The Triangle Fire

In the early 1900s, immigrants poured into New York City. They took whatever jobs they could find. Many worked long hours at sewing machines in sweatshops which were often crowded lofts that turned out clothing for the garment industry. One such sweatshop was the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. It occupied the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of a building in Manhattan.

On March 25, 1911, as 500 of its young women workers were preparing to leave for the day, a fire broke out on the eighth floor. Within minutes, the fire had spread out of control. Workers panicked. Some crowded into freight elevators. Others rushed to the narrow stairwells. There, they found their way blocked – the company had locked most exits to prevent workers from stealing. A single fire escape collapsed under the weight of the fleeing women.

Fire trucks rushed to the scene, but their ladders were too short to reach the loft. Horrified bystanders watched as workers, many with their clothes and hair on fire, jumped from the windows to their death on the street below.

In less than 30 minutes, 146 people were killed. Investigators failed to determine the cause of the fire. But they found many people at fault – the factory owners, the fire department, and city officials. The tragedy drew attention to unsafe factory conditions and helped start a reform movement.

After the fire, New York City passed laws to improve workplace safety.

The Miss America Pageant

It began in 1921 as a gimmick to attract tourists to Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the end of the summer season. 

Today, it is a national institution.  Millions watch on television each year as the judges’ decision is announced, a winner is crowned, and a tearful but radiant young woman walks down the runway to the strains of a familiar song, “Here she is, Miss America…”

The first Miss America, Margaret Gorman was just 16 years old when she won the contest in 1921.  In the early  days, the contestants often represented cities rather than states.  Not until 1959 was there a contestant from each state.  Originally just a swimsuit contest, the pageant later added a talent contest and interviews designed to reveal  the personalities and opinions of the women.

Beginning in 1945, winners received college scholarships along with other prizes.  The pageant became a truly national even in 1954, when television first beamed the show across the country. 

The Miss America Pageant has been criticized by people who feel that beauty contest are insulting to  women.   But supporters point out that the contest stresses intelligence and talent as well as beauty.  And the pageant  has survived the criticisims to win a lasting place in American popular culture.

The use of live animals in the Miss America talent competition was banned in 1940, afer Miss Montana and her horse almost fell off the stage.

Susan B. Anthony

Until the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became law in 1920, American women were not allowed to vote.   Susan B. Anthony’s 50-year fight for women’s suffrage, or the right to vote, made this amendment possible.

Susan B. Anthony grew up in a Quaker home.  Like her parents, she believed the men and women should be treated equally.  In 1851, she began working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another suffragette.  Their first success was the passage of a law in 1860 in New York that gave women the right to own property and to keep their children if they divorced.

Anthony also fought for the abolition or end, of slavery, and for the right of former slaves to vote.  After the Civil War, she was disappointed when former slaves were given that right, but women were not.  

As a result, she formed suffrage associations and lectured all over the world.  She saw women get the right to vote in other countries, but not in the U.S.  But she remained hopeful, and in a month before her death in 1906, she said, “failure is impossible.”   She was right.   Fourteen years after Anthony’s death, the 19^th Amendment became law, amd people called it is the “Anthony Amendment”.

In 1979, the U.S. government minted $1 coins with Susan B. Anthony’s picture on them.  This made her the first woman to be pictured on an American coin in general circulation.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth could neither read nor write.  But when this tall African-American woman strode on stage to speak out against slavery, she held everyone’s attention.  She began almost every speech with the same words:  “Children, I talk to God and God talks to me.”

Sojourner Truth was born a slave named Isabella on a farm in New York State.  Before she was freed, Sojourner Truth had several children, most of whom were sold into slavery by her masters.

She gained her freedom after New York abolished slavery, when she was about 30 years old.  She then moved to New York City, where she worked as a servant.  Deeply religious, she sometimes preached on street corners, both against slavery and on behalf of women’s rights.  

Then in 1843, she came to believe that God wanted her to “travel up and down the land” preaching his word. 

She took the name Sojourner (which means wanderer) Truth and began traveling through the country, speaking wherever she could find an audience.  She suffered abuse and physical attacks, but her eloquence made her famous.  In 1864, Abraham Lincoln invited her to the White House and appointed her counselor to freedmen in the capital.

After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth continued to work tirelessly to help the newly freed slaves and improve the lives of women.

Barbara Jordan

“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, and it is total,” Congresswoman Barbara Jordan told a national television audience on July 25, 1974.   She was not about to stand by and watch “the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”  At that time, Jordan was participating in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on President Richard Nixon’s serious abuse of presidential powers.  Jordan’s vote again Nixon helped lead to the President’s resignation in August.

A brilliant scholar and a thrilling orator, Jordan became the first African-American elected to Congress since the 1870s.  Her eloquent denunciation of Nixon at the committee hearings in 1974 stirred the nation.  Two years later, she became the first black woman to deliver the keynote address at a Democratic National Convention.  Her presence there, she noted, proved that “the American Dream need not forever be deferred.”  After retiring from Congress in 1979, Jordan taught at the University of Texas in Austin.   In 1992, though confined to a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis, she again addressed a Democratic convention.  Less than four years later, however, she died at the age of 59.   President Lyndon B. Johnson once said Jordan “proved that black is beautiful before we knew what [the saying] meant.”

Jordan’s love of and respect for the U.S. Constitution was so great that she always carried a copy of the document in her purse.

Amy Tan

In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese-American women meets regularly to play mah-jongg, a Chinese game played with small ivory tiles. The women all came to the U.S. from China years earlier, and have kept their Chinese traditions. Their old-fashioned ways embarrass the book’s heroine, the grown daughter of one of the women. Above all, she wants to be American. But as the women tell their touching and often tragic stories of their lives, the daughter begins to understand and appreciate her Chinese heritage.

Amy Tan’s Chinese given name, An-mei, means “blessing from America.”

The story is close to Tan’s own experience. Her parents come to California from China, and she grew up with many of the same conflicts faced by the young heroine of the book. Tan’s parents wanted her to have a successful live in American, but they hoped she would think of herself as Chinese. As a girl, Tan wanted only to blend into American society, but when she began to write stories in the mid-1980s, she brought her two worlds together. Her personal experiences enabled her to write movingly about the relationships between immigrant parents of their children.

The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, was a surprise best-seller in 1989 and later a successful movie. Her second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, was also successful. And in 1995 she was back on the best-seller list with The Hundred Secret Senses, a novel about a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese half sister.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan’s early life and career were far from revolutionary. She was a college-educated housewife, mother of three children, and writer for women’s magazines. For her 15th college reunion, Friedan sent a questionnaire to members of her class (all women), asking them to describe their lives after college. Their surprising answers inspired her to write The Feminine Mystique, a book that ignited the women’s-liberation movement in 1963.

Friedan’s research revealed that many American women were not as happy as people told them they should be. Contrary to popular belief some women did not find fulfillment as housewives and mothers. The Feminine Mystique was an instant best-seller.
In 1966, Friedan was one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW). As NOW’s president, she fought for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), legalization of abortions, and better job opportunities for women.

In 1971, she helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus to encourage women to seek public office. A decade later, in 1981, Friedan looked at the progress of the women’s movement in her book The Second Stage. She stressed the important of family life for women and urged that more men be brought into the movement.

In 1993’s The Fountain of Age, Friedan wrote about discrimination against older people.

Clara Barton

She was called the “angel of the battlefield” by those who saw her caring for wounded and dying soldiers during the Civil War. Her role there made her a national heroine. A strong-minded woman, Clara barton then devoted the rest of her life to helping others.
When the Civil war began in 1861, Barton was working as the first female clerk in the Patent Office in Washington D.C. But reports of suffering soldiers roused her to action. Besides nursing the wounded, she carried supplies and medicines to the battlefield.

Clara barton created a bureau to search for missing Civil War soldiers and mark the graves of the dead.

Barton’s war efforts left her exhausted and ill. In 1869, she went to Switzerland to recover. There, barton learned about the International red Cross, an organization devoted to the relief of suffering resulting from war. In 1870-1871, she took part in Red Cross activities during the Franco-Prussia war. Two years later, Barton returned home and set about forming an American red Cross. In 1881, she achieved her goal and served as the organization’s first president for 22 years. Before retiring in 1904, Barton expanded the efforts of the Red Cross to include aid to victims of peacetime disasters, such as floods and hurricanes.

The Bustle

Casual, comfortable clothing is preferred by most people today. But in the nineteenth century, American women chose to be uncomfortable rather than unfashionable. They wore tight corsets and long, heavy dresses that restricted their movements . And they also wore a series of strange contraptions that were designed to give them the shape considered attractive then.

One odd fashion device of the 1870s was the bustle, or “dress improver.” The bustle was either a padded cushion of cork or down, or a frame made of metal or whalebone. A woman tied it around her backside at waist level. When she put her dress on over the bustle, her skirt stuck out in back.

If the bustle was small, it merely gave the impression that extra material had been gathered at the back of the skirt. But some bustles were huge. They jutted out like shelves, provoking jokes about bustles big enough to serve tea on!

By the 1890s, the bustle was no longer in fashion. Women could once again sit down without having to make allowance for the awkward “dress improver” behind them.

Prior to bustles, women wore petticoats with wide steel hoops so that their skirts would swell out into enormous circles. Some skirts were ten yards in circumference!

Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt lived at a time when women were expected to marry and raise families. They were not supposed to become artists. But Cassatt was determined to be a painter, and she succeeded. She became the first American women to win recognition as an important artist.

Cassatt studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Then she went to Europe to pursue her dream. In 1872, one of her paintings was accepted for exhibition by the French Academy of Fine Arts. She settled in Paris, where she became a lifelong friend and student of the Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas. “How well I remember, “ she recalled, “seeing for the first time Degas’ pastels in the window of a picture dealer. I used to go and flatten my nose against the window and absorb all I could of his art.”

Most of Cassett’s paintings were of women or children. Artists at that time usually idealized their subjects. But Cassatt’s paintings showed people as they really looked. Her work became very popular. And when a gallery exhibted her work in 1893, the catalogue noted, “Cassatt is perhaps along with Whistler, the only artist of eminent talent…that America actually possesses.”

Cassatt’s eyesight began to fail when she was about 60. She grew nearly blind, and had to give up painting.

You can find several links regarding this artist at Mary Cassatt Online and this site has a lot to offer from the National Gallery of Art.


There are also several YouTube videos featuring Mary Cassatt’s work (see list here) including this one:

Abigail Adams

In America’s early days, women had no voice in government and were not expected to know much about politics. But Abigail Adams, the wife of the second U.S. Prwsident, was ahead of her time. She was well-informed and held strong opinions about politics and government.

John Adams was a country lawyer when he married Abigail Smith in 1764. He played a key role in the struggles for independence and was often away from home. Abigail Adams raised their four children and managed the family farm, and she kept up a steady stream of letters to her husband.

When a neighbor complained because Abigail had sent a young servant to school, she wrote to John, “Merely because his face is black, is he to be denied instruction?”
And when John Adams was helping to plan the new country’s government, she wrote, “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.”

Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to live in the White House. But only a few rooms of the mansion were ready in 1800 when the Adamses moved in. In a letter to her daughter, Abigail revealed that she hung her family’s laundry in the unfinished East Room, later the scene of elegant receptions.

Abigail Adams is also remembered as the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott wrote almost 300 books, stories, and poems, but she is best known for the novel Little Women. This children’s classic is about four teenage sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March—and their family life in a New England village during the time of the American Civil War. Alcott herself was one of four sisters, and the story is largely based on her own life.

The Alcott family moved to Concord, Massachusetts, when Louisa May Alcott was eight years old. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a teacher, but he had problems supporting his family. Among his friends were two great writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. They helped Alcott develop her writing ability. She started writing when she was 19, to earn money for the family.

Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables, was published in 1854. But her first success came in 1863 with Hospital Sketches, which was based on her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War. Little Women, published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869, was an immediate success. Her publisher originally decided not to publish Little Women, but his children read the manuscript, loved it, and talked him into it. She later wrote several sequels about the March family, including Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

Mercy Otis Warren

“Be it known unto Britain even American daughters are politicians and patriots,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren. Women were not educated outside their homes in colonial America, and they were not allowed to participate openly in public affairs. But Warren had a natuiral talent for literature and for politics, and she used both to support the Patriot cause. She has been called the “First Lady of the Revolution.”

Warren’s brother, James Otis, and her husband, James Warren, were both Patriot leaders in Massachusetts. Through them, Warren knew most of the important figures of ther day including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. By 1772, she had become a supporter of American indepdence. To encourage patriotic feeling in the colonies, Warren wrote a series of plays that were published anonymously. They satirized the British colonial government and attacked specific public officials. Soon after the Revolutionary War began, Warren started to record its history.

Her three-volume work, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, was published in 1805, under her own name. It provides an insider’s view of the struggle by a woman who believed that revolutions are “permitted by Providence to remind mankind of their natural equality.”

Some poems written by Mercy Otis Warren were published in 1790, but much of her poetry was not published until modern times.

Gertrude Stein

In the 1920's, Paris was a center of creativity, a place where new ideas in art and literature flourished. Man of the most talented writers and painters gathered frequently at the home of Gertrude Stein, a witty, opinionated American writer and art collector.
Stein was born in Pennsylvania and grew up on the West Coast. She graduated from Radcliffe College and then studied medicine. But she left medical school before earning a degree and went to Europe in 1902. Indepdenently wealthy, she lived abroad the rest of her life, mostly in Paris.
Stein collected paintings by such artists as Pablo Picasso and Henry Matisse, little known then but considered masters today. Their paintings were not realistic; instead they often took apart familiar images and reassembled the pieces in startling arrangements. Stein tried to do with words what those artists did with paint. Her poetry and other writings are filled with repetition and often seem to make little sense. But her reputation as an artist and an important influence on your writers, including Ernest Hemingway, grew steadily. Her best-known book is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklars, published in 1933. It told more about Stein's life than about Toklas, who was her lifelong companion.
Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "the Lost Generation" to describe the groups of Americans living in Paris in the 1920s.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson called her poetry “my letter to the world.” But only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime. Not until after her death did the world take notice of the odd, brilliant woman who was one of America’s greatest poets.

Dickinson was born and lived her entire life in her father’s red brick house in Amherst, Massachusetts. She had a normal childhood, but as an adult she led a largely solitary life. Because Emily Dickinson was rarely seen around Amherst after she reached adulthood, the townspeople called her “The Myth.” She never married. She rarely left her home and she spent many hours alone, writing poetry. Her poems expressed her deepest emotions. Many of them were about nature, death, and God.

In all, Dickinson wrote 1,775 poems. But she never tried to have them published. A few were submitted to newspapers by admirers without her consent.

She hid most of her poems in a bureau in her bedroom. After her death in 1886, her sister and a friend arranged for a volume of her poems to be published. One reviewer attacked them as “barbaric,” because they did not have simple positive messages or tradional forms. But the book became a great success with the American public, which recognized the genius of Emily Dickinson’s “letter to the world.”

The League of Women Voters

“We are not feminists primarily, we are citizens,” wrote an early leader of the League of Women Voters. Her statement reflects the organization’s goal of helping all Americans become knowledgeable participants in government.

An outgrowth of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, the League was founded in Chicago in 1920. After a long battle, women had been given the right to vote by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The League was founded to educate women in the use of that newly won right. At first, members were divided on the role of women in politics. Some felt that they should work through exisiting political parties. Others argued that women should have their own party. Still others believed that women should remain above partisan politics. Finally, members agreed that the League would be nonpartisan, while supporting social and political reform.

Today, the League has more than 1,200 local and state chapters. It concentrates on educating the American public on important local, state, and national issues. It distributes reliable information on candidates and issues, runs voter registration drives, and sponsors political debates. The League remains nonpartisan, although it takes stands on important issues after conducting studies and reaching concensus among its members.

Membership in the League of Women Voters was opened to men in 1974.

The political cartoon pictured with this post is interesting. Click on it to see a larger view. The topic involves passage of the 19th amendment.

The Murder of Selena

She was only 23, and on the verge of superstardom. But in March, 1995, the Mexican-American singing star known as Selena was murdered by the former president of her fan club. Thousands of shocked fans mourned the death of the talented young performer who had popularized Tejano music, a fast-paced blend of Mexican folk music and American pop.

Selena, whose full name was Selena Quintanilla Perez, was by far the biggest Tejano star. Her Selena Live recording won a 1994 Grammy Award as best Mexican-American albulm. And at the beginning of 1995, she seemed close to achieving her goal of reaching a wider audience. She had recorded her first English-language albulm just before her death.

Yolanda Saldivar, the woman who killed Selena, had managed a clothing boutique owned by Selena’s family, but she was fired after being suspected of taking money from the store. On March 31, 1995, she arranged to meet Selena at a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas. When the singer arrived, Saldivar pulled out a gun and shot her. Saldivar claimed that the gun went off accidentally, but she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Selena’s album Dreaming of You was released after her death. It became the first albulm by a Latin artist to top the popular-music chart.

Emily Post's Etiquette

When Americans wanted to know the proper way to set a table, answer an invitation, or write a thank-you note, they turned to Emily Post. For 40 years, she was the country’s most famous expert on etiquette---the correct way to behave in social situations.

The daughter of a prominent Baltimore architect, Post politely refused when an editor asked her to write a book on etiquette. Etiquette, she said, was stuffy and not to be taken seriously. But after looking at a book from a rival publisher, she decided that she could do a better job. Her book first appeared in 1922 as Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home. Its sound advice made it a must for every household. For a later edition, the book’s title was changed to Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage. Some of Post’s 1922 rules were soon outdated such as “It is unheard of for a gentleman to ‘take’ a young girl alone to a dance or to dine or to parties.” But her books were frequently revised to cover modern situations. And Emily Post continued to dispense good advice through books, newspaper columns, and a radio program until her death in 1960.

Another piece of Post’s advice…..”Never try to make any two people like each other, “ Emily Post warned. “If they do, they do; if they don’t, they don’t, and that is all there is to it.”

Oh Those Flappers!

Young and rebellious, they wanted to live a very different life from that of their mothers. They were known as “flappers,” and with their boyfriends---their “sheikhs”----they were the “flaming youth” of the period known as the Roaring Twenties.


Instead of ankle-length skirts, heavy black stockings, and long hair piled on top of their heads, the flappers wore short skirts, rolled-down silk stockings, and bobbed hair. They used lipstick and rouge and learned the latest dances of the “jazz age,” such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom. And they adopted many customs previously reserved for men, including smoking, drinking, and driving. “She will never knit you a necktie,” wrote one journalist about the flapper, “but she’ll drive you from the station in her little sports car.”


Of course, not all young American women were flappers. Many were too conservative or too timid for such open persuit of pleasure. But the flappers symbolized the restlessness of a changing America that was reexamining its social structure and its values. When the stock market crashed in 1929, bringing about the Great Depression, the era of the flapper ended as suddenly as American prosperity.


The word “flapper” originally meant a bird that was too young to fly. By the late 1800s, it was used to describe any young girl. By 1920, it came to mean a free-spirited young woman.