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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_l6kyzXFcL7iQHCSwUyLpGeYfRNxTIoNqPtL8ecsgSg/edit

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rHi3DI6_1jRNe7zOr4iwxbzbGhpjgz3XATwXpwb49Fk/edit

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This video will help others understand what women went through while fighting for equal education.

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This article focuses on what was expected from women in the 1950's.

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Mrs. America: Women’s Roles in the 1950s | American Experience | PBS

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American society in the 1950s was geared toward the family. Marriage and children were part of the national agenda.

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This article shows what women were forced to do for their families, while men prepared for their futures.

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Following her probes into the lives of women after the First World War and their roles in the Second, Virginia Nicholson moves forward into a decade that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Sandwiched between the privations and sacrifices of the 1940s and the affluent excesses of the 'swinging sixties', the fifties have long been regarded as a dull decade, when Britain was struggling to rebuild a devastated and shabby country and 'face the future', in the words of the Labour Party's 1945 election slogan. For many women they were years of frustration at wartime gains lost, whereas others nursed a profound desire to return to the certainties of their pre-war lives. But for both the future was to prove circumscribed.

Women might have had the vote on the same terms as men since 1929, but for most that was pretty well the limit of their equality: working women were paid much less than men and despite the responsibilities and sheer hard graft many had endured in wartime, were still regarded as submissive and inferior beings. Educational opportunities were limited. The 1944 Education Act was supposed to give everyone 'parity of esteem', but that is not how it worked out. Many teachers and parents had narrow expectations for girls whose destiny was to be marriage, a home and a family, with work just an interim measure between leaving school and walking down the aisle, rather than a career. Just 1.2 per cent of women went to university in the 1950s.

In many cases, a woman's lot seems to have hardly improved by marriage. Imagining wives to be fulfilled by having an easy-to-clean Formica worktop and a twin-tub washing machine, husbands could be harsh taskmasters, most regarding running the home and parenting solely as a woman's responsibility, expecting meals ready when they returned from work, making all the household decisions of consequence and largely continuing to inhabit a separate sphere of pubs and football.

Nicholson stitches together some telling interviews to support this perception: the wife whose husband confiscated her pearl necklace until she 'learned not to swear', the mother who wept when her daughter called off her engagement since she had already purchased a set of wall-lights in anticipation. However, she also includes exceptions to the Stepford Wives stereotypes; Dora Russell who organised a 'peace caravan' of women against nuclear war, pioneers of birth control, the working-class girl who knew her looks would get her out of the factory and ruthlessly fought her way to be crowned Miss Great Britain.

As ever, the perfect and the ideal were a chimera, but frequently proved oppressive ones for women in the 1950s.

Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s
Virginia Nicholson
Viking/Penguin 526pp £16.99
Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Juliet Gardiner is a historian and broadcaster and a former editor of History Today.

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Following her probes into the lives of women after the First World War and their roles in the Second, Virginia Nicholson moves forward into a decade that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves.

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This article is about an international network that makes a difference for girls/women in education.

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ActionAid is an international network building a just, equitable, and sustainable world in solidarity with communities on the frontlines of poverty and injustice.

We know this can only be done by shifting power - towards communities and away from elites - and aid as traditionally practiced does not accomplish this. That's why we take action in partnership with people on the frontlines of poverty and injustice. Together, we tackle the symptoms of unequal power - poverty, hunger, gender-based violence, climate change, conflict, and disaster - and challenge the ideologies, legal systems, and social norms that lie underneath.

ActionAid embraces feminist leadership as necessary to moving our mission forward. We define feminist leadership as positive and inclusive use of power to build an organization capable of changing the world. Feminist leadership informs and guides our core values, theory of change and objectives.

ActionAid USA is the U.S. branch of ActionAid International, which works in more than 50 countries to achieve social justice, gender equality, and poverty eradication. We influence U.S. policy and international institutions like the United Nations and elevate marginalized voices in the halls of power.
Read our 2018-2020 strategy.
Our Vision

A just, equitable and sustainable world in which every person enjoys the right to a life of dignity, freedom from poverty and all forms of oppression.

Our Mission

To achieve social justice, gender equality, and poverty eradication by working with people living in poverty and exclusion, their communities, people's organizations, activists, social movements and supporters.

Where we work

Asia & Australia: Afghanistan, Arab Region, Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, occupied Palestinian territories, The Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam

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About ActionAid USA - International Aid Organization

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ActionAid is an international network building a just, equitable, and sustainable world in solidarity with communities on the frontlines of poverty and injustice. We know this can only be done by shifting power - towards communities and away from elites - and aid as traditionally practiced does not accomplish this.

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This article basically goes into detail about how women in the 1950's set the tone for women/girls today.

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Today more girls than ever go to school. However, despite progress, women and girls continue to face multiple barriers based on gender and its intersections with other factors, such as age, ethnicity, poverty, and disability, in the equal enjoyment of the right to quality education. This includes barriers, at all levels, to access quality education and within education systems, institutions, and classrooms, such as, amongst others:

The international community has recognised the equal right to quality education of everyone and committed to achieving gender equality in all fields, including education, through their acceptance of international human rights law. This means that states have legal obligations to remove all discriminatory barriers, whether they exist in law or in everyday life, and to undertake positive measures to bring about equality, including in access of, within, and through education.

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Today more girls than ever go to school. However, despite progress, women and girls continue to face multiple barriers based on gender and its intersections with other factors, such as age, ethnicity, poverty, and disability, in the equal enjoyment of the right to quality education.

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This article is about women's history in the United States.

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This is mainly about how women fought for us women today in the education field.

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A major focus of the Women's Liberation Movement was on equal educational and job opportunities. Activism by teachers, students, writers and publishers was one of the most exciting and effective streams of feminist work. Discover the context of compulsory, further and higher education for girls and women, as well as sex education provision in the 1970s and the development of Women's Studies courses at universities.

Banner credit: 'Facts of Life' photograph © Time & Life Pictures / Getty Images.

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Education and the Women's Liberation Movement

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A major focus of the Women's Liberation Movement was on equal educational and job opportunities. Activism by teachers, students, writers and publishers was one of the most exciting and effective streams of feminist work. Discover the context of compulsory, further and higher education for girls and women, as well as sex education provision in the 1970s and the development of Women's Studies courses at universities.

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This is an organization designed to ensure women of all races/ethnicity are treated well.

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Women's WorldWide Web (W4) is an online crowdfunding platform aiming to promote girls' and women's empowerment worldwide, in cities and in rural areas, in both developing and developed countries.

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Education is the foundation for civic participation, and schools are formative in shaping how children and young people view themselves and others. Accordingly, it is essential that school environments foster gender equality and provide safe spaces in which all students can learn.

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"It’s not enough to get a girl into school if later she is pulled out for reasons beyond her control. We can teach girls to speak up, but we can’t forget to make sure that the world listens"

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We're currently in the thick of college graduation season, which means that you and your friends are likely gathering your gowns, planning your parties, and wondering what the hell you're going to do with your lives once you've got that shiny new diploma. But women's higher education, and the specific right to earn a degree of the same quality and content as a man at a university, is in many senses a very new right; and to understand just how far we've come, it's necessary to look back a long way to the pioneers and kick-ass women who made this educational revolution.

Women's pursuit of an equal, in-depth, high-level education as adults has met many stumbling blocks over the centuries: inferior standards (or the complete absence) of education for young girls, beliefs in women's intellectual inferiority, and worries that education in non-domestic subjects wouldn't adequately prepare women for their "natural" role as wives and mothers. To the women of a century ago, the fact that 11.7 million women started college in America in 2016 - a majority of the total number of new students - would seem like a miracle. The ability to get your degrees as a woman isn't something to be taken for granted, so let's have a look at the history of women who just wanted to have the same education as everybody else - and the incredible fight it took to get them there.

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Here's How Women Fought For The Right To Be Educated Throughout History

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We're currently in the thick of college graduation season, which means that you and your friends are likely gathering your gowns, planning your parties, and wondering what the hell you're going to do with your lives once you've got that shiny new diploma.