The women's movement in America first got organized around 1848. Sorry you missed it. Women as labor leaders began to organize in the 1870's but it wasn't until hundreds of women died in the Triangle fire, around 1910, that much of the USA paid attention to sweat shop conditions. Wyoming was the first territory of the USA to pass a women's suffrage law. In the following year, 1870, women began serving on juries there. Soon, other states offered limited voting rights to women, usually accessible only if they were white, or held property. Colorado appears as the first state to have a universal voting rights amendment to its constitution, in 1893. By 1918, about 16 states had such laws or amendments. The federal women's suffrage amendment finally passed in Congress in 1919, about 40 years after Susan B. Anthony wrote that radical proposal. It became the 19th amendment to the Constitution of the USA in 1920 after ratification by the majority of the states. Interestingly, President Wilson wasn't the one who signed it ' into law. ' The secretary of State signed it. Kent Law School Union Hall of Honor http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/honor.htm Columbia Encyclopedia http://www.answers.com/topic/feminism ...the first feminist document was Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). In the French Revolution, women's republican clubs demanded that liberty, equality, and fraternity be applied regardless of sex, but this movement was extinguished for the time by the Code Napoléon. In North America, although Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren pressed for the inclusion of women's emancipation in the Constitution, the feminist movement really dates from 1848, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Coffin Mott, and others, in a women's convention at Seneca Falls, N.Y., issued a declaration of independence for women, demanding full legal equality, full educational and commercial opportunity, equal compensation, the right to collect wages, and the right to vote. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony, the movement spread rapidly and soon extended to Europe.... [Please note that women had no right to the wages they earned outside the home. Husbands or fathers had the legal right to the money they made. Pin money, selling sewing or butter and eggs, was for some women a desperate source of funds for their and their children's clothing, and even food. Wanna guess why?] Mother Jones http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/majones.htm quoting the first paragraph of a short article: The elderly woman smoothed her black dress and touched the lace at her throat and wrists. Her snow-white hair was gathered into a knot at the nape of her neck, and a black hat, trimmed with lavender ribbons to lend a touch of color, shaded her finely wrinkled face. She was about five feet tall, but she exuded energy and enthusiasm. As she waited to speak, her bright blue eyes scanned the people grouped beyond the platform. Her kindly expression never altered as her voice broke over the audience: "I'm not a humanitarian," she exclaimed. "I'm a hell-raiser." Rosa Luxemburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg Golda Meier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golda_Meir#Emigration_to_the_United_States.2C_1906 ....Her father worked as a carpenter in Milwaukee and her mother ran a grocery store. Beginning when she was only eight years old, Golda oversaw the store for a short time each morning as her mother was buying supplies at the market. When she was 14, her mother suggested that she give up school for work and to marry an older man. Golda rebelled and ran away. She went to Denver, where her older sister, Sheyna, was living. Here she met Morris Myerson, a sign painter, who would later become her husband. She returned to Milwaukee at the urging of her father when she was 18. She began speaking and advocating.... Encyclopedia Britannica women at the crossroads http://search.eb.com/women/crossroads02.html 1880: Paiute Indian leader Sarah Winnemucca protests conditions on Indian reservations. 1880: Women in Mississippi, New York, and Vermont win partial suffrage. 1881: The Women's National Indian Association (originally known as the Central Indian Committee) is founded by Mary Lucinda Bonney and Amelia Stone Quinton. 1881: Clara Barton establishes the American branch of the Red Cross and becomes its first president. 1881: Sophia Packard and Harriet Giles open a school for black women in an Atlanta, Georgia, church basement. Their school will become known as Spelman College. etc. 1893: Johns Hopkins Medical School opens. The women who donate the funding, including Mary Elizabeth Garrett and Martha Carey Thomas, insist that men and women be admitted equally. [ However, all faculty and staff remained white until after WW2 ] etc. biographies at EB include: Florence Rena Sabin (1871-1953), anatomist Florence Sabin was born on November 9, 1871, in Central City, Colorado. She was educated in Denver, Colorado, and Vermont and graduated from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1893. After teaching in Denver and at Smith to earn tuition money, she entered the Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1896. While a student she demonstrated a particular gift for laboratory work; her model of the brain stem of a newborn infant was widely reproduced for use as a teaching model in medical schools. After graduation in 1900 she interned in Johns Hopkins Hospital for a year and then returned to the medical school to conduct research under a fellowship awarded by the Baltimore Association for the Advancement of University Education of Women. In 1901 she published An Atlas of the Medulla and Midbrain, which became a popular medical text. In 1902, when Johns Hopkins finally abandoned its policy of not appointing women to its medical faculty, Sabin was named an assistant in anatomy, and she became the first female full professor at Johns Hopkins in 1917.... History looks different when the contributions of women are included. -National Women's History Project some books: Sara Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America, 2nd ed. (1997) This is a major text and is on a number of textbook and encyclopedia reading list references. Notice that it's been popular enough to be in its second edition. Karen Anderson, Changing Woman: A History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America (1996). Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984)