In light of Women’s History Month which is celebrated in March, we are going to feature some “firsts” for women in US history. Since we are a company that was started by women, we want to pay tribute to the ladies and events that made our success possible.
Women’s History Month, now celebrated annually in the United States, grew out of a weeklong celebration of women’s contributions to health, culture, history and society. The first celebration was organized by the school district of Sonoma, California, in 1979. The idea quickly caught on within communities, schools and organizations across the country. In 1981, the U.S. Congress made it official, passing a resolution establishing Women’s History Week. Six years later, the event was expanded into the entire month of March.
First women's-rights convention meets in Seneca Falls, New York, 1848
In July 1848, some 240 men and women gathered in upstate New York for a meeting convened, said organizers, "to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women." One hundred of the delegates--68 women and 32 men--signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women, like men, were citizens with an "inalienable right to the elective franchise." The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.
Wyoming Territory is first to grant women the vote, 1869
In 1869, Wyoming’s territorial legislature declared that “every woman of the age of twenty-one years, residing in this territory, may at every election…cast her vote.” Though Congress lobbied hard against it, Wyoming’s women kept their right to vote when the territory became a state in 1890. In 1924, the state’s voters elected the nation’s first female governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross.
Californian Julia Morgan is first woman admitted to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, 1898
The 26-year-old Morgan had already earned a degree in civil engineering from Berkeley, where she was one of just 100 female students in the entire university (and the only female engineer). After she received her certification in architecture from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, the best architecture school in the world, Morgan returned to California. There, she became the first woman licensed to practice architecture in the state and an influential champion of the Arts and Crafts movement. Though she is most famous for building the “Hearst Castle,” a massive compound for the publisher William Randolph Hearst in San Simeon, California, Morgan designed more than 700 buildings in her long career. She died in 1957.
Margaret Sanger opens first birth-control clinic in the U.S., 1916
In October 1916, the nurse and women’s-rights activist Margaret Sanger opened the first American birth-control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Since state “Comstock Laws” banned contraceptives and the dissemination of information about them, Sanger’s clinic was illegal; as a result, on October 26, the city vice squad raided the clinic, arresting its staff and seizing its stock of diaphragms and condoms. Sanger tried to reopen the clinic twice more, but police forced her landlord to evict her the next month, closing it for good. In 1921, Sanger formed the American Birth Control League, the organization that eventually became Planned Parenthood.
Edith Wharton is the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, 1921
Wharton won the prize for her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Like many of Wharton’s books, The Age of Innocence was a critique of the insularity and hypocrisy of the upper class in turn-of-the-century New York. The book has inspired several stage and screen adaptations, and the writer Cecily Von Ziegesar has said that it was the model for her popular Gossip Girl series of books.
Activist Alice Paul proposes the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time, 1923
For almost 50 years, women’s-rights advocates like Alice Paul tried to get Congress to approve the amendment; finally, in 1972, they succeeded. In March of that year, Congress sent the proposed amendment--“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex”--to the states for ratification. Twenty-two of the required 38 states ratified it right away, but then conservative activists mobilized against it. (The ERA’s straightforward language hid all kinds of sinister threats, they claimed: It would force wives to support their husbands, send women into combat and validate gay marriages.) This anti-ratification campaign was a success: In 1977, Indiana became the 35th and last state to ratify the ERA. In June 1982, the ratification deadline expired. The amendment has never been passed.
Amelia Earhart is the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane, 1928
After that first trip across the ocean, which took more than 20 hours, Earhart became a celebrity: She won countless awards, got a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, wrote a best-selling book about her famous flight and became an editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. In 1937, Earhart attempted to be the first female pilot to fly around the world, and the first pilot of any gender to circumnavigate the globe at its widest point, the Equator. Along with her navigator Fred Noonan, Earhart successfully hopscotched from Miami to Brazil, Africa, India and Australia. Six weeks after they began their journey, Earhart and Noonan left New Guinea for the U.S. territory of Howland Island, but they never arrived. No trace of Earhart, Noonan or their plane was ever found.
Frances Perkins becomes the first female member of a Presidential cabinet, 1933
Perkins, a sociologist and Progressive reformer in New York, served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. She kept her job until 1945.
The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League becomes the first professional baseball league for female players, 1943
Women had been playing professional baseball for decades: Starting in the 1890s, gender-integrated “Bloomer Girls” teams (named after the feminist Amelia Bloomer) traveled around the country, challenging men’s teams to games--and frequently winning. As the men’s minor leagues expanded, however, playing opportunities for Bloomer Girls decreased, and the last of the teams called it quits in 1934. But by 1943, so many major-league stars had joined the armed services and gone off to war that stadium owners and baseball executives worried that the game would never recover. The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was the solution to this problem: It would keep ballparks filled and fans entertained until the war was over. For 12 seasons, more than 600 women played for the league’s teams, including the Racine (Wisconsin) Belles, the Rockford (Illinois) Peaches, the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Chicks and the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Daisies. The AAGPBL disbanded in 1954.
The FDA announces its approval of “The Pill,” the first birth-control drug, 1960
In October 1959, the pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle applied for a license from the federal Food and Drug Administration to sell its drug Enovid, a combination of the hormones estrogen and progesterone, for use as an oral contraceptive. FDA approval was not guaranteed: For one thing, the agency was uncomfortable with the idea of allowing doctors to prescribe drugs to healthy people; for another, the young bureaucrat assigned to the case was fixated on moral and religious, not scientific, objections to the pill. Despite all this, Enovid was approved for short-term use in October 1960.
Janet Guthrie is the first woman to drive in the Indy 500, 1977
Guthrie was an aerospace engineer, training to be an astronaut, when she was cut from the space program because she didn’t have her PhD. She turned to car racing instead and became the first woman to qualify for the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500. Mechanical difficulties forced her out of the 1977 Indy race, but the next year she finished in ninth place (with a broken wrist!). The helmet and suit that Guthrie wore in her first Indy race are on display in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to be the first woman on the Supreme Court, 1981
O’Connor was confirmed that September. She did not have much judicial experience when she began her Supreme Court term—she had only been a judge for a few years and had never served on a federal court—but she soon made a name for herself as one of the Court’s most thoughtful centrists. O’Connor retired in 2006.
Joan Benoit wins the first women’s Olympic Marathon, 1984
At the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, Joan Benoit (today known as Joan Benoit Samuelson) finished the first-ever women’s marathon in 2:24.52. She finished 400 meters ahead of the silver medalist, Norway’s Grete Waitz.
Manon Rheaume is the first woman to play in an NHL game, 1992
Manon Rheaume, a goalie from Quebec City, Canada, was no stranger to firsts: She was well-known for being the first female player to take the ice in a major boys’ junior hockey game. In 1992, Rheaume was the starting goalie for the National Hockey League’s Tampa Bay Lighting in a preseason exhibition game, making her the first woman to play in any of the major men’s sports leagues in the U.S. In that game, she deflected seven of nine shots; however, she was taken out of the game early and never played in a regular-season game. Rheaume led the Canadian women’s national team to victory in the 1992 and 1994 World Hockey Championships. The team also won silver at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
Madeleine Albright becomes the first female Secretary of State, 1997
In January 1997, the international-relations expert Madeleine K. Albright was sworn in as the United States’ 64th Secretary of State. She was the first woman to hold that job, which made her the highest-ranking woman in the federal government’s history. Before President Bill Clinton asked her to be part of his Cabinet, Albright had served as the country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. In 2004, Condoleezza Rice became the second woman--and first African-American woman to hold the job. Five years later, in January 2009, the former Senator (and First Lady) Hillary Rodham Clinton became the third female Secretary of State.
Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, 2010
The American film director Kathryn Bigelow’s 2008 film "The Hurt Locker" garnered six Oscars on March 7, 2010, including the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Written by Mark Boal, a former journalist who covered the war in Iraq, the movie follows an Army bomb squad unit as they conduct dangerous missions and battle personal demons in war-torn Baghdad. Bigelow, whose previous films include "Strange Days" and "Point Break," was the first woman to take home the Best Director distinction. She triumphed over her former husband, James Cameron, whose science fiction epic "Avatar" was another presumed front-runner.
Without these women…where would we be?
Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906
Perhaps the most well-known women’s rights activist in history, Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, to a Quaker family in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. Anthony was raised to be independent and outspoken: Her parents, like many Quakers, believed that men and women should study, live and work as equals and should commit themselves equally to the eradication of cruelty and injustice in the world.
Before she joined the campaign for woman suffrage, Anthony was a temperance activist in Rochester, New York, where she was a teacher at a girls’ school. As a Quaker, she believed that drinking alcohol was a sin; moreover, she believed that (male) drunkenness was particularly hurtful to the innocent women and children who suffered from the poverty and violence it caused. However, Anthony found that few politicians took her anti-liquor crusade seriously, both because she was a woman and because she was advocating on behalf of a “women’s issue.” Women needed the vote, she concluded, so that they could make certain that the government kept women’s interests in mind.
In 1853, Anthony began to campaign for the expansion of married women’s property rights; in 1856, she joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, delivering abolitionist lectures across New York State. Though Anthony was dedicated to the abolitionist cause and genuinely believed that African-American men and women deserved the right to vote, after the Civil War ended she refused to support any suffrage amendments to the Constitution unless they granted the franchise to women as well as men.
This led to a dramatic schism in the women’s-rights movement between activists like Anthony, who believed that no amendment granting the vote to African Americans should be ratified unless it also granted the vote to women (proponents of this point of view formed a group called the National Woman Suffrage Association), and those who were willing to support an immediate expansion of the citizenship rights of former slaves, even if it meant they had to keep fighting for universal suffrage. (Proponents of this point of view formed a group called the American Woman Suffrage Association.)
This animosity eventually faded, and in 1890 the two groups joined to form a new suffrage organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was NAWSA’s first president; Anthony was its second. She continued to fight for the vote until she died on March 13, 1906.
Alice Paul, 1885-1977
Alice Paul was the leader of the most militant wing of the woman-suffrage movement. Born in 1885 to a wealthy Quaker family in New Jersey, Paul was well-educated--she earned an undergraduate degree in biology from Swarthmore College and a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania--and determined to win the vote by any means necessary.
While she was in graduate school, Paul spent time in London, where she joined the suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s radical, confrontational Women’s Social and Political Union and learned how to use civil disobedience and other “unladylike” tactics to draw attention to her cause. When she returned to the United States in 1910, Paul brought those militant tactics to the well-established National American Woman Suffrage Association. There, as the chair of NAWSA’s Congressional Committee, she began to agitate for the passage of a federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution like the one her hero Susan B. Anthony had wanted so badly to see.
On March 3, 1913, Paul and her colleagues coordinated an enormous suffrage parade to coincide with--and distract from--President Wilson’s inauguration. More marches and protests followed. The more conservative women at NAWSA soon grew frustrated with publicity stunts like these, and in 1914 Paul left the organization and started her own, the Congressional Union (which soon became the National Woman’s Party). Even after the U.S. entered World War I, the NWP kept up its flamboyant protests, even staging a seven-month picket of the White House.
For this “unpatriotic” act, Paul and the rest of the NWP suffragists were arrested and imprisoned. Along with some of the other activists, Paul was placed in solitary confinement; then, when they went on a hunger strike to protest this unfair treatment, the women were force-fed for as long as three weeks. These abuses did not have their intended effect: Once news of the mistreatment got out, public sympathy swung to the side of the imprisoned activists and they soon were released.
In January 1918, President Wilson announced his support for a constitutional amendment that would give all female citizens the right to vote. On August 26, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, making it law.
In 1920, Alice Paul proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution. (“Men and women,” it read, “shall have equal rights throughout the United States.”) The ERA has never been ratified.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1815-1902
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the foremost women’s-rights activists and philosophers of the 19th century. Born on November 12, 1815, to a prominent family in upstate New York, Elizabeth Cady was surrounded by reform movements of all kinds. Soon after her marriage to abolitionist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, the pair traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where they were turned away: Female delegates, they were told, were unwelcome.
This injustice convinced Stanton that women needed to pursue equality for themselves before they could seek it for others. In the summer of 1848, she--along with the abolitionist and temperance activist Lucretia Mott and a handful of other reformers--organized the first women’s-rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Some 240 men and women gathered to discuss what Stanton and Mott called “the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” One hundred of the delegates--68 women and 32 men--signed a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declaring that women were citizens equal to men with “an inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The Seneca Falls Convention marked the beginning of the campaign for woman suffrage.
Like Susan B. Anthony, Stanton was a committed abolitionist; however, she too refused to compromise on the principle of universal suffrage. As a result, she campaigned against the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed black men the right to vote but denied it to women.
After the fight over the 14th and 15th Amendments, Stanton continued to push for women’s political equality--but she believed in a much broader vision of women’s rights. She advocated for the reform of marriage and divorce laws, the expansion of educational opportunities for girls and even the adoption of less confining clothing (such as the pants-and-tunic ensemble popularized by the activist Amelia Bloomer) so that women could be more active. She also campaigned against the oppression of women in the name of religion--“From the inauguration of the movement for woman’s emancipation,” she wrote, “the Bible has been used to hold her in the ‘divinely ordained sphere’”--and in 1895 published the first volume of a more egalitarian Woman’s Bible.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton died in 1902. Today, a statue of Stanton, with fellow women’s rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott stands in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
Lucy Stone, 1818-1893
Lucy Stone, born in Massachusetts in 1818, was a pioneering abolitionist and women’s-rights activist, but she is perhaps best known for refusing to change her last name when she married the abolitionist Henry Blackwell in 1855. (This tradition, the couple declared, “refuse[d] to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being” and “confer[red] on the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority.”)
After she graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, Stone became a traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society--advocating, she said, “not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” She continued her activism on behalf of abolitionism and women’s rights until 1857, when she retired from the anti-slavery lecture circuit to care for her baby daughter.
After the Civil War, advocates of woman suffrage faced a dilemma: Should they hold firm to their demand for universal suffrage or should they endorse--even celebrate--the 15th Amendment while they kept up their own campaign for the franchise? Some suffragists, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, chose the former, scorning the Fifteenth Amendment while forming the National Woman Suffrage Association to try and win the passage of a federal universal-suffrage amendment. Stone, on the other hand, supported the15th Amendment; at the same time, she helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association, which fought for woman suffrage on a state-by-state basis.
In 1871, Stone and Blackwell began to publish the weekly feminist newspaper The Woman’s Journal. Stone died in 1893, 27 years before American women won the right to vote. The Woman’s Journal survived until 1931.
Ida B. Wells, 1862-1931
Ida B. Wells, born in Mississippi in 1862, is perhaps best known for her work as a crusading journalist and anti-lynching activist. While working as a schoolteacher in Memphis, Wells wrote for the city’s black newspaper, The Free Speech. Her writings exposed and condemned the inequalities and injustices that were so common in the Jim Crow South: disfranchisement, segregation, lack of educational and economic opportunity for African-Americans, and especially the arbitrary violence that white racists used to intimidate and control their black neighbors.
Wells’s insistence on publicizing the evils of lynching, in particular, won her many enemies in the South, and in 1892 she left Memphis for good when an angry mob wrecked the offices of The Free Speech and warned that they would kill her if she ever came back. Wells moved north but kept writing about racist violence in the former Confederacy, campaigning for federal anti-lynching laws (which were never passed) and organizing on behalf of many civil rights causes, including woman suffrage.
In March 1913, as Wells prepared to join the suffrage parade through President Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural celebration, organizers asked her to stay out of the procession: Some of the white suffragists, it seemed, refused to march alongside blacks. (Early suffrage activists had generally supported racial equality--in fact, most had been abolitionists before they were feminists--but by the beginning of the 20th century, that was rarely the case. In fact, many middle-class white people embraced the suffragists’ cause because they believed that the enfranchisement of “their” women would guarantee white supremacy by neutralizing the black vote.) Wells joined the march anyway, but her experience showed that to many white suffragists, “equality” did not apply to everyone.
Wells continued to fight for civil rights for all until she died in 1931.
(Content courtesy of History.com)
