Sunday, January 16, 2011

Progressive Era Sample Essay Question

Analyze the roles that women played in Progressive Era reforms from the 1880s through 1920. Focus your essay on TWO of the following. 
     -Politics 
     -Social conditions 
     -Labor and working conditions
 

 Politics
• 1880–1920: men dominated federal, state, local electoral politics, but women were often active in
pressuring politicians for a range of reforms.
• Women in Populist Party: Mary Elizabeth Lease, Anne Diggs, prominent in Kansas and Nebraska
Populist activity.
• Settlement house activist women pressured federal, state and local politicians for better working
and living conditions in urban areas.
• Some elitism, nativism and racism in women’s views of their roles in politics: Some saw the
extension of suffrage to native-born white women as a way to counter African American and
immigrant male votes and the “slum vote.”
• Muckrakers were mostly men, but there were a few women:
     o Ida Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904.
     o Frances Kellor, Out of Work, 1904 (exploitation of immigrants, blacks, other recent arrivals
to the city by employment agencies).
     o Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor, 1881.
• Women’s suffrage:
     o Attracted few African American, immigrant, working-class women.
     o Women could increasingly vote in local elections: 
                - Wyoming Territory gave unrestricted suffrage to women in 1869 and achieved
statehood in 1890, keeping women’s suffrage. 
                - Utah Territory was created in 1870; Congress disenfranchised women in Utah
in 1887, but women got the vote back when Utah achieved statehood in 1896.
                - Colorado women got suffrage through popular vote in 1893.              
                -Idaho approved women’s suffrage in 1896.            
                -Washington State extended the vote to women in 1910; California in 1911; Arizona, Kansas and Oregon in 1912; Illinois in 1913; Montana and Nevada in 1914; New York in 1917; Michigan in 1918. 
     o By 1919, 39 states had extended suffrage to women for some elections, and 15 allowed full
voting rights.
     o The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) endorsed women’s suffrage in 1882.
     o Some women were antisuffrage: They saw it as a threat to the “natural order” of separate
spheres and associated suffrage with increased divorce, neglect of children, loose morality,
promiscuity.
     o National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1890 (merger of the
National Woman Suffrage Association, formed in 1869, and the American Woman Suffrage
Association, formed in 1869):
               - Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony (jailed for trying to vote for president
in 1872), Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Elizabeth Stone Blackwell.
               -Linked ballot to traditional role of women and extension of women’s influence
to improve public life.    
               -Increased membership from 13,000 in 1893 to over two million in 1917.
               -1910s: mass movement of women seeking suffrage; all ages and different
socioeconomic backgrounds.
               -During World War II, lobbied Congress, asked for state referendums.
     o Links to International Suffrage Association, organized in New Zealand, 1893; in Australia,
1902; Finland, 1906; Norway, 1913; Iceland, 1915; Canada and Great Britain for some local
elections, 1918.
     o Some women supported suffrage in order to engage in “municipal housekeeping” to
protect their families.
o Alice Paul formed Congressional Union, 1914: wanted women’s suffrage through
constitutional amendment; allied with National Women’s Party in 1917. 
o Harriot Stanton Blatch worked for women’s vote; founded Equality League of Self
Supporting Women in 1907 to recruit working women into suffrage movement.
o 19th Amendment ratified, 1920.
o Jeanette Rankin (Montana) was the first female elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives (1916).
o African American women were generally excluded from suffrage and other white women’s
organizations.
o National Woman’s Party, 1916:
 Alice Paul, Harriot Stanton Blatch.
 Advocated more confrontational tactics.
 Argued that the 19th Amendment wasn’t enough and favored a constitutional
amendment prohibiting all discrimination on the basis of sex.
 Congressional Union allied with the National Women’s Party in 1917.
• Women and peace activism:
o Women’s Peace Party founded in 1915 by Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt.
o After the U.S. entered World War I, women peace activists split: Catt advocated women’s
suffrage as a war measure; Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman wouldn’t support
the war.  
o Some women argued that their roles as keepers of morality and maternalism meant that
they had to be pacifists.
o Parallels and connections to peace activists in Great Britain at this time. 
• Prohibition: 18th Amendment ratified, 1919.

Social Conditions
• Temperance and Prohibition:
     o Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), 1874: slogan was “Do Everything”:
                -Frances E. Willard, Carrie Nation (smashed saloon bars and bottles).
                -Advocated abstinence from alcohol, prison reform, ending prostitution, elimination
of wage system, right to vote for women.
                - Organized separate African American women’s chapters: Frances Ellen Harper,
head of African American division of WCTU, 1883–1890.
                -By 1911, the WCTU had 250,000 members and was the largest women’s
organization in American history up to that time.
     o Women were active in the Anti-Saloon League.
     o Prohibition: 18th Amendment ratified, 1919.
• Social gospel movement often guided by women:
      o Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) founded in 1866.
      o Girls’ Friendly Societies (Episcopal Church).
      o Roman Catholic laywomen and nuns.
• African American women sponsored programs, particularly in the Baptist Church (Chicago, Phyllis Wheatley Home, 1908).
• Women missionaries abroad (by 1902, 783 Methodist women missionaries were in China).
• Settlement houses and social work:
     o Women worked for a range of social, economic, educational, health, sanitation, labor
causes.
     o Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House, Chicago, 1889; Lillian Wald, Henry Street,
New York City, 1893.
     o Florence Kelley, Hull House Maps and Papers, 1895.
     o By 1910, there were 400 settlement houses in the U.S. with three-quarters of settlement
workers women, mostly college educated. 
     o Led to profession of social work (Columbia University, 1902), where women dominated the
field.
     o Settlement houses usually did not include African Americans.
     o African American women founded their own settlement houses: Neighborhood Union,
Atlanta, 1908, Lugenia Burns Hope; Phyllis Wheatley Settlement House, Minneapolis, 1924.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898: supported women’s involvement in the
economy; advocated decentralized nurseries and cooperative kitchens to assist women in the
work force.
• General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1892:
      o Club women advocated educational “uplift,” civic reform, child labor laws, mothers’
pensions, protective laws.
      o In 1892, there were over one hundred thousand members in almost five hundred clubs; in
1917, there were over one million members.
• African American women joined the National Association of Colored Women (founded 1896):
     o Mary Church Terrell, first president.
     o Anti-lynching, anti-segregation, worked to improve local communities.
• Birth control and contraception:
     o Margaret Sanger: nurse in New York City who educated women about birth control,
advocated birth control in her journal, The Woman Rebel, 1914; pamphlet, Family
Limitation; opened clinic in New York and distributed contraceptive devices, 1916 (jailed
for it); founded the American Birth Control League, 1921.
     o  National Birth Control League formed by women in 1915.
• Civil rights for African Americans:
     o Women (Wells-Barnett, Terrell, Addams) helped to found and worked with the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 1909.  
     o Antilynching campaigns:
               - Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Jessie Daniel Ames.
               - Wells-Barnett became a journalist in 1880s and later wrote Southern Horrors, 1892,
and A Red Record, 1895; worked for women’s suffrage and helped found NAACP.
• Frances Kellor: active on behalf of black women workers, black prisoners and immigrants; brought
the plight of the urban poor to Theodore Roosevelt’s attention
• Antiprostitution (the “social evil”):
      o Many women worked against prostitution through state and federal laws; fought to get age
of consent raised.
      o Occidental Branch of Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, San Francisco, sponsored
rescue home for Chinese prostitutes. 
     o Mann Act, 1910.
     o Wassermann test for syphilis in 20 states.  
• Tenement reform:
     o National Housing Association, 1910.
     o Charlotte Perkins Gilman suggested apartment buildings with common dining rooms to
relieve women of the task of preparing meals.
• Campfire Girls (1910) and Girl Scouts (Juliette Low, 1912) prepared girls to be future homemakers;
founders thought that delinquency and crime would be reduced.
• Native American assimilation:  
     o Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor, 1881; Ramona, 1884.
• Women’s National Indian Association, founded in 1879, advocated Christianizing Indians, ending
reservation system, universal education, “civilized home life” on reservations in the West;
supported the Dawes Act, 1887.

Labor and Working Conditions
• Women in Knights of Labor:
     o Pushed for equal pay for equal work by men and women.
     o First women joined the Knights (all-female local in shoe trade in Philadelphia).
     o 1885: 10 percent of members were women.
     o Mary Harris (“Mother”) Jones.
     o 1886: A special department was created within the Knights to investigate female and child
labor, women’s pay.
     o Ran day-care centers for children of wage-earning mothers; sometimes created cooperative
kitchens.
• Many American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade unions barred women, although the AFL had
some female organizers in industries employing mostly women; union leadership believed that
women should not be factory workers (presence of women would lower wages), but two locals
(Cigar Makers’ Union, Typographers’ Union) allowed women.
• Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) welcomed women: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.
• Settlement house movement worked for an 8-hour workday for women, an end to child labor,
better working conditions for women, protective legislation.
• New York Consumers League, 1890, Josephine Shaw Lowell: concerned about women’s working
conditions in New York City.
• National Consumers League, 1898: 
     o Worked for better working conditions for women and children.
     o Headed by Florence Kelley, 1899.
     o Tried to get women to see themselves as consumers.
     o Instrumental in the defense of the 10-hour workday for women (Muller v. Oregon, 1908).
• Florence Kelley established the New York Child Labor Committee; served as first chief factory
inspector for the State of Illinois; supported Illinois campaign for 8-hour workday for women.
• International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 1900: Clara Lemlich, Pauline Newman, Rose
Schneiderman; tried to organize women in the textile industry.
• Women’s Trade Union League, 1903: 
     o Founded by female upper-class reformers and union members, Mary Kenney.
     o Tried to persuade women to join unions.
     o Raised money to support strikes, walked picket lines, held public meetings on behalf of
female workers.
• Emphasis on protecting women and children in workplace (Muller v. Oregon, 1908):
     o Women activists split on protective legislation.
     o Supporters of protective legislation argued that such laws were necessary because of
women’s physical frailty and their roles as future mothers. 
     o Opponents argued against protective laws because the laws implied women were unequal
to men, women were to be treated differently than men due to gender, and women were
not suited for certain types of work.
• Uprising of 20,000, New York City, 1909: Women garment workers struck for better wages, union
recognition, better working conditions; strike didn’t get union recognition.
• Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911, prompted reforms in New York State; efforts led by Florence Kelley,
Frances Perkins (National Consumers League).
• New York State Factory Investigation Committee formed under Frances Perkins.
• Women advocated for creation of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau (1912) and
Women’s Bureau (1920) and then worked through both agencies.
     o Julia Lathrop, first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1912; supported passage of
Keating–Owen Act (1916) forbidding interstate shipment of goods manufactured by
children under the age of 14.
• Emphasis on protecting women and children in workplace (Muller v. Oregon, 1908):
     o Women activists split on protective legislation.
     o Supporters of protective legislation argued that such laws were necessary because of
women’s physical frailty and their roles as future mothers. 
     o Opponents argued against protective laws because the laws implied women were unequal
to men, women were to be treated differently than men due to gender, and women were
not suited for certain types of work.
• Uprising of 20,000, New York City, 1909: Women garment workers struck for better wages, union
recognition, better working conditions; strike didn’t get union recognition.
• Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911, prompted reforms in New York State; efforts led by Florence Kelley,
Frances Perkins (National Consumers League).
• New York State Factory Investigation Committee formed under Frances Perkins.
• Women advocated for creation of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau (1912) and
Women’s Bureau (1920) and then worked through both agencies.
     o Julia Lathrop, first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1912; supported passage of
Keating–Owen Act (1916) forbidding interstate shipment of goods manufactured by
children under the age of 14.
     o Federal government created the Women in Industry board during World War I; it became
the Women’s Bureau (1920), worked for protection of women’s interests in the workforce.
 • Emphasis on protecting women and children in workplace (Muller v. Oregon, 1908):
     o Women activists split on protective legislation.
     o Supporters of protective legislation argued that such laws were necessary because of
women’s physical frailty and their roles as future mothers. 
     o Opponents argued against protective laws because the laws implied women were unequal
to men, women were to be treated differently than men due to gender, and women were
not suited for certain types of work.
• Uprising of 20,000, New York City, 1909: Women garment workers struck for better wages, union
recognition, better working conditions; strike didn’t get union recognition.
• Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911, prompted reforms in New York State; efforts led by Florence Kelley,
Frances Perkins (National Consumers League).
• New York State Factory Investigation Committee formed under Frances Perkins.
• Women advocated for creation of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Children’s Bureau (1912) and
Women’s Bureau (1920) and then worked through both agencies.
     o Julia Lathrop, first director of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, 1912; supported passage of
Keating–Owen Act (1916) forbidding interstate shipment of goods manufactured by
children under the age of 14.
     o Federal government created the Women in Industry board during World War I; it became
the Women’s Bureau (1920), worked for protection of women’s interests in the workforce.
     o Federal government created the Women in Industry board during World War I; it became
the Women’s Bureau (1920), worked for protection of women’s interests in the workforce.