otis Warren’s book is one of the earliest histories of the American Revolution, and the first to be written by a woman. It charts the progress of the entire revolution, from the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765 through to ratification of the Constitution in 1787.This book provides brilliant insight into the history of the American Revolution from the perspective of a contemporary who was able to talk to the key figures involved. This book should be essential reading for anyone interested in the Revolutionary period and how the United States was founded.
Early Republic    1783-1815
Following the American Revolution, US culture morphed and shifted. Women in this new republic found new roles and expectations as mothers: for to give power to the masses in a democracy, meant men needed to be educated, and their mothers needed to do it. The ideal of a Republican Mother emerged and the dynamic women of the colonial and revolutionary eras became a thing of the past.
"A New England Girlhood" is the autobiography of poet Lucy Larcom. Arriving in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s after the death of her shipmaster father, eleven-year-old Lucy Larcom went to work in a textile mill to help her family make ends meet. Originally published in 1889, her engaging autobiography offers glimpses of the early years of the American factory system as well as of the social influences on her development.
In 1762, John Adams penned a flirtatious note to “Miss Adorable,” the 17-year-old Abigail Smith. In 1801, Abigail wrote to wish her husband John a safe journey as he headed home to Quincy after serving as president of the nation he helped create. The letters that span these nearly forty years form the most significant correspondence―and reveal one of the most intriguing and inspiring partnerships―in American history.
​In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes.
Antebellum    1815-1861
The Antebellum Period is full of historical events and movements. From the rise of the abolitionist movement, the Mexican-American War, and the Trail of Tears. 
In Patriots, Prostitutes, and Spies, John M. Belohlavek tells the story of women on both sides of the Mexican-American War (1846-48) as they were propelled by the bloody conflict to adopt new roles and expand traditional ones.
American women "back home" functioned as anti-war activists, pro-war supporters, and pioneering female journalists. Others moved west and established their own reputations for courage and determination in dusty border towns or bordellos.
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market.
This book traces the lived experiences of women lawbreakers in the state of Pennsylvania from 1820 to 1860 through the records of more than six thousand criminal court cases. By following these women from the perpetration of their crimes through the state’s efforts to punish and reform them, Erica Rhodes Hayden places them at the center of their own stories.
Celebrated for her exploits as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman has entered history as one of nineteenth-century America's most enduring and important figures. But just who was this remarkable woman? To John Brown, leader of the Harper's Ferry slave uprising, she was General Tubman. For the many slaves she led north to freedom, she was Moses. To the slaveholders who sought her capture, she was a thief and a trickster. To abolitionists, she was a prophet.
A small group of black and white American women who banded together in the 1830s and 1840s to remedy the evils of slavery and racism, the "antislavery females" included many who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well. Organizing fundraising fairs, writing pamphlets and giftbooks, circulating petitions, even speaking before "promiscuous" audiences including men and women―the antislavery women energetically created a diverse and dynamic political culture.
​The brave pioneers who made a life on the frontier were not only male—and they were not only white. The story of African-American women in the Old West is one that has largely gone untold until now. The stories of ten African-American women are reconstructed from historic documents found in century-old archives. Some of these women slaves, some were free, and some were born into slavery and found freedom in the old west.
Civil War & Reconstruction    1861-1877
The role of women throughout the American Civil War was diverse and widespread. No matter whether one was black or white, southern or northern, women were vital in the war efforts. Some were soldiers, nurses, or took control over their farms and families stations that the men usually would. ​
​Through richly detailed letters from the time and exhaustive research, Wickenden traces the second American revolution these women fought to bring about, the toll it took on their families, and its lasting effects on the country. Riveting and profoundly relevant to our own time, The Agitators brings a vibrant, original voice to this transformative period in our history.
This lively and authoritative book opens a hitherto neglected chapter of Civil War history, telling the stories of hundreds of women who adopted male disguise and fought as soldiers. It explores their reasons for enlisting; their experiences in combat, and the way they were seen by their fellow soldiers and the American public.
Historians of the Civil War often speak of "wars within a war"—the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War—North and South, white and black, slave and free—showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas.
When Confederate men marched off to battle, southern women struggled with the new responsibilities of directing farms and plantations, providing for families, and supervising increasingly restive slaves. Drew Faust offers a compelling picture of the more than half-million women who belonged to the slaveholding families of the Confederacy during this period of acute crisis, when every part of these women's lives became vexed and uncertain.
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Freedom's Women examines African American women's experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women's attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward work, marriage, family, and community.
Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community.
Karen Abbott illuminates one of the most fascinating yet little known aspects of the Civil War: the stories of four courageous women—a socialite, a farmgirl, an abolitionist, and a widow—who were spies. Using a wealth of primary source material and interviews with the spies’ descendants, Abbott seamlessly weaves the adventures of these four heroines throughout the tumultuous years of the war.
Women in the Reconstruction Era, which followed the American Civil War, faced many new challenges. Freedwomen struggled to find their place in society due to separated families, mistreatment from former masters, racism, and no substantial help. Some White Northern women helped with the Freedman's Bureau and fought to help African American's where they could. Whereas, White Southern women worked towards honoring their dead and mythologizing the Confederacy. ​
This book examines the problems that Southern women faced during the Reconstruction Era, in Part I as mothers, wives, daughters or sisters of men burdened with financial difficulties and the radical Republican regime, and in Part II with specific illustrations of their tribulations through the letters and diaries of five different women. ​
In this first critical study of female abolitionists and feminists in the freedmen's aid movement, Carol Faulkner describes these women's radical view of former slaves and the nation's responsibility to them. Moving beyond the image of the Yankee schoolmarm, Women's Radical Reconstruction demonstrates fully the complex and dynamic part played by Northern women in the design, implementation, and administration of Reconstruction policy. ​
The advocates of woman suffrage and black suffrage came to a bitter falling-out in the midst of Reconstruction, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it granted the vote to black men but not to women. How did these two causes, so long allied, come to this? Based on extensive research, Fighting Chance is a major contribution to women's history and to 19th-century political history--a story of how idealists descended to racist betrayal and desperate failure.
The Wild West  1876-1897
On May 30, 1899, history was made when Pearl Hart, disguised as a man, held up a stagecoach in Arizona and robbed the passengers at gunpoint. A manhunt ensued as word of her heist spread, and Pearl Hart went on to become a media sensation and the most notorious female outlaw on the Western frontier.
Hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns; wives and mothers traveling two and a half thousand miles across the prairies in covered-wagon convoys, some of them so poor they walked the entire route.
Born a slave in eastern Tennessee, Sarah Blair Bickford (1852–1931) made her way while still a teenager to Montana Territory, where she settled in the mining boomtown of Virginia City. Race and the Wild West is the first full-length biography of this remarkable woman, whose life story affords new insight into race and belonging in the American West around the turn of the twentieth century.
In Women of the Northern Plains, Barbara Handy-Marchello tells the stories of the unsung heroes of North Dakota's settlement era: the farm women. Enlivened by interviews with pioneer families as well as diaries, memoirs, and other primary sources, Women of the Northern Plains uncovers the significant and changing roles of Dakota farm women who were true partners to their husbands, their efforts marking the difference between success and failure for their families.
Soiled Doves tells the story of the grey world of prostitution and the women who participated in the oldest profession. Colorful, if not socially acceptable, these ladies of easy virtue were a definite part of the early West--wearing ruffled petticoats with fancy bows, they were glamorous and plain, good and ad and many were as wild as the land they came to tame.
Daughters of Joy will prove to be a gold mine of information, since the author's massive research makes the book a primary source as well as a thoughtful study of soiled doves on the frontier.....Butler has portrayed the stark realities of prostitution in the American West With sensitivity and insight.
The Progressive Era    1897-1920
Following the Civil War, Americans were still divided on many many socio-political topics--including universal suffrage. Although female suffragist fought tooth and nail for the right other women fought just as hard against it. Women of all backgrounds played important roles on both sides of the journey to suffrage. ​
Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. Their battlefront wasn't just about gender. African American women had to deal with white abolitionist-suffragists who drew the line at sharing power with their black sisters. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. And they had to maintain their dignity--and safety--in a society that tried to keep them in its bottom ranks.
Woodrow Wilson lands in Washington, DC, in March of 1913, a day before he is set to take the presidential oath of office. He is surprised by the modest turnout. The crowds and reporters are blocks away from Union Station, watching a parade of eight thousand suffragists on Pennsylvania Avenue in a first-of-its-kind protest organized by a twenty-five-year-old activist named Alice Paul. The next day, The New York Times calls the procession “one of the most impressively beautiful spectacles ever staged in this country.”
Comprised of historical texts spanning two centuries, The Women's Suffrage Movement is a comprehensive and singular volume with a distinctive focus on incorporating race, class, and gender, and illuminating minority voices. At a time of enormous political and social upheaval, there could be no more important book than one that recognizes a group of exemplary women--in their own words--as they paved the way for future generations. 
Ever wonder what our foremothers were doing while our forefathers were making recorded history? And what did these women do to claim their social and political power to change their circumstances? We Demand the Right to Vote: The Journey to the 19th Amendment introduces readers to American women's first civil rights movement known as "Women's Suffrage"--women's 72-year struggle for social and political equality that culminated in their winning the right to vote via the 19th Amendment.
Early in the twentieth century, maternal and child welfare evolved from a private family responsibility into a matter of national policy. Molly Ladd-Taylor explores both the private and public aspects of child-rearing, using the relationship between them to cast new light on the histories of motherhood, the welfare state, and women's activism in the United States. 
During the Progessive Era, a period of unprecedented ingenuity, women evangelists built the old time religion with brick and mortar, uniforms and automobiles, fresh converts and devoted protégés. Across America, entrepreneurial women founded churches, denominations, religious training schools, rescue homes, rescue missions, and evangelistic organizations.
World War I    1914-1918
The significant roles women played during World War I implored Americans to take a hard look at gender equality. The contributions and sacrifices made by women during this time ignited the demand for social change, which ultimately led to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. ​
Into the Breach uses excerpts from diaries, memoirs, letters, and newspaper accounts to depict the experiences of wartime nurses, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, and journalists
The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.
In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence.
When World War I began, war reporting was a thoroughly masculine bastion of journalism. But that did not stop dozens of women reporters from stepping into the breach, defying gender norms and official restrictions to establish roles for themselves—and to write new kinds of narratives about women and war.
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The new woman
Looks at the role of women in postwar America, discussing the common perceptions of women at the time--including flappers and housewives--and illustrating how they were reflected in the magazines, catalogs, and films of the time.
This is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot. ​
In the wake of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the scattered hamlets and farms of the rural South to the nation's burgeoning cities, a New Negro ethos of modernist cultural expression and potent self-determination arose to challenge white supremacy and create opportunities for racial advancement.
Ignorant. Brutal. Male. One of these stereotypes of the Ku Klux Klan offers a misleading picture. In Women of the Klan, sociologist Kathleen M. Blee dismantles the popular notion that politically involved women are always inspired by pacifism, equality, and justice. In her new preface, Blee reflects on how recent scholarship on gender and right-wing extremism suggests new ways to understand women's place in the 1920s Klan's crusade for white and Christian supremacy.
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that saw an explosion of Black art, music and writing, yet few female creatives are remembered alongside their male counterparts. Exploring subjects from love, loss and motherhood to jazz, passing and Jim Crow law, the poems and stories collected in this anthology celebrate the women of color at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.
Native American women
Based on an Athabascan Indian legend passed along for many generations from mothers to daughters of the upper Yukon River Valley in Alaska, this is the suspenseful, shocking, ultimately inspirational tale of two old women abandoned by their tribe during a brutal winter famine.
In this haunting and groundbreaking historical novel, Danielle Daniel imagines the lives of women in the Algonquin territories of the 1600s, a story inspired by her family’s ancestral link to a young girl who was murdered by French settlers.​
Daunis Fontaine must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she’ll go for her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.
Colonial Women
Amari's life was once perfect. Engaged to the handsomest man in her tribe, adored by her family, and fortunate enough to live in a beautiful village, it never occurred to her that it could all be taken away in an instant. But that was what happened when her village was invaded by slave traders. Her family was brutally murdered as she was dragged away to a slave ship and sent to be sold in the Carolinas. There she was bought by a plantation owner and given to his son as a "birthday present".
A riveting historical novel about Peggy Shippen Arnold, the cunning wife of Benedict Arnold and mastermind behind America’s most infamous act of treason.
A young Puritan woman—faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul—plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense.
Revolutionary Era Women
Addie stands with the restless crowd in Boston Harbor, watching her brother climb aboard the English tea ship. She isn’t supposed to be out, but this is no ordinary night. When she sees him start to toss the cargo into the water, she knows her world is about to change forever…​
As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel.
Rebellious Frannie Tasker knows little about the war between England and its thirteen colonies in 1776, until a shipwreck off her home in Grand Bahama Island presents an unthinkable opportunity. The body of a young woman floating in the sea gives Frannie the chance to escape her brutal stepfather--and she takes it.
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Antebellum Women
Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world.
The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.​
Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Conjure Women is a sweeping story that brings the world of the South before and after the Civil War vividly to life. Spanning eras and generations, it tells of the lives of three unforgettable women: Miss May Belle, a wise healing woman; her precocious and observant daughter Rue, who is reluctant to follow in her mother’s footsteps as a midwife; and their master’s daughter Varina.
Set in the midst of the Civil War, The Thread Collectors follows two very different women whose paths collide unexpectedly. In New Orleans, Stella, a young Black woman, sews maps that help enslaved men escape and join the Union Army. Lily, a Jewish woman in New York City, creates a quilt for her husband, a Union soldier stationed in Louisiana. When she goes months without hearing from him, she decides to journey to Louisiana to find him.
Josephine N. Leary is determined to build a life of her own and a future for her family. When she moves to Edenton, North Carolina, from the plantation where she was born, she is free, newly married, and ready to follow her dreams.
The wild West and Second Industrial Revolution
The day of her wedding, 17 year old Ada’s life looks good; she loves her husband, and she loves working as an apprentice to her mother, a respected midwife. But after a year of marriage and no pregnancy, in a town where barren women are routinely hanged as witches, her survival depends on leaving behind everything she knows. 
When Kate Thompson’s father is killed by the notorious Rose Riders for a mysterious journal that reveals the secret location of a gold mine, the eighteen-year-old disguises herself as a boy and takes to the gritty plains looking for answers and justice.
In this gripping historical, Chance exposes the horrors women faced in late 19th-century New York when they dared to show passion of any kind or repudiate society's norms.
The Progressive Era
Since childhood, Anita Hemmings has longed to attend the country’s most exclusive school for women, Vassar College. Now, a bright, beautiful senior in the class of 1897, she is hiding a secret that would have banned her from admission: Anita is the only African-American student ever to attend Vassar. With her olive complexion and dark hair, this daughter of a janitor and descendant of slaves has successfully passed as white, but now finds herself rooming with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, the scion of one of New York’s most prominent families.
It's 1913 and Laura Lyons lives with  her husband, superintendent of the New York Public Library building, and their two children in an apartment located in the grand building on 5th Avenue. But Laura wants more—she applies to the Columbia Journalism School and her world is cracked open.  She discovers a radical, all-female group where women  loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women's rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. ​
In City of Lies, con woman Elizabeth Miles is desperately trying to escape men that are after her in 1917 Washington D.C.  so she joins a suffragist parade in front of the White House only to get swept up, arrested and sent to the Occoquan, VA women’s prison with the other marchers.
World War 1
Inspired by real women, this powerful novel tells the story of two unconventional American sisters who volunteer at the front during World War I​.
A group of young women from Smith College risk their lives in France at the height of World War I in this sweeping novel based on a true story—a skillful blend of Call the Midwife and The Alice Network—from New York Times bestselling author Lauren Willig.​
December 1917. As World War I rages in Europe, twenty-four-year-old Ruby Wagner, the jewel in a prominent Philadelphia family, prepares for her upcoming wedding to a society scion. Like her life so far, it’s all been carefully arranged. But when her beloved older brother is killed in combat, Ruby follows her heart and answers the Army Signal Corps’ call for women operators to help overseas.​
The new woman
The Empty Mirror chronicles the parallel lives of Frances Austin and Addie Stanford, two women who come of age in the Roaring Twenties. Born in small-town Pennsylvania, the women independently move to New York City during the wildest years of the Jazz Age. Their trials in business and love reveal the rapidly changing roles of women in society.
Harlem, 1926. Young Black women like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. When a girl turns up dead in front of the café, Louise is forced to confront something she’s been trying to ignore - two other local Black girls have been murdered in the past few weeks. After an altercation with a police officer gets her arrested, Louise is given an ultimatum: She can either help solve the case or wind up in a jail cell. Louise has no choice but to investigate and soon finds herself toe-to-toe with a murderous mastermind hell-bent on taking more lives, maybe even her own....
The Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman–Madge Oberholtzer–who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.
Sallie Kincaid is the daughter of the biggest man in a small town, the charismatic Duke Kincaid.  By the time she is just eight years old, the Duke has remarried and had a son, Eddie. When Sallie tries to teach young Eddie to be more like their father, her daredevil coaching leads to an accident, and Sallie is cast out. Nine years later, she returns, determined to reclaim her place in the family. That’s a lot more complicated than Sallie expected, and she enters a world of conflict and lawlessness. Sallie confronts the secrets and scandals that hide in the shadows of the Big House, navigates the factions in the family and town, and finally comes into her own as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger.

How to teach with Films:

Remember, teachers want the student to be the historian. What do historians do when they watch films?
  1. Before they watch, ask students to research the director and producers. These are the source of the information. How will their background and experience likely bias this film?
  2. Also, ask students to consider the context the film was created in. The film may be about history, but it was made recently. What was going on the year the film was made that could bias the film? In particular, how do you think the gains of feminism will impact the portrayal of the female characters?
  3. As they watch, ask students to research the historical accuracy of the film. What do online sources say about what the film gets right or wrong?
  4. Afterward, ask students to describe how the female characters were portrayed and what lessons they got from the film.
  5. Then, ask students to evaluate this film as a learning tool. Was it helpful to better understand this topic? Did the historical inaccuracies make it unhelpful? Make it clear any informed opinion is valid. 
Documentaries
Ascent of Woman: is a documentary about prehistoric and Ancient women's history across cultures. 
IMDB
Barbarians Rising: Warrior Queen Boudica shows the rise and fall of Boudica.
IMDB
Witches: A Century of Murder is about the witch trials that plagued England under Kings James IV and I and Charles I.
Taking Root is a documentary about the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai. She was from Kenya and her work was on environmental protection.
IMDB
Feature Length Movies
The Last Duel highlights the way that rape was handled in medieval Europe. It barely passes the Bechdel Test, with main actors being the male characters, but the whole theme of sex, sexuality, and gender dynamics cannot be ignored. 
IMDB
Elizabeth tells the story of Elizabeth's Golden era.
IMDB
Mary Queen of Scots is a film about the relationship between the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England and her Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots who challenged her throne. 
IMDB
Catherine the Great is about the career of Catherine of Russia and her challenges as a female leader.
IMDB
The Favorite is about the interesting palace life of Queen Anne and her closest female confidants. This film expands upon rumors of lesbianism within the court. 
The Woman King is a film about the Dahomey "Amazons," women warriors who fought European imperialism in West Africa. 
IMDB
Albert Nobbs is a film about the life of a poor woman living in 19th century Ireland who cross dresses in order to improve her station.
IMDB
Victoria and Abdul is a film about the interesting relationship between Queen Victoria and Abdul Karim, an Indian man who earned her confidence. 
IMDB
Suffragette tells the stories of English women who grappled with a way to have their voices heard in the early movement.
IMDB
The Danish Girl is historical fiction based losely on the life and marriage of a transgender pioneer.
IMDB
A Call to Spy is about the first British and American women spies that worked on the ground in France during WWII.
IMDB
The Guernsey etc. is based on a novel of the same name, about post war England.
IMDB
Frida is a film about the first Mexican woman to have her work displayed at the Louvre in Paris, FR.
IMDB
The Iron Lady is a biopic of Margaret Thatcher.
IMDB
Television Series
The White Queen and the series that follow are based on a historical fiction novel about the rise of the Tudor family in England. The main characters are the women, who through marriage gain and lose the crown.
IMDB
The Serpent Queen tells the story of Queen Catherine de Medici of France and the complexities of being a queen regent. 
The Tudors tells the story of Henry VIII and each of his six wives. Remember the old school tale: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.
IMDB
Victoria is a TV series about the rise and career of Queen Victoria, whose reign spanned much of the 19th century.
IMDB
The Crown is a TV series that shows the rise and career of the current Queen of England, Elizabeth II. Her reign began shortly after WWII.
IMDB
Elsie Hill: Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? ​
Elise Hill: Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law?

Yes! The removal of all forms of the subjection of women is the purpose to which the National Woman’s Party is dedicated… The laws of various States at present hold her in that class. They deny her a control of her children equal to the father’s; they deny her, if married, the right to her own earnings; they punish her for offenses for which men go unpunished; they exclude her from public office and from public institutions to the support of which her taxes contribute. These laws are not the creation of this age, but the fact that they are still tolerated on our statute books and that in some States their removal is vigorously resisted shows the hold of old traditions-upon us. Since the passage of the Suffrage Amendment the incongruity of these laws, dating back many centuries, has become more than ever marked.
​
In many States the earnings of minor children belong entirely to the father, and the father alone is entitled to damages in the case of injuries to a child. In Florida the father recovers money damages even for the mental pain and suffering of the mother, occasioned by the wrongful death of her child…The double standard of morals is written into the laws of many States. …[I]n Maryland white woman who has a child by Negro Mulatto may be sentenced to the penitentiary for a number of years, but a white man under the existing Maryland law can have a child by a Negro woman and receive no punishment. This type of discrimination enters also into the divorce laws of more than one State. In Texas a husband is entitled to a divorce for a single act of infidelity on the part of his wife, but a wife is denied a divorce on this ground, and is granted one if her husband is living a state of infidelity and addition has abandoned her.

State education is still not open to women on equal terms. The State University of Florida is closed to women. The State University of Virginia accepts men at the age of 16, while refusing entrance to women until 20 and maintaining a different standard of requirements for each.

There are also laws which discriminate against women as citizens. For instance, there are States which do not permit women to serve on juries, and in least one, Massachusetts, a ruling has been made since the passage of the Suffrage Amendment to the effect that a woman cannot sit in legislature…
​
The National Woman’s Party believes that it is a vital social need to do away with these discriminations against women and is devoting its energies to that end. 

Hill, Elsie. "Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? The removal of all forms of the subjection of women is the purpose to which the National Woman's Party is dedicated." The Nation. April 22, 1922. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/shall-women-be-equal-law/.

​Crystal Eastman: Now we can begin
Crystal Eastman: Now We Can Begin
This speech delivered by Crystal Eastman, co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment, is considered one of the top 100 most influential speeches in American History. It was delivered in 1920, just after the ratification of the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women's suffrage. 
​
Most women will agree that August 23, the day when the Tennessee legislature finally enacted the Federal suffrage amendment, is a day to begin with, not a day to end with. Men are saying perhaps “Thank God, this everlasting woman’s fight is over!” But women, if I know them, are saying, “Now at last we can begin.” In fighting for the right to vote most women have tried to be either non-committal or thoroughly respectable on every other subject. Now they can say what they are really after; and what they are after, in common with all the rest of the struggling world, is freedom.

Freedom is a large word
…

What, then, is “the matter with women”? What is the problem of women’s freedom? It seems to me to be this: how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity—housework and child-raising. And second, if and when they choose housework and child-raising, to have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man.

This is not the whole of feminism, of course, but it is enough to begin with. “Oh, don’t begin with economics,” my friends often protest, “Woman does not live by bread alone. What she needs first of all is a free soul.” And I can agree that women will never be great until they achieve a certain emotional freedom, a strong healthy egotism, and some un-personal sources of joy — that in this inner sense we cannot make woman free by changing her economic status. What we can do, however, is to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free woman’s soul can be born and grow. It is these outward conditions with which an organized feminist movement must concern itself.

Freedom of choice in occupation and individual economic independence for women: How shall we approach this next feminist objective? First, by breaking down all remaining barriers, actual as well as legal, which make it difficult for women to enter or succeed in the various professions, to go into and get on in business, to learn trades and practice them, to join trades unions. Chief among these remaining barriers is inequality in pay…

Second, we must institute a revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls. It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies of life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first…

Cooperative schemes and electrical devices will simplify the business of homemaking, but they will not get rid of it entirely… The immediate feminist program must include voluntary motherhood. Freedom of any kind for women is hardly worth considering unless it is assumed that they will know how to control the size of their families. “Birth control” is just as elementary an essential in our propaganda as “equal pay.” Women are to have children when they want them, that’s the first thing…

But is there any way of insuring a woman’s economic independence while child-raising is her chosen occupation? Or must she sink into that dependent state from which, as we all know, it is so hard to rise again? That brings us to the fourth feature of our program — motherhood endowment. It seems that the only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist society, is by the establishment of a principle that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted. But with a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing.

It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.

Crystal Eastman, “Now We Can Begin,” Liberator (December 1920). 
Florence Kelley: Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? ​
Florence Kelley: Shall Women Be Equal Before the Law? 
Florence Kelley dedicated her life to social reform. She worked to end many social problems, including labor and racial discrimination.

"The removal of all forms of the subjection of women is the purpose 
to which the National Woman’s Party is dedicated."

A few years ago, the Woman’s Party counted disfranchisement the form of subjection which must first be removed. Today millions of American women, educated and uneducated, are kept from the polls in bold defiance of the Suffrage Amendment. Every form of subjection suffered by their white sisters they also suffer. Deprivation of the vote is theirs alone among native women. Because of this discrimination all other forms of subjection weigh a hundred-fold more heavily upon them. In the family, in the effort to rent or to buy homes, as wage-earners, before the courts, in getting education for their children, in every relation of life, their burden is greater because they are victims of political inequality. How literally are colored readers to understand the words quoted above?

Kelley, Florence. Women Be Equal Before the Law? The removal of all forms of the subjection of women is the purpose to which the National Woman's Party is dedicated. The Nation. April 22, 1922. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/shall-women-be-equal-law/.
Carrie Chapman Catt and Ethel Smith: Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women
Carrie Chapman Catt and Ethel Smith: Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women
​
Not all women supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Some women, including Carrie Chapman Catt and Ethel M. Smith claimed that “absolute equality” between men and women would strip protections for women. They proposed removing, modifying, or addressing unequal laws one at a time, rather than by a single amendment.

There are innumerable laws that differentiate between men and women, and some are found in every state… the most important [are] in three groups…:
I. Laws that Differentiate between Men and Women


Citizenship
Suffrage
Eligibility to public office
Eligibility to jury service
Admission to public employment (teaching, civil service)
Marriage
Divorce
Property rights of married women
Support of family
Domicile
Guardianship of children
Inheritance from children
Earnings of children
Sex offenses
Illegitimate parentage
Maternal and infant hygiene
Mothers’ aid
Prohibited occupations
Public health regulations
Regulation of terms and conditions of employment…

II. Laws that Differentiate without Adverse Discrimination
Maternal and infant hygiene
Mothers’ aid
Regulation of employment conditions for women…
Sex offenses…
III. Laws that Differentiate on Subjects Where Equality Is Not Yet Adequately Defined

Married women's property rights (some only)
Married women's contract rights (some only)
Age of majority
Marriage age
Divorce (some causes)
Support
Sex offenses (some only)
Health (some only)

…For reasons partly judicial and partly economic and political, it has been possible to have laws regulating hours of women's labor, or fixing minimum wage standards for women, only by making a difference in the contract rights of men and women. Therefore, the question of legal equality here seemed unimportant as compared with the need for the equalizing economic effect of the laws. 
The net result of this examination, then, is to re-emphasize the dangers of generalization and call for a clear definition of terms. The laws of the forty-eight states differ, they have been amended in different ways in the different states, and the remaining needs are so uneven as to have, in concrete terms, no common denominator at all.

Smith, Ethel Marion, Carrie Chapman Catt, and National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection. Toward Equal Rights for Men and Women. Washington D.C.: Published by the Committee of the Legal Status of Women, National League of Women Voters, 1929. (pp 19-21) PDF https://www.loc.gov/item/29012783/.   

Bibliography

Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.

Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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