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Women in progressive era
Changes that the progressive era brought
Changes that the progressive era brought
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Many women of the Progressive Era were industrial workers and often endured deplorable working conditions. Briefly, in the progressive Era women entered the workforce, despite the opposition from men. However, there was a discrimination and gender tension. However, women played an essential role in the expanding industrial economy. As in the popular culture, though, the workplace (and later the Women's Union League) was plagued with gender assumptions. First, women were directed toward the 'female' work, e.g. the needle trades. Because of women's specific problems, women began to move into the union movement, as evidenced by the rise of the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) (mostly female social workers) (1903) (uprising of 20,000 women). For
Through the Progressive Era, many advances were made in America. Not all of those came easy though. Citizens of America all were taking a stand. Fighting for their rights within the work place. Many were striking against low wages, dangerous working conditions and management’s refusals to recognize any unions. One of the largest strikes of women during the Progressive Era was from the garment workers in New York City. Unfortunately, it failed to bring any changes to the garment-making industry at the time, but soon after everything fell into place creating a devastating event that soon led to
After the success of antislavery movement in the early nineteenth century, activist women in the United States took another step toward claiming themselves a voice in politics. They were known as the suffragists. It took those women a lot of efforts and some decades to seek for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In her essay “The Next Generation of Suffragists: Harriot Stanton Blatch and Grassroots Politics,” Ellen Carol Dubois notes some hardships American suffragists faced in order to achieve the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Along with that essay, the film Iron-Jawed Angels somehow helps to paint a vivid image of the obstacles in the fight for women’s suffrage. In the essay “Gender at Work: The Sexual Division of Labor during World War II,” Ruth Milkman highlights the segregation between men and women at works during wartime some decades after the success of women suffrage movement. Similarly, women in the Glamour Girls of 1943 were segregated by men that they could only do the jobs temporarily and would not able to go back to work once the war over. In other words, many American women did help to claim themselves a voice by voting and giving hands in World War II but they were not fully great enough to change the public eyes about women.
Jane Addams and the Progressive Movement. Works Cited Not Included Jane Addams is recognized as a social and political pioneer for women in America. In her biography, which later revealed her experiences in Hull House, she demonstrates her altruistic personality, which nurtured the poor and pushed for social reforms. Although many of Addams ideas were considered radical for her time, she provided women with a socially acceptable way to participate in both political and social change. She defied the prototypical middle class women by integrating the line that separated private and political life.
Women’s role in society changed quite a bit during WWI and throughout the 1920s. During the 1910s women were very short or liberty and equality, life was like an endless rulebook. Women were expected to behave modestly and wear long dresses. Long hair was obligatory, however it always had to be up. It was unacceptable for them to smoke and they were expected to always be accompanied by an older woman or a married woman when outing. Women were usually employed with jobs that were usually associated with their genders, such as servants, seamstresses, secretaries and nursing. However during the war, women started becoming employed in different types of jobs such as factory work, replacing the men who had gone to fight in the war in Europe. In the late 1910s The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) had been fighting for decades to get the vote for women. As women had contributed so much to the war effort, it was difficult to refuse their demands for political equality. As a result, the Nineteenth Amendment to the constitution became law in 19...
The progressive era was a time of enormous changes that flourished in the United States. Activists demanded a reform in education, technology, science, and Democracy. Purification of government was the main goal, and it was during this time that progressives made “scientific” the social sciences, especially history, economics and political sciences (http://www.iep.utm.edu). It was also during this era (1890’s-1920’s) that the Federal Reserve System was founded. The 16th through 19th amendments, the Food and Drug Act, and Federal Trade Commission were also put into play. It wasn’t until World War I that such drastic change started to slow. Amidst all this change existed an amazing woman by the name of Jane Addams; a political activist and pragmatist whom made enormous social and economic changes to the United States. It wasn’t until the late 20th century however that she was properly recognized as one of the most influential philosophers and sociologists of her time (http://americanhistory.unomaha.edu).
By 1913, the suffragette movement had exceeded a decade. The growing desperation of the suffragettes is clear in their calls for the aid of working men, echoing Emmeline Pankhurst’s “Freedom or Death” speech in November 1913. This appears as a change of heart in the operation of the WSPU, which had decreed to exclude men from their organisation and broken with the Labour Party in the previous year.
The early 1900s was a time of many movements, from the cities to the rural farms; people were uniting for various causes. One of the most widespread was the labor movement, which affected people far and wide. Conditions in the nation’s workplaces were notoriously poor, but New York City fostered the worst. Factories had started out in the city’s tenements, which were extremely cramped, poorly ventilated, and thoroughly unsanitary. With the advent of skyscrapers, factories were moved out of the tenements and into slightly larger buildings, which still had terrible conditions. Workers were forced to work long hours (around 12 hours long) six hours a day, often for extremely low pay. The pay was also extremely lower for women, who made up a large portion of the shirtwaist industry. If a worker were to openly contest an employer’s rule, they would be promptly fired and replaced immediately. Also, strength in numbers did not always work. Managers often hired brutal strikebreakers to shut movements down. The local police and justice were often of no help to the workers, even when women were being beaten. At the time, the workers needs were not taken seriously and profit was placed ahead of human life. This was not just a struggle for workers’ rights; it was also a movement for the working class’ freedom.
The craft workers were successful in organizing because unlike the unskilled workers they could not be replaced easily. This union bargained for thing such as 8 hour work days, higher wages did not deal with social reforms. Women’s wages were not considered because the AFL dealt
Many factories became short-handed and had to hire women to cover the jobs. The factories were very dangerous and unhealthy, and the women were only getting paid half the wages of men. The women were not unionized because the Labor Union said that they had to hire many women to replace one man and that the skilled tasks were broken in to several less skilled tasks. They had no protection, so their lungs and skin were exposed to dangerous chemicals. Many women worked in munitions factories, where they worked with sulphur.
In the 1890s, American women emerged as a major force for social reform. Millions joined civic organizations and extended their roles from domestic duties to concerns about their communities and environments. These years, between 1890 and 1920, were a time of many social changes that later became known as the Progressive Era. In this time era, millions of Americans organized associations to come up with solutions to the many problems that society was facing, and many of these problems were staring American women right in the face.
In this time was founded the first major union group for women known has the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Even with this first organized women union their influence was weak and not being able to gather in protest to fight back properly. No shop representatives so gathering complaints about wages and work conditions couldn’t happen. Most of their fights were aimed at import legislation, cheap foreign imports and high rent. Furthermore, this leads to this union group rise and fall. The ILGWU masses the largest protest in American history with 20,000 seamstresses walking off their jobs because of the conditions they were forced to work in. But sadly with limited organizing experience awarded them little form management. At this time the union group were young Jewish women. I believe this because in 1911 a disaster happen that took the lives of 146 young Jewish women known as “Triangle Shirtwaist Fire”. Which escalated their organizing efforts, leading its members to become the highest paid workers, with union clinics, low rent housing and huge retirement plans. But the rights of the unionize workers weren’t protected. When it came to racial matters things were different. African American and Puerto Rican workers weren’t active union members and received lower wages than the white union members during this time. Many Puerto Rican women were sexually harassed. Both groups were also fined and threatened to be fired. Which lead to the two groups wanting decertify by the
As stated in the article “Political Socialization…,” the Coalition of Labor Union Women was a feminist union founded in 1974 as a result of the diffusion of feminist consciousness in the labor movement and the mobilization for the Equal Rights Amendment. It was a union formed to promote the unionization of women in the workforce, and wanted to make trade unions more responsive to the needs of organized and unorganized women workers. They later became one of the support groups of the labor federation AFL-CIO.
Women worked mainly in the garment industry. Their working conditions were less than desirable and they worked for lower wages and long hours. Women formed the Industrial Ladies Garment Workers Union to represent laborers in sweatshops. They event...
The women’s movement had been characterized by women's wish to acquire equal legal status to men by obtaining civil and political rights recorded in the Constitution and legislation. In Romania, the first wave of the feminist movement had been held simultaneously with the women’s movement in West, and it had been a movement of the elite, educated women with access to international information. An important period of this movement was before the establishment of the Romanian Constitution in 1923. It was the most democratic Constitution and women started an intense activity of lobbying for their rights until 1947. Between 1947 and 1989 Romania was pushed under Soviet influence by the Red Curtain, and the feminist activity was eradicated. Although Communism proclaimed gender equality between men and women, this had been acted contradictorily in public sphere and private life. Freedom has been detracted by the Communist Party, and women’s private lives had been controlled by the Party by limiting their legal rights. After the Romanian Revolution in 1989, it was taken a modest initiative on the situation of gender equality and women’s rights in Romanian society. Since 1989 until the present, Romanian women’s roles and rights in society is becoming a priority in Romania. In addition, the promotion of equal opportunities for women and men is also a priority in the democracy, and under Western influence and European legislation. This essay will attempt to outline the difficulties representing the causes of the women’s movement and some of the effects of social, economic and political rights.
Women and men are nestled into predetermined cultural molds when it comes to gender in American society. Women play the roles of mothers, housekeepers, and servants to their husbands and children, and men act as providers, protectors, and heads of the household. These gender roles stem from the many culture myths that exist pertaining to America, including those of the model family, education, liberty, and of gender. The majority of these myths are misconceptions, but linger because we, as Americans, do not analyze or question them. The misconception of gender suggests that biological truths no longer dictate our gender roles as men and women; they derive from cultural myths. We, as a nation, need to do severe critical thinking about this delusion of gender, how has limited us in the home, media, and education, how it currently limits us, and what the results of the current and future changes in gender roles will be.