At the end of the nineteenth century, American politicians, journalists, professionals, and volunteers mobilized on behalf of reforms meant to deal with a variety of social problems associated with industrialization. Woman activists, mainly from middling and prosperous social backgrounds, emphasized the special contribution that women could make in tackling these problems. With issues of public health and safety, child labor, and women’s work under dangerous conditions so prominent, who better than women to address them? Focusing on issues that appealed to women as wives and mothers, and…

If you ask most people about the history of women and the United States Supreme Court, they are likely to point to the historic nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female justice, in 1981. That is a watershed moment in our nation’s history. But in order to fully understand the relationship of women to the United States Supreme Court, we must reach back much further. This story begins, as all stories about American history inevitably do, during the colonial period. Margaret Brent: A Colonial Woman in the Courts While it is true that women were generally prohibited from practicing law…

An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest transcripts only date to the 1790s. Even if redcoats and rebels did not whistle it in 1776, it echoes what people of the Revolutionary era believed about men honor-bound to cause, country, and home-bound consorts. The reality, however, was that not all men left to serve in the military and not all women stayed home. Over the course of the war, thousands of women, many with…

At the beginning of the twentieth century, women were outsiders to the formal structures of political life—voting, serving on juries, holding elective office—and they were subject to wide-ranging discrimination that marked them as secondary citizens. Over the course of the century, however, women in America moved dramatically (though still not equally) into all aspects of public life—politics, labor-force participation, professions, mass media, and popular culture.Deeply divided by race, class, religion, ethnicity, and region, women do not always identify with one another, and as a result…

Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as scarce commodities in a region where masculinity and aridity have appeared, quite simply, as natural. But just as the West could not have developed without water, the region never could have flourished without important contributions from the women who lived there. From the Paleolithic period to the present, women have made essential contributions to the claiming of…

The earliest and most famous expression of the discontent American women felt over their station in life was voiced by Abigail Adams in March 1776 when she urged her husband, the future president John Adams, to “Remember the Ladies, & be more generous & favourable to them than your ancestors.” John Adams was meeting with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, drafting a new code of laws that, his wife warned him, women would not feel bound to obey if they had no voice or representation.Three-quarters of a century later, on the morning of July 19, 1848, more than three hundred people…

What did it mean for women to exercise "leadership" in the American Revolution? Before that conflict, the question itself would probably have baffled most American women and men. Living within a staunchly patriarchal society, they assumed that in any political conflict men would be the leaders and women, if they had any role at all, would be the followers. Politics, war, and governance were considered the exclusive province of men. Women had no political rights, few legal rights, and limited potential for employment outside their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Women who dared to…

Late in August 1793 Philadelphia was struck by a strange and virulent disease. Patients developed aches, chills, and fever, vomited black bile, and turned yellow. Some recovered, but many died. The yellow fever, as it was called, had visited Philadelphia before but not for thirty years. Its toll now was ghastly. In normal times two to five Philadelphians were buried every day. But by the end of August the daily figure regularly passed twenty; by the second week of September it exceeded forty. Philadelphia was one of the most flourishing cities in the English-speaking world. Its metropolitan…

According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay provides an overview of Korean immigration to the United States and the key moments and stories that define the Korean American experience. First Wave The first wave (1903–1905) of Korean migrants were mostly men who worked as contract laborers in the sugar cane fields in Hawaii and migrant farm workers in California. As “a people without a country” under extreme…