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Margaret Sanger, a prominent feminist of the time fights a case in New York, winning the rights to allow doctors to inform patients, even if they are married, about birth control for medical safety purposes. This groundwork eventually gives rise to planned parenthood.

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Abigail Adams writes a letter in March to her husband, John Quincy Adams, urging him to not forget the women in the fight for national independence. #rememberthewomen

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In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John Adams, urging him and the other members of the Continental Congress not to forget about the nation's women when fighting for America's independence from Great Britain.

The future First Lady wrote in part, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

Nearly 150 years before the House of Representatives voted to pass the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, Adams letter was a private first step in the fight for equal rights for women. Recognized and admired as a formidable woman in her own right, the union of Abigail and John Adams persists as a model of mutual respect and affection; they have since been referred to as "America's first power couple." Their correspondence of over 1,000 letters written between 1762 and 1801 remains in the Massachusetts Historical Society and continues to give historians a unique perspective on domestic and political life during the revolutionary era.

Abigail bore six children, of whom five survived. Abigail and John's eldest son, John Quincy Adams, served as the sixth president of the United States. Only two women, Abigail Adams and Barbara Bush, have been both wives and mothers of American presidents.
READ MORE: Women's History Milestones: A Timeline

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Abigail Adams urges husband to "remember the ladies"

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In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams writes to her husband, John Adams, urging him and the other members of the Continental Congress not to forget about the nation's women when fighting for America's independence from Great Britain. The future First Lady wrote in part, "I long to hear that you have declared an independency.

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All 13 of the original states pass a law that removes the voting privilege from women - this primary kickstarts the feminist movement.
#suffraGETthevote

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This year marks the centennial of congressional approval of the U.S. constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. After Congress passed the amendment in June 1919, Wisconsin was the first state to ratify it a week later. (Tennessee was the final of the required 36 states to ratify, on Aug. 18, 1920.)

Carolyn Eichner, associate professor of history and women's and gender studies at UWM, talks about the struggle that led to the 19 th Amendment and its legacy.
What were the reasons some opposed the amendment?
Some people believed men belonged in the public, political sphere and women in the private sphere. But, in reality, working-class women worked both inside and outside of the home, and many elite women became reformers, campaigning for abolition, temperance and child labor laws. Anti-suffragists feared what women would do with the vote, like support Prohibition. Some men did not want to share power; they rejected the democratic ideal of equal citizenship regardless of gender.
What are some key moments in the struggle for voting rights?
It took 72 years after the first women's rights convention, the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, for women to win full citizenship. They finally succeeded after World War I, at least in part in recognition of women's participation on the home front. A number of states had already granted women's suffrage on the state level.

The abolition and suffrage movements overlapped significantly. In 1840 the abolitionist Lucretia Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London with her husband, but she, along with all of the other women, had to sit behind a curtain. She recognized that women needed emancipation too.

With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott organized the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to address women's status. Because women's suffrage seemed like such a radical concept, they only included it in the convention's Declaration of Sentiments after much heated debate. The abolitionist - and former slave - Frederick Douglass played a prominent role at Seneca Falls, supporting the inclusion of the vote in the convention's declaration.

Following the Civil War, many Americans thought women should support voting rights for black men first. Stanton and Anthony refused, splitting the suffrage movement for over 20 years.

By the turn of the 20 th century, the movement had divided again, this time based on politics and tactics. Carrie Chapman Catt led the more conservative side. Alice Paul, influenced by militant British suffragettes while studying in England, led the more radical side.

Suffragists marched in Washington D.C. and protested outside the White House. They faced violent opposition and arrest. Many went on hunger strikes in prison and suffered violent force-feeding. It was the brutal treatment of women of privilege that helped shift public opinion. The D.C. marches drew visibility, leading more women and men to support female suffrage.

Working-class women had always worked, but during World War I, they took over jobs long considered male-only. Women delivered mail, drove streetcars and worked in manufacturing. Afterward they were fired to make way for the returning men. But their patriotic contribution was recognized to the extent that it increased support for women's enfranchisement.
How did the American push for suffrage compare with what was happening in other countries?
England, France and the U.S. claimed universal suffrage - but they did not count women.

The English suffrage struggle began after 1830s laws banned women from voting. It became a huge, multifaceted movement, radicalizing in 1905. Property-owning women over 30 got the vote in 1918. But it wasn't until 1928 that all women gained the vote.

In France, the movement was small and developed later. Women did not attain suffrage until 1944. There were many feminists, but few suffragists, because the majority of French feminists - including Socialist feminists - focused, instead, on more concrete economic and social issues.

In 1893, New Zealand, became the first country with women's suffrage. Finland was the first European nation in 1906, followed by Denmark, Norway, Russia and Germany. Women in Afghanistan got the right to vote before U.S. women did.

It is vital to understand the global suffrage picture. Some U.S. states were early ( Wyoming was the first, in 1869), but as a nation, we were not.
Did the amendment accomplish what was expected?
Opponents feared women would vote as a bloc. But most women of voting age didn't vote. Younger women did vote as soon as they could. American-born white women slowly began voting, but black and immigrant women remained disenfranchised by racist practices including illegal poll taxes and other measures.

Most U.S. suffragists were white and middle class. Other feminists had more tangible goals than voting, including women's wages and labor conditions.

The gender gap as we know it - women voting in higher percentages than men - did not appear until 1980, although starting in the 1960s, more women than men voted.
What are the legacies of the 19th Amendment?
While the amendment made women full citizens for the first time, in reality many women remained excluded by racial barriers.

The Equal Rights Amendment - guaranteeing equal legal rights regardless of sex - was introduced in 1921, and reintroduced in the 1970s, but failed. Today no constitutional protection exists against sex-based discrimination.

The centennial is important to raise awareness of the length and difficulty of the suffrage movement, of who was included, and who was excluded. Women were not "given the vote," rather they worked and fought for it for three-quarters of a century. Feminists have undoubtedly made notable progress, but in terms of wages, political representation, social status, and rights over our bodies - among other concerns - there still is far to go.

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Path to women's suffrage was long, winding and hard-fought

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This year marks the centennial of congressional approval of the U.S. constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. After Congress passed the amendment in June 1919, Wisconsin was the first state to ratify it a week later. (Tennessee was the final of the required 36 states to ratify, on Aug.

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The US Constitution is formed and ratified, and uses the words person and people, which are gender neutral, allowing the interpretation of all laws applying to both men and women.

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1848 - First National Women's Rights Convention

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1848 - First National Women's Rights Convention

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The first women rights convention took place in Seneca Falls, NY, due to the anger of women being banned from protesting at an antislavery convention. Important figures including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott led this. 300 people at this convention sign the Declaration of Sentiments, which asks for the removal of sex based discrimination in all spheres of life.

#declarationofsentiments #senecafalls

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During the period of the 1960's and 70's, the peaceful suburban life in America came to a halt. The Women's Rights Movement picked up as talks of equality and justice for all erupted during the Civil Rights Movement. Discussion over unequal pay, legal inequality, and lack of supportive services for women began to plague legislation.

#feminism

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The women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, the so-called "second wave" of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban life pictured in American popular culture. Yet the roots of the new rebellion were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent impelled their daughters in a new direction. If first-wave feminists were inspired by the abolition movement, their great-granddaughters were swept into feminism by the civil rights movement, the attendant discussion of principles such as equality and justice, and the revolutionary ferment caused by protests against the Vietnam War.

Women's concerns were on Pres. John F. Kennedy's agenda even before this public discussion began. In 1961 he created the President's Commission on the Status of Women and appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to lead it. Its report, issued in 1963, firmly supported the nuclear family and preparing women for motherhood. But it also documented a national pattern of employment discrimination, unequal pay, legal inequality, and meagre support services for working women that needed to be corrected through legislative guarantees of equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and expanded child-care services. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 offered the first guarantee, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was amended to bar employers from discriminating on the basis of sex.

Some deemed these measures insufficient in a country where classified advertisements still segregated job openings by sex, where state laws restricted women's access to contraception, and where incidences of rape and domestic violence remained undisclosed. In the late 1960s, then, the notion of a women's rights movement took root at the same time as the civil rights movement, and women of all ages and circumstances were swept up in debates about gender, discrimination, and the nature of equality.

Dissension and debate

Mainstream groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) launched a campaign for legal equity, while ad hoc groups staged sit-ins and marches for any number of reasons-from assailing college curricula that lacked female authors to promoting the use of the word Ms. as a neutral form of address-that is, one that did not refer to marital status. Health collectives and rape crisis centres were established. Children's books were rewritten to obviate sexual stereotypes. Women's studies departments were founded at colleges and universities. Protective labour laws were overturned. Employers found to have discriminated against female workers were required to compensate with back pay. Excluded from male-dominated occupations for decades, women began finding jobs as pilots, construction workers, soldiers, bankers, and bus drivers.

Unlike the first wave, second-wave feminism provoked extensive theoretical discussion about the origins of women's oppression, the nature of gender, and the role of the family. Kate Millett's Sexual Politics made the best-seller list in 1970, and in it she broadened the term politics to include all "power-structured relationships" and posited that the personal was actually political. Shulamith Firestone, a founder of the New York Radical Feminists, published The Dialectic of Sex in the same year, insisting that love disadvantaged women by creating intimate shackles between them and the men they loved-men who were also their oppressors. One year later, Germaine Greer, an Australian living in London, published The Female Eunuch, in which she argued that the sexual repression of women cuts them off from the creative energy they need to be independent and self-fulfilled.

Any attempt to create a coherent, all-encompassing feminist ideology was doomed. While most could agree on the questions that needed to be asked about the origins of gender distinctions, the nature of power, or the roots of sexual violence, the answers to those questions were bogged down by ideological hairsplitting, name-calling, and mutual recrimination. Even the term liberation could mean different things to different people.

Feminism became a river of competing eddies and currents. "Anarcho-feminists," who found a larger audience in Europe than in the United States, resurrected Emma Goldman and said that women could not be liberated without dismantling such institutions as the family, private property, and state power. Individualist feminists, calling on libertarian principles of minimal government, broke with most other feminists over the issue of turning to government for solutions to women's problems. "Amazon feminists" celebrated the mythical female heroine and advocated liberation through physical strength. And separatist feminists, including many lesbian feminists, preached that women could not possibly liberate themselves without at least a period of separation from men.

Ultimately, three major streams of thought surfaced. The first was liberal, or mainstream, feminism, which focused its energy on concrete and pragmatic change at an institutional and governmental level. Its goal was to integrate women more thoroughly into the power structure and to give women equal access to positions men had traditionally dominated. While aiming for strict equality (to be evidenced by such measures as an equal number of women and men in positions of power, or an equal amount of money spent on male and female student athletes), these liberal feminist groups nonetheless supported the modern equivalent of protective legislation such as special workplace benefits for mothers.

In contrast to the pragmatic approach taken by liberal feminism, radical feminism aimed to reshape society and restructure its institutions, which they saw as inherently patriarchal. Providing the core theory for modern feminism, radicals argued that women's subservient role in society was too closely woven into the social fabric to be unraveled without a revolutionary revamping of society itself. They strove to supplant hierarchical and traditional power relationships they saw as reflecting a male bias, and they sought to develop nonhierarchical and antiauthoritarian approaches to politics and organization.

Finally, cultural or "difference" feminism, the last of the three currents, rejected the notion that men and women are intrinsically the same and advocated celebrating the qualities they associated with women, such as their greater concern for affective relationships and their nurturing preoccupation with others. Inherent in its message was a critique of mainstream feminism's attempt to enter traditionally male spheres. This was seen as denigrating women's natural inclinations by attempting to make women more like men.

The race factor

Like first-wave feminism, the second wave was largely defined and led by educated middle-class white women who built the movement primarily around their own concerns. This created an ambivalent, if not contentious, relationship with women of other classes and races. The campaign against employment and wage discrimination helped bridge the gap between the movement and white labour union women. But the relationship of feminism to African American women always posed greater challenges. White feminists defined gender as the principal source of their exclusion from full participation in American life; Black women were forced to confront the interplay between racism and sexism and to figure out how to make Black men think about gender issues while making white women think about racial issues. Such issues were addressed by Black feminists including Michele Wallace, Mary Ann Weathers, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Bettina Aptheker.

The call by white feminists for unity and solidarity was based on their assumption that women constituted a gender-based class or caste that was unified by common oppression. Many Black women had difficulty seeing white women as their feminist sisters; in the eyes of many African Americans, after all, white women were as much the oppressor as white men. "How relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of White women to Black women?" asked Toni Cade Bambara in The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970). "I don't know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same." As far back as Sojourner Truth, Black feminists had seen white feminists as incapable of understanding their concerns.

Yet some Black women, especially middle-class Black women, also insisted that it was fundamentally different to be Black and female than to be Black and male. During the first conference of the National Black Feminist Organization, held in New York City in 1973, Black women activists acknowledged that many of the goals central to the mainstream feminist movement-day care, abortion, maternity leave, violence-were critical to African American women as well. On specific issues, then, African American feminists and white feminists built an effective working relationship.

The globalization of feminism

By the end of the 20th century, European and American feminists had begun to interact with the nascent feminist movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As this happened, women in developed countries, especially intellectuals, were horrified to discover that women in some countries were required to wear veils in public or to endure forced marriage, female infanticide, widow burning, or female genital cutting (FGC). Many Western feminists soon perceived themselves as saviours of Third World women, little realizing that their perceptions of and solutions to social problems were often at odds with the real lives and concerns of women in these regions. In many parts of Africa, for example, the status of women had begun to erode significantly only with the arrival of European colonialism. In those regions, then, the notion that patriarchy was the chief problem-rather than European imperialism-seemed absurd.

The conflicts between women in developed and developing nations played out most vividly at international conferences. After the 1980 World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace, in Copenhagen, women from less-developed nations complained that the veil and FGC had been chosen as conference priorities without consulting the women most concerned. It seemed that their counterparts in the West were not listening to them. During the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, in Cairo, women from the Third World protested outside because they believed the agenda had been hijacked by Europeans and Americans. The protesters had expected to talk about ways that underdevelopment was holding women back. Instead, conference organizers chose to focus on contraception and abortion. "[Third World women] noted that they could not very well worry about other matters when their children were dying from thirst, hunger or war," wrote Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor and scholar of Muslim women's rights. "The conference instead centred around reducing the number of Third World babies in order to preserve the earth's resources, despite (or is it 'because of') the fact that the First World consumes much of these resources." In Beijing, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, Third World women again criticized the priority American and European women put on reproductive rights language and issues of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and their disinterest in the platform proposal that was most important to less-developed nations-that of restructuring international debt.

Still, the close of the 20th century saw women around the world advancing their interests, although often in fits and starts. Feminism was derailed in countries such as Afghanistan, where the staunchly reactionary and antifeminist Taliban banned even the education of girls. Elsewhere, however, feminism achieved significant gains for women, as seen in the eradication of FGC in many African countries or government efforts to end widow burning in India. More generally, and especially in the West, feminism had influenced every aspect of contemporary life, communication, and debate, from the heightened concern over sexist language to the rise of academic fields such as women's studies and ecofeminism. Sports, divorce laws, sexual mores, organized religion-all had been affected, in many parts of the world, by feminism.

Yet questions remained: How would Western feminism deal with the dissension of women who believed the movement had gone too far and grown too radical? How uniform and successful could feminism be at the global level? Could the problems confronting women in the mountains of Pakistan or the deserts of the Middle East be addressed in isolation, or must such issues be pursued through international forums? Given the unique economic, political, and cultural situations that obtained across the globe, the answers to these questions looked quite different in Nairobi than in New York.
Elinor Burkett

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Feminism - Equality, Women's Rights, Activism

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Feminism - Equality, Women's Rights, Activism: The women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, the so-called "second wave" of feminism, represented a seemingly abrupt break with the tranquil suburban life pictured in American popular culture. Yet the roots of the new rebellion were buried in the frustrations of college-educated mothers whose discontent impelled their daughters in a new direction.

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1960 - Food and Drug Administration Approve Birth Control Pill

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1960 - Food and Drug Administration Approve Birth Control Pill

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Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of "the pill", encouraged the development and use of a more effective and applicable contraceptive. Following roughly 4 years, the FDA finally approved the pill. Thus, granting women a greater sense of freedom in regards to their sexual lifestyles.

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On May 9, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the world's first commercially produced birth-control pill-Enovid-10, made by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois.

Development of "the pill," as it became popularly known, was initially commissioned by birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick. Sanger, who opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States in 1916, hoped to encourage the development of a more practical and effective alternative to contraceptives that were in use at the time.

In the early 1950s, Gregory Pincus, a biochemist at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and John Rock, a gynecologist at Harvard Medical School, began work on a birth-control pill. Clinical tests of the pill, which used synthetic progesterone and estrogen to repress ovulation in women, were initiated in 1954. On May 9, 1960, the FDA approved the pill, granting greater reproductive freedom to American women.

Fact Check

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On May 9, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the world's first commercially produced birth-control pill-Enovid-10, made by the G.D. Searle Company of Chicago, Illinois. Development of "the pill," as it became popularly known, was initially commissioned by birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and funded by heiress Katherine McCormick.

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Written by Betty Friedan, "The Feminine Mystique" took the US by storm. The book interviewed average, middle-class housewives, which found many to be dissatisfied. Leading to the undermining of the classical American belief that women found satisfaction from solely being a mother.

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Passed by Congress in 1963, the disparity between the pay of men and women performing the same job was outlawed. In doing so, women gained a monumental step in the direction of equality. #equality

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Though seen primarily as an historical event for the Civil Rights Movement, the addition of Title VII benefited the Women Right's Movement. No longer could society discriminate on the basis of sex. #onthebasisofsex #ruthbaderginsburg

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1969 - Shirley Chisholm elected to Congress

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1969 - Shirley Chisholm elected to Congress

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Shirley Chisholm had been the first black woman elected to Congress. Such an event proved to be beneficial for all women, both colored and non-colored.

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Passed by Congress in 1972, the Higher Education Act contains Title IX. With this law, discrimination in education based on gender would become prohibited. Once again, providing women with many more opportunities.
#bigbrainedgals

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Landmark court decision in which abortion was legalized. Prior to Roe v. Wade, abortion had been deemed illegal across much of the country.
#prochoice

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Roe vs. Wade | Season 1 | Makers: Women Who Make America

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MAKERS: Women Who Make America airs February 26 at 8pm ET.

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1981 - Sandra Day O'Connor sworn into Supreme Court

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1981 - Sandra Day O'Connor sworn into Supreme Court

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O'Connor made history as she became the first woman sworn into the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan.

#womenareSUPREME

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A Missouri court case rules that Celia, a black female slave, is not a person and rather is property, in a dispute over her killing her master in response to him raping her. Missouri's law writes this as a woman's show of self defense, but simultaneously rules that Celia is not a woman. This was a clear showing of the treatment of both women and African Americans in the USA.
#iguesswomenaren'tpeople

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Celia was facing the gallows when she went on trial in 1855 for the murder of the white slave owner who had been raping her. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

She warned the white slave owner that the rapes had to stop. Celia, 19, had endured five years of assaults by Robert Newsom, the Missouri widower in his 70s who'd purchased her when she was 14. She'd borne two of her predator's children.

Now she was being courted by an enslaved black man named George. When she became pregnant a third time, George told her the farmer's abuse could not continue.

Celia warned Newsom that she would hurt him if he came to her cabin again. She also asked his two adult daughters for help keeping their father away.

But on the night of June 23, 1855, Newsom crept into her cabin and tried to force her to have sex with him. Celia took a stick and bashed his head with it, killing him, according to court documents. Then she pushed his body into a roaring fire in her cabin's fireplace. The next day, his bones were carried out in the embers.

What followed was her arrest and a groundbreaking legal case known as the State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave - a dispute that played out long before #MeToo hashtags on Twitter and the explosive sexual assault and harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Cosby and other powerful men.

She said her boss raped her in a bank vault. Her sexual harassment case would make legal history.

In Missouri in 1855, it was a crime "to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to be defiled," allowing women to argue self-defense in resisting such assaults. Did that law apply to enslaved women?

Celia's court-appointed defense lawyer argued that it did. He asked Circuit Court Judge William Hall to instruct the jury that a slave master had no right to rape a slave and that the slaying could be considered justifiable.

But the judge refused to give the jury those instructions. Instead, Hall told the 12 white men weighing the evidence: "If Newsom was in the habit of having intercourse with the defendant who was his slave and went to her cabin on the night he was killed to have intercourse with her or for any other purpose and while he was standing in the floor talking to her she struck him with a stick which was a dangerous weapon and knocked him down, and struck him again after he fell, and killed him by either blow, it is murder in the first degree."

Though Celia had pleaded not guilty, she'd confessed to the crime, according to Jefferson Jones, who investigated the killing. Jones had interrogated Celia in jail about a week after she was arrested to learn if there were any accomplices in Newsom's slaying.

"I asked her whether she thought she would hang for what she had done," Jones testified, according to court documents. "She said she thought she would hang. I then told her to tell the whole truth."

Celia told Jones the farmer had been abusing her for years and "he had told her he was coming down to her cabin that night. She told him not to come, that if he came she would hurt him."

"I asked her if George had asked her to kill the old man; said he never had. Said that George had told her that he would have nothing to do with her if she did not quit the old man."

She told Jones that after she killed Newsom, his body lay about an hour on the floor, before she decided to burn it, he testified.

Christopher Gordon, director of library and collections at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, called the trial "a sham. Most everyone on the jury was either pro-slavery or they owned slaves themselves. The thought of a slave - and let alone a female slave - getting away with something like this was not anything they would permit. The defense tried very hard to play on sympathy and cast Robert Newsom as a predator. ... But the racial politics of the day won out."

Hunting down runaway slaves: The cruel ads of Andrew Jackson and 'the master class'

At the time, the country was edging toward civil war over slavery, and Missouri was a microcosm of those tensions. White people who supported slavery wanted Celia executed for the murder of her master. But others expressed sympathy for her, wrote Melton A. McLaurin, author of the book, "Celia: A Slave."

"Although slave law had come in the course of the 19th century to recognize a slave's right to use force to protect her life, it had not extended this right to include protection against sexual assault," McLaurin wrote.

On Nov. 1, 1855, the Glasgow Weekly Times reported that Celia had been found guilty in Callaway County Circuit Court "of murder in the first degree ... for the murder of her master."

The jury sentenced her to death, though her case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court.

While awaiting her execution, Celia escaped. "The negro woman 'Celia' confined in the Calloway jail, and under sentence of death, made her escape a few days before she was to have been executed, and was at large last accounts," the Glasgow, Mo., newspaper reported on Nov. 22, 1855. "She was to have been hung last Friday."

Celia was captured a few days later.

The state Supreme Court refused to overturn Celia's conviction. But her execution was delayed long enough to allow her to give birth to her third child. The baby was stillborn.

On Dec. 21, 1855, Celia was taken to the Calloway Courthouse in Fulton, Mo., and "hanged until she died."

A surgeon experimented on slave women without anesthesia. Now his statues are under attack.

'My mother was sold from me': After slavery, the desperate search for loved ones in 'last seen ads'

Who killed Alberta Jones, Louisville's first black female prosecutor?

Whether she's on the $20 bill or not, Harriet Tubman made men pay for underestimating her

Civil rights crusader Fannie Lou Hamer defied men - and presidents - who tried to silence her

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Missouri v. Celia, a Slave: She killed the white master raping her, then claimed self-defense

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She warned the white slave owner that the rapes had to stop. Celia, 19, had endured five years of assaults by Robert Newsom, the Missouri widower in his 70s who'd purchased her when she was 14. She'd borne two of her predator's children. Now she was being courted by an enslaved black man named George.

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The 14th amendment, which states that naturalized people are citizens of the United States, but also uses the words male to describe those with the power to vote, purposefully excluding women.

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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump says he wants to order the end of the constitutional right to citizenship for babies of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants born in the United States.

Section 1, which contains the Citizenship Clause, of the 14th Amendment guarantees that right for all children born in the U.S. Here's a look at the 14th Amendment.

What the Citizenship Clause says

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

The amendment nullified a Supreme Court decision that held that those descended from slaves could not be citizens.

The second sentence contains two of the most important clause in the Constitution, the due process and equal protection clauses. They apply to everyone in the U.S., not just citizens:

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The history of the 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment was passed by Congress in 1866 after the Civil War and during the period of Reconstruction. The amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868 by three-fourths of the states. By extending citizenship to those born in the U.S., the amendment nullified an 1857 Supreme Court decision (Dred Scott v. Sandford), which had held that those descended from slaves could not be citizens.

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What is the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause?

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"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

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Wyoming becomes the first state to grant suffrage to women in all elections, after previously being the first state to allow general suffrage to women in 1869.

#wyomingsuffrage

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The Secret Life of Bees novel is centered around Lily, the main character, along with four secondary characters, all of which are female, black, and break boundaries. As opposed to the role conformed to by many women of being subservient, superficial, and weak, Sue Monk Kidd writes all of her female characters as stubborn and stereotype defying. This can be seen on page 32 in chapter one. In this passage, Lily's nanny and housekeeper, a black woman named Rosaleen, faces crude racism from white men in town, and her response, rather than taking their treatment, is strong and defiant.

He looked up and saw us,                  Rosaleen fanning and                        shuffling, swaying side
to side. "Well, look what we
got coming here," he
called out. "Where're you
going, n*****?" .... Rosaleen
lifted her snuff jug, which was
filled with black spit, and
calmly poured it across the
tops of the men's shoes.

This passage is one of the numerous times Sue Monk Kidd writes her characters reactions to certain experiences in a strong and honestly inspiring way, rather than letting down the readers with acts of weakness.

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While many families and ancient ideas revolve around the idea that the father or patriarchy is the center of the family and any group, the novel emphasizes the importance of the mother in the development of anyone, shown by Lily's continuous thoughts about the loss of her mother at a young age. She spends many times in the novel thinking about how she misses her mother, wishes her mother was with her, and eventually begins to identify other motherly figures in her life. One of Lily's retrospective discussions is seen on page 5, in chapter one.

My first and only memory of              my mother was the day she
died. I tried for a long time to            conjure up an image of her
before that, just a sliver of
something, like her tucking
me into bed, reading the
adventures of Uncle Wiggly,
or hanging my underclothes
near the space heater on ice-
cold mornings. ...This is what           I know about myself. She is
all I wanted. And I took her
away.

This portion of the story is both touching, and allows the reader to see the significant impact of life without a mother, and therefore the value of having a mother. This feminist idea empowers women as mothers, rather than belittling them as some puny force that has no purpose other than child bearing and caring.

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Sue Monk Kidd also connects feminism to her novel by writing characters that break traditional female stereotypes. First of all, none of the four adult characters that are prominent in the book are mothers, and all of them are middle aged and unmarried. The three women who eventually take Lily and Rosaleen in, August, May, and June, all are successful and own a large beekeeping company. They characterize the traits of intelligence and hard work in females, two traits that societally were not always associated with this gender. This idea is represented in the discourse between two characters, June and Neil.

"I'd like you to tell me why not,"          I heard Neil say one evening.
And June, "Because I can't."
"That's not a reason."
"Well, it's the only one I've got."

This conversation between the two characters is over the topic of marriage, in which June refuses to marry Neil because she does not want to give her life away to a man. This is another display of classic femininity that breaks traditional gender roles that state that women should be ecstatic over the idea of a proposal.

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The 14th amendment is essentially fixed, as the 15th amendment states that citizens rights cannot be changed on the basis of race, color, or servitude. The amendment does not formally ban women from having rights, so this is considered a win for women rights.

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As society transitions towards a more open environment, the empowerment of women has gained traction once again. The resurfacing of the "Me Too"  Movement has occurred within the early 2000's. The movement stands against sexual abuse and assault aimed towards women.

#MeToo

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Throughout the novel, Lily tries to pursue the "ideal" lifestyle as she views those around her. However, she slowly matures and begins to realize the harsh reality in store for her. She yearns for a complete family containing both a loving mother and father. However, the absence of her mother leaves her feeling out of place. Fortunately, as Kidd develops Lily's character, she begins to mature and disregard the "ideal" images forged by society. Such can be seen in the novel when Lily writes,

"We have reputations as "n*****
lovers," which is how it is put to
us and when the ignoramuses
ball up their notebook paper and
throw it as Zach in the hallway,
which seems to be a favorite
pastime between classes,
Becca and I are just as likely to
get popped in the head as he is.
Zach says we should walk on the
other side of the hall from him.
We say, 'Balled-up notebook
paper -- big deal'" (Kidd 301).

Lily's development truly evokes the freedom and strength shown in the Women's Rights Movement. She breaks through the "ideal" image created by society, and continues to follow her aspirations. In this case, staying loyal to Zach despite him being African American.

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Kidd also addresses the topic of abuse aimed towards women. Throughout the novel, a variety of instances occur where Lily or another character is abused. However, the most notable act of abuse occurs between Lily and T. Ray, her father. T. Ray constantly abuses Lily and subjects her to undeserving punishment. This can be seen when T. Ray forces Lily to kneel on grits for an hour. Kidd writes,

"He didn't speak till we reached
the kitchen and he pulled the
Martha White grits from the
pantry. 'I expect this out of boys,
Lily--you can't blame them--but
I expect more out of you. You
are no better than a s***.' He
poured a mound of grits the size
of an anthill onto the pine floor.
'Get over here and kneel down'"
(24).

T. Ray punishes Lily for catching her outside at night. He dismisses Lily's replies and assumes that Lily had been out meeting a boy. This is far from the truth, but T. Ray doesn't care. Lily is subjected to this abuse until she escapes with Rosaleen to Tiburon, South Carolina. Lily's situation is similar to circumstances women face within the real world. Women experience abuse and some do not escape. Kidd's incorporation of such a scenario shines light on a very possible reality that women face.

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The strong role women played in World War 1 in factories and military mobilization drives the US to FINALLY give them voting rights, ratifying the amendment.
#GOTthevote #wecandoit!

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FDR appoints the first ever female cabinet member, Frances Perkins, who is the secretary of labor. #PerkinshasPOWER

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Eleanor Roosevelt, a delegate of the United Nations, worked to pass the Status of Women, which was a mandate that set the standard of women's rights and urged countries around to world to adjoin the global norm.