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16 Most Rebellious Women

25 Most Powerful Women of the 20th Century

National Women's Hall of Fame

National Women's History Project

Photo Essay: Int. Women's Day 2011

Women's History Mini-Bio Videos

Women's History Month

Women's History Month- History

Women's History Month Resources

Women Who Have Changed History

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American Women who Changed American History

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American Women who Changed American History

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Edith Kanaka'ole (also affectionately called "Aunty Edith"), a native Hawaiian composer, chanter and dancer, was a champion for the preservation of native Hawaiian culture and arts.

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Women have always played an active role in history. Explore some of the historical pioneers and contemporary newsmakers that continue to impact the world. New biographies are added regularly, so check back to discover new stories!

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Emma Watson to United Nations: I'm a feminist

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Celebrate women all year long with these picture books telling the stories of women who soar through the sky, navigate the stars, swim with sharks, dig up dinosaur bones, code computers, paint portraits, design buildings, solve mathematical equations to send rockets into space, construct monuments, sew dresses, write bestsellers, sing and dance across stages, lead nations, fight for the right to vote, and stand up for all that is good and right in the world.

This clickable pdf, has most books linked to YouTube videos of the stories being read aloud, book trailers, book reviews, short biographies, or interviews. As always, be sure to vet all videos before sharing them with your young audiences to make sure there are no surprises and the content is developmentally appropriate. Download the file by clicking here. A free bookmark is included at the end of the pdf. Feel free to print, laminate, cut, and gift to students. Want some posters to decorate your classroom? Check these out on a previous blog post. And have your students complete these Women's History Month portraits after reading books about these powerful women who made valuable contributions to our world. Happy Women's History Month.

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Celebrate women all year long with these picture books telling the stories of women who soar through the sky, navigate the stars, swim with sharks, dig up dinosaur bones, code computers, paint portraits, design buildings, solve mathematical equations to send rockets into space, construct monuments, sew dresses, write bestsellers, sing and dance across stages, lead nations, fight for the right to vote, and stand up for all that is good and right in the world.

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Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word, a testament to a human contribution.

Yet who gets remembered - and how - inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can, therefore, be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.

Since 1851, The New York Times has published thousands of obituaries: of heads of state, opera singers, the inventor of Stove Top stuffing and the namer of the Slinky. The vast majority chronicled the lives of men, mostly white ones.

Charlotte Brontë wrote "Jane Eyre"; Emily Warren Roebling oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband fell ill; Madhubala transfixed Bollywood; Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching. Yet all of their deaths went unremarked in our pages, until now.

Below you'll find obituaries for these and others who left indelible marks but were nonetheless overlooked. We'll be adding to this collection each week, as Overlooked becomes a regular feature in the obituaries section, and expanding our lens beyond women.
You can use this form to nominate candidates for future "Overlooked" obits. Read an essay from our obituaries editor about how he approaches subjects and learn more about how the project came to be.

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Remarkable People We Overlooked in Our Obituaries

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Obituary writing is more about life than death: the last word, a testament to a human contribution. Yet who gets remembered - and how - inherently involves judgment. To look back at the obituary archives can, therefore, be a stark lesson in how society valued various achievements and achievers.

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Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator, civil rights activist, and political advisor to multiple US presidents. She became president of the National Association of Colored Women in 1924 and founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935.

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national american woman suffrage association

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Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911 - (American Memory from the Library of Congress)

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The Elizabeth Smith Miller and Anne Fitzhugh Miller Suffrage Scrapbooks, part of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection, housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress, contain ephemera and memorabilia related to their work with the suffrage movement.

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feminism women’s rights instagram square

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Free download of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness
When it comes to race, the experience you most need to understand is your own. The people you most need to talk to are your own family members.

This book can help you do that. Right now.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

Free download of IntersectionAllies: We Make Room For All
When society feels this broken, it's hard to know where to begin. The theory of intersectionality helps us see where change needs to be made by teaching us to notice where power lies, who benefits, and who doesn't. Being an effective ally means turning that knowledge into action. It means noticing when and where you have power, and using that power to make room for all.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

Free download of The Nightlife of Jacuzzi Gaskett
At night Jacuzzi, age 11, takes care of things if mom is out. Kids at school and teachers might not realize how special and smart he is-but baby brother Jamaal does. A collaboration between the artists Brontez Purnell (writer) and Elise Peterson (illustrator) portrays a common childhood experience of responsibility and family life that is almost never depicted in children's books.

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(no credit card required)

Free download of Death is Stupid
A boy's grandmother dies-and people say some stupid things to comfort him. The new edition of Anastasia Higginbotham's award-winning Death is Stupid is back in print August 4. Because it's very needed right now, you can download a PDF of the book for free here.

Click the button and complete the checkout process to download PDF
(no credit card required)

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Free download of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness When it comes to race, the experience you most need to understand is your own. The people you most need to talk to are your own family members. This book can help you do that. Right now.

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Exploring the under-representation of women in history.

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Where are the Women? examines the status of women's history in state level social studies standards. States have devised sets of learning standards that describe what students are expected to know and be able to do at specific stages of education. The report and analysis finds that women's experiences and stories are not well integrated into US state history standards. The lack of representation and context in state-level materials presupposes that women's history is even less represented at the classroom level. This implies that women's history is not important.

Project Methodology

NWHM scholars read the social studies standards for each state and the District of Columbia. Project staff highlighted every standard that referred to a woman or a topic associated with women. Each standard was copied into a database. Researchers-following guidance from the Museum's advisory council of scholars, public historians, and educators-reviewed the database entries to ensure that the selected standards met the project's definitions of history about women. In the final step, researchers counted the number of times that women's names and key terms occurred within the standards. The analysis describes the way that women's history is characterized in US K-12 social studies standards. It suggests that women are excluded because the standards' historiographical framework preferences male-oriented exceptional leadership while over-emphasizing women's domestic roles.

Interesting Findings

Individual Women

One hundred seventy-eight individual women are named in state standards. Fifteen women are named more than ten times in standards. Individual women listed in standards are usually those who achieved a level of national or regional name recognition for their activities.

Fifteen women most often named in state social studies standards of learning.

Women by Race

Since the new history movement that began in the 1960s, coinciding with modern rights movements, many states include the history of marginalized groups in standards. Women as a group are often characterized as one of these marginalized groups along with ethnic minority groups and the working class. Non-elite, non-white women who appear in the standards are most often associated with the history of their marginalized groups. The 178 women listed in standards occupy the following racial distribution.

Chart depicting the racial distribution of individual women named in state social studies standards.

Thedistribution of women by racial category reflects the emphasis on standards on protest movements. The first women's rights movement in the nineteenth century arose as elite, white women challenged social, economic, political, and cultural definitions of women's roles. Many of these women rose to national prominence by effective use of the media. Elite, white women who had the most access to resources to advance their causes are over represented in the standards.African American women are most often connected to the Abolitionist and modern Civil Rights movements, which are widely included in standards. Other rights movements like disability rights, Native American rights, LGBTQ, or migrant labor movements are less frequently included in standards and, when they are, in less detail. Therefore, they have fewer corresponding biographical entries.

Topics About Women

State standards divide social studies into topic areas. While women occasionally appear by name under topics, more often women are listed as a group. In some cases, topics are understood to be about women or inclusive of women-i.e. Seneca Falls Convention, family, or the home front. With the guidance of the Museum's Advisory Council, NWHM scholars culled a list of terms from the data that assumes standards writers intended the standards to be inclusive of women's roles and activities. NWHM scholars found 1,975 mentions of women, women's history, and women's roles within all state standards.

The standards overwhelmingly emphasize women in their domestic roles.

Chart showing the groupings of standards for various women's social studies topics.

NWHM scholars did not count the total number of standards, men by name, or the number of topics about men. Therefore, the project cannot determine the percentage of women's topics relative to all topics within all state standards.

What We Learned

Standards prioritize listing women of accomplishment, which reflects the standards' overall tendency to celebrate individual leadership and achievement.

State standards do not collectively address the breadth and depth of women's history. Rather, standards address a minority of topics and groups.

Standards over emphasize women in their domestic roles without placing women's activities in broader economic, cultural, or political contexts.

A small number of topics or eras that are commonly associated with being women-centric are emphasized, such as the Progressive Era and Woman Suffrage/Voting Rights.

The presentation of women within standards does not reflect current scholarship.

Standards do not reflect current trends or ideals in girls' education. While there is an increasing public interest in motivating girls to embrace science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, social studies standards provide few historic examples of women or their achievements in these fields.

The Takeaway

This result of this project is a data set of women and topics within US history standards. The state standards are not women's history as understood by academic historians. Women's history studies historical events, topics, people, and subjects from a woman's perspective. It understands that culture affects experience and that women's historical experiences differed from men's. Women's history contextualizes women within the social, political, legal, and cultural systems of their times. History that does not acknowledge women's situations as well as their activities and accomplishments is, by definition, not a full history. We found that women's topics are often an addendum to the main storyline. Women are frequently included in lists of marginalized groups as a reminder to teachers that when covering a broad topic, they should also include the experiences of women among others.

Now that NWHM scholars have identified the common women's topics in history standards, the National Women's History Museum will embark on the next phase of our curriculum project. Throughout the next year, NWHM scholars and staff will work with master educators, scholars, and public history experts to create a wealth of materials to support teachers and students. Our emphasis will be on the topics in national standards to ensure that teachers have high quality materials in specified topic areas. And NWHM scholars will further create materials that integrate women's historical experiences across the curriculum. Educators and parents will be able to examine any historical topic from a woman's perspective while meeting standards' learning objectives.

Call to Action

The current standards represent an opportunity for thoughtful dialog around women's history in K-12 public education. An opportunity exists for researchers to make more in-depth explorations of how women's history is presented in the US state standards. NWHM scholars hope that this report will inspire teachers, scholars, students, and parents to examine the ways in which women's historical experiences are presented in classrooms. We encourage all our stakeholders to advocate for the inclusion of women's history in standards, and therefore curriculum, now and into the future.
Click the link below to download the Full Report and Data Set, including a listing of each state's learning standards related to women below.
Unladylike2020 Where Are the Women? Virtual Education Summit

To address why women are vastly underrepresented in U.S. history and social studies classrooms, and provide teachers and parents access to the educational support they need to reverse this trend, UNLADYLIKE2020 convened the 2-hour Where Are the Women? Summit on Saturday February 13, 2021, streaming live on the American Masters YouTube channel.

The Where Are the Women? Summit was presented by Unladylike2020 in partnership with PBS's flagship biography series American Masters, WNET, National Women's History Museum, National Council for the Social Studies, National Council for History Education, National Women's Hall of Fame, and National Women's History Alliance, with educational content provided by PBS LearningMedia and funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Watch the Summit here:

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A preliminary version of A Report on the Status of Women in the United States Social Studies Standards, published January 9, 2018, examines the status of women's history in social studies standards for each state. NWHM scholars read each set of state social studies standards, isolated standards related to women's stories and experiences, and analyzed the collected material.

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Click! In the 1970s that word signaled the moment when a woman awakened to the powerful ideas of contemporary feminism. Today "click" usually refers to a computer keystroke that connects women (and men) to powerful ideas on the Internet.

We aim to bridge the gap between those two clicks by offering an exhibit that highlights the achievements of women from the 1940s to the present. This exhibit explores the power and complexity of gender consciousness in modern American life.

Think of this as a conversation between generations, between men and women, between historians and the public. While the focus is clearly historical, we are not focused exclusively on the past. We believe that the enormous changes in women's lives need to be better known, both for what was accomplished and for what remains to be done. That is what we mean by "the ongoing feminist revolution."

Periods of heightened mobilization like the 1960s and 1970s are significant and eye-catching, but social movements don't start from scratch. Understanding the backstory is just as important as documenting the dramatic moments that caught the media's attention. Nor do we stop the story in 1975 or 1980 when the media began to lose interest, precisely because women's issues and women's lives continued to evolve. Instead, we explain and explore the long history of women's activism over time. And yet we realize that these changes remain controversial and contested, so we always aim to tell the story from multiple perspectives.

We examine the big national projects and leaders, and we also look closely at the grassroots. We are equally concerned with social change on an individual, personal level and in society at large. We document these ongoing struggles for gender equality in three major areas - the workplace and family; politics and social movements; and the body and health - and, because we are historians, we offer a full library of resources for those who want to learn more. So, get ready to start clicking - in both senses of the word - and prepare to have your historical consciousness raised. First, however, let's talk about definitions, perceptions and a short history of feminism.

What did Jennifer Lee discover when making a film about feminism?

Excerpt from "Feminist: Stories from Women's Liberation," a film by Jennifer Lee. (Running time 3:18) Used with permission. The complete film is available from Women Make Movies.

Feminism: 1. Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. 2. The movement organized around this belief. (American Heritage Dictionary)

What? Nothing about man-haters? Bra-burners? Ugly old crones with no sense of humor? The list of stereotypes (almost always negative) associated with modern feminism could go on and on. But maybe it is worth pausing to ask: Why has such a seemingly simple and straightforward notion about the equality of the sexes been demonized to such an extent that many Americans shy away from it, even when they admit that they are in agreement with many of its basic goals?

There is no simple answer to that question, although negative portrayals in the media certainly play a huge role; feminists have been characterized as opposing motherhood and families when in fact they do not. But as a result, feminism - the other so-called "f-word"- is not a rallying point or label that speaks to large segments of the population, even to many of the younger women who have come of age in a world reshaped by this far-reaching social movement.

What is the best way to deal with this misperception? Should we abandon the word and try to come up with a gender-neutral term that brings more women and men into the fold? Or should we insist, loudly and boldly, that the word feminism is important and should not be abandoned or scorned? We choose the second option. Indeed, the whole idea behind this project is to showcase the powerful ideas of modern feminism for old and new audiences and to show why feminism mattered in the past and why it is still relevant and necessary today.

As we work to reclaim feminism from the negative stereotypes that have made too many people unwilling to embrace the term, we consciously double our pool of recruits by asserting that feminism is as relevant and potentially life-changing for men as it is for women. Men are essential allies in the feminist struggle and have much to gain when they too move beyond stereotyped gender roles; women cannot and should not do it alone. Feminism supplies a clear road map to a more egalitarian world.

So let's go back to definitions, realizing that a concept as broad-ranging and capacious as feminism will be hard to reduce to a few key concepts. Instead of focusing simply on the notion of equality between the sexes, let's go a little deeper, and adopt a definition formulated by Estelle Freedman in her masterful No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (2002):

Feminism is a belief that women and men are inherently of equal worth. Because most societies privilege men as a group, social movements are necessary to achieve equality between women and men, with the understanding that gender always intersects with other social hierarchies.

The idea of equal worth offers a way to value traditional female priorities like caregiving alongside the work historically associated with men, thus avoiding the trap of assuming that men's lives are the primary ones women should aspire to in the name of equality. This approach defines feminism not just as an ideology but also as a social justice movement, broadly conceived to include mass action as well as individual participation and thus encompassing a wide range of behavior and beliefs and capable of being equally embraced by women and men. Finally, this complex and nuanced definition recognizes that other factors, especially race, class, and sexuality (i.e., other social hierarchies), intersect with gender to shape women's lives.

The definition is also broad enough to cover historical changes in the meaning of feminism and feminist movements. Like everything else, feminism has a history. Although women have always been active (if undervalued) participants in history, the specific outlines of feminism began to appear only in the late eighteenth century as part of two broader historical shifts: the rise of capitalism and the spread of Enlightenment ideas about individual rights and the consent of the governed. Those powerful paradigm shifts provided the opening for a tiny but growing number of writers and thinkers, starting with Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), to ask: What about women? Don't they have rights and responsibilities too, both as citizens and as participants in a market economy? That is the seed of modern feminism.

Because feminism has such a long history, historians of the United States sometimes resort to a shorthand description that focuses on successive waves of feminist activism. In this model the first wave was the suffrage movement, starting at Seneca Falls in 1848 and culminating in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The second wave was the revival of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, when questions of gender equality pushed their way onto the national agenda. In the 1990s, younger feminists began to call themselves the third wave to differentiate themselves from their feminist foremothers. Moving beyond the perceived white, middle-class bias of earlier movements, third-wave feminists embraced a far more racially and sexually inclusive vision; popular culture, more than politics or the workplace, was the focus of their energy, and they defined feminism for themselves rather than through participating in a mass movement. In the twenty-first century, the social-media-savvy generation - for which feminism is never more than a click away on the Internet - uses the blogosphere to generate grassroots social change efforts that are informed by global partners and a broad human rights framework. Young feminists are injecting their voices into popular culture, participating in collective actions and targeting all forms of injustice, such as promoting workers' rights and opposing sexual violence. Only time will tell if the broad visions of early twenty-first-century feminists can be neatly tucked into something called a fourth wave.

Waves are a useful tool for understanding the history of American feminism, but they also have real limits. Focusing on waves tends to downplay any action or organizing that happens between the periods when feminism is publicly prominent. In addition, the waves perspective makes each manifestation seem to spring from nowhere, rather than locating feminist activism on a broad historical continuum. It also tends to flatten out the story to the most recognizable, public faces of feminism, generally white and middle-class, rather than what historian Nancy Hewitt calls "the messy multiplicity of feminist activism across U.S. history and beyond its borders." But it is precisely this "messy multiplicity" that necessitates an open-ended, inclusive, and ever-changing understanding of feminism as an ideology and a social movement.

While we embrace this word for its history, we also do so because we believe that looking at the world with a feminist perspective is just as rich and fruitful an approach in the twenty-first century as it was earlier. Any problem or question can be made more complex and challenging by asking: What about women? But as we think about feminism and women's lives, we always have to be mindful of the difficulties of generalizing about women as a group, given that they are divided by and affected by race, class, sexuality and generations, among other factors. Feminists today embody a range of priorities, diverse programs and multiple perspectives. So when we say women, we should always ask: Which women? Finally, we should all remember that words and labels mean different things to different generations, and embrace those diverse points of view as one of the forces that keep feminism alive and vibrant.

So when someone makes a disparaging remark about feminism, or claims that it has no relevance to her or his life, or that the battles are already over and it's time to move forward, ask that person: Are you sure you know what feminism really is? Through conversations that cross generations, race, class, and sexual orientation, we can rediscover the true meaning of feminism and explain why it matters, both historically and for the future of women and men, lending the term new significance and reclaiming its proud heritage.

Each section of this exhibit features a timeline with unique content. The timeline materials on this page are relevant to all of the topics in the exhibit and are present in each.

How to Navigate our Interactive Timeline

You will find unique content in each chapter's timeline.

Place the cursor over the timeline to scroll up and down within the timeline itself. If you place the cursor anywhere else on the page, you can scroll up and down in the whole page - but the timeline won't scroll.

To see what's in the timeline beyond the top or bottom of the window, use the white "dragger" located on the right edge of the timeline. (It looks like a small white disk with an up-arrow and a down-arrow attached to it.) If you click on the dragger, you can move the whole timeline up or down, so you can see more of it. If the dragger won't move any further, then you've reached one end of the timeline.

Click on one of the timeline entries and it will display a short description of the subject. It may also include an image, a video, or a link to more information within our website or on another website.

Our timelines are also available in our Resource Library in non-interactive format.
Timeline Legend

1. Yellow bars mark entries that appear in every chapter

2. This icon indicates a book

3. This icon indicates a film

The idea of the "Click! moment" was coined by Jane O'Reilly. "The women in the group looked at her, looked at each other, and ... click! A moment of truth. The shock of recognition. Instant sisterhood... Those clicks are coming faster and faster. They were nearly audible last summer, which was a very angry summer for American women. Not redneck-angry from screaming because we are so frustrated and unfulfilled-angry, but clicking-things-into-place-angry, because we have suddenly and shockingly perceived the basic disorder in what has been believed to be the natural order of things." Article, "The Housewife's Moment of Truth," published in the first issue of Ms. Magazine and in New York Magazine. Republished in The Girl I Left Behind, by Jane O'Reilly (Macmillan, 1980). Jane O'Reilly papers, Schlesinger Library.

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Click - The Ongoing Feminist Revolution - Feminist History, History of Feminism, Women's Rights Movement, History of Women's Rights, Feminist Movement

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An online exhibit about the history of feminism, Click! covers feminist history and the feminist movement, the women's rights movement and history of women's rights.