NBC's Campbell Brown looks back at Betty Ford's life: her marriage to President Gerald Ford and her activism for causes like breast cancer awareness and substance abuse treatment.
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Gloria Steinem discusses the evolution of the women's movement in the 30 years since the birth of Ms. Magazine.
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This NBC Nightly News Report describes how, in 2003, the number of abortions in the United States was at its lowest level since 1974, but the emotion and division surrounding the issue may have been at a peak since Roe v. Wade 30 years earlier.
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This NBC Nightly News Report comments on the first time in the 34 years since Roe v. Wade in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban of a specific abortion procedure. Activists on both sides called the decision monumental.
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The fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City was the deadliest workplace disaster in New York history until 9/11. David Von Drehle, the author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, discusses the fire in this segment from the NBC Today Show.
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Author David McCullough discusses his book John Adams, profiling the life of the second president of the United States. McCullough talks about the relationship between Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and also with his wife Abigail.
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It’s Women’s History Month, a good time to remember that women, as well as men, settled the West—and recorded their experiences. Answer the following questions on excerpts from the records of 19th-century (and one early 20th-century) women.
1. It was after dark when we came in sight of the camp and a dismal looking it is the tents are all huddled in together and the wagons are interspersed some are singing and laughing some are praying children crying &c. every sound may be heard from one tent to another . . .
This entry comes from a diary recording one woman's experience on:
c. The Mormon Trail
In her diary, 18-year-old Emmeline B. Wells describes her experiences on the trail from Nauvoo, IL, to Garden Grove, IA. In 1846, Mormons, followers of the Church of Latter-day Saints, began to migrate west from their settlement in Nauvoo due to persecution, following a trail that, for much of its length, closely followed the Oregon Trail. Wells's diary describes the first half of this journey; as 1846 ended, the Mormons would winter in Iowa and then continue on to the territory that would become Utah. Wells relates experiences both general to all trailgoers and specific to women—the diary ends with her husband unexpectedly abandoning her, and her grief at the event.
2. There were no battlefields, but over every mile of the long trail stalked the shadow of death. And what was waiting to greet us in [. . .]? A wilderness marked by faint trails of wild Indian feet (wilder than wild animals that would tear with bloody claws) and slow, agonizing death caused by the poison fangs of rattlesnakes who were in countless numbers.
This paragraph from a memoir by a female pioneer describes which state?
b. California
Lee Summers Whipple-Haslam, near the end of her life, wrote a memoir of her experiences as a child traveling to and living in California during the Gold Rush. Whipple-Haslam's parents brought her to California in 1850, where her mother ran a boarding house and her father prospected. Critics accused the memoir, published in 1925, of being more nostalgic fantasy than precise memory, but it still provides one woman's latter-life interpretation of the Gold Rush and California settlement.
3. We all take names - Wajapa names me, Ma-she-ha-the. It means, The motion of eagle as he sweeps high in the air. He gives me the name of his family and band. He belongs to the eagle family. Ma-she means high, ha-the means eagle.
In this diary extract, a woman is describing an encounter with which Native American group?
a. The Dakota Sioux
In this excerpt from her September 23, 1881 diary entry, ethnologist Alice Fletcher describes her assumption of a Sioux Dakota name before spending a month and a half studying the lives of Native Americans in the Dakota Territory. Fletcher, a woman from a well-off family, had developed a vocational interest in ethnology that led her to undertake this study. Like many other male and female reformers of the day, she would go on to attempt to "civilize" Native American culture through education and political action.
4.
In this image, a female photographer captures a scene in what city?
b. San Francisco
Words aren't the only medium in which women could capture their life experiences in the West. Here, photographer Laura Adams Armer records a street scene from San Francisco, c. 1910. Armer worked as a portrait photographer in San Francisco in the early 1900s, taking time to preserve not only portraits of native San Franciscans but also photographs of the life of the city—and, later in her career, of the lives of southwestern Native Americans, particularly Navajo communities.
Read the full text of Emmeline B. Wells's diary at the Library of Congress's American Memory collection Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1849. The collection includes diaries written by three other women traveling the westward trails; refer to the author index and introductory essay for more information.
The first few sections of Lee Summers Whipple-Haslam's memoir, Early Days in California; Scenes and Events of the '50s as I Remember Them, can be read online in the American Memory collection "California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900. Try the subject heading "Women" in the "Browse" menu for more primary sources written by women.
Alice Fletcher's diary of her time with the Dakota Sioux can be read in full at the National Anthropological Archives' exhibit Camping With the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher. Kate and Sue McBeth, Missionary Teachers to the Nez Perce Indians offers the diaries of two other women who took up the cause of Native American assimilation in the late 19th century.
Yale University's Women Artists of the American West features photographs by Laura Adams Armer and other female photographers of the American West, as well as essays on the women and their work.
For suggestions on analyzing diaries and other personal narratives, try Making Sense of Letters and Diaries by professor, author, and historian Steven Stowe.
While women may often have been left out of historical accounts, they were never left out of history—and some women got themselves into the books in remarkable (and unusual) ways. Match the pictures of each of the following women with the descriptions of their accomplishments in the drop-down menu:
1. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Jane Cochran). Investigative undercover reporter for the New York World and globe traveler. Lived 1864-1922.
2. Annie Smith Peck. Amateur American archeologist of Greek antiquities, and world's most famous mountaineer. Scaled Mt. Shasta, the Matterhorn, Popocatépetl, Orizaba, and Huascarán, among others. Lived 1850-1935.
3. Marguerite Harrison. Reporter for the Baltimore Sun and spy in revolutionary Russia. First foreign woman to be held by Bolshevists in the Lubyanka prison. Explorer and cinematographer in China and among the Bakhtiari in Central Asia. Lived 1879-1957.
4. Annie Edson Taylor. Unemployed schoolteacher who, at age 63, was the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on October 24, 1901. Lived 1838-1931.
5. Mabel Stark (Mary Haynie). Daughter of Kentucky farmers. Joined the circus and, during the 1920s, became the world's most famous and skilled tiger and lion trainer, working with up to 18 cats at once. Lived 1889-1968.
6. Sonora Webster Carver. As a teenager in 1923, the first woman performer to dive on horseback 40 feet down into a deep pool of water at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Regularly performed the stunt for two decades, even after being blinded in 1931 during a dive. Lived 1904-2003.
7. Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick. In 1908, at age 15, became the first woman to use a parachute (from a hot air balloon), then in 1913, the first woman to make a jump from an aircraft. Trial tested parachute designs for the U.S. Army, and in 1914 made the first free fall parachute jump. Made over 1,100 jumps. Lived 1893-1978.
PBS' American Experience series of documentaries includes Around the World in 72 Days, on Nellie Bly and her 1889-1890 journey around the world. The full text of Bly's account of her experiences, Nellie Bly's Book: Around the World in 72 Days, can be found free to download or read online at Project Gutenberg. Her report on time spent undercover in an insane asylum, Ten Days in a Mad-house, can also be found at this site.
In 1902, Annie Edson Taylor published a 17-page booklet recording her experiences: The Internet Archive presents the full text of Over the Falls: Annie Edson Taylor's Story of Her Trip: How the Horseshoe Fall Was Conquered.
Sonora Webster Carver also wrote about her life, in her autobiography A Girl and Five Brave Horses. In 1992, Disney released a film, Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, based on Carver's life—though, as with most films, it presents a highly fictionalized version of a true story.
Try a search in NHEC's Website Reviews—Topic: Women—for websites featuring other remarkable women in American history. From Women in Journalism, archiving interviews with reporters who followed in the footsteps of women like Marguerite Harrison, to the Library of Congress's Votes for Women, preserving material from the fight for women's suffrage, NHEC highlights websites with primary sources suitable for use in the classroom.
I am trying to find a good website that have the demographics during 1890-1915. Could you please give me a direction to go in?
Luckily, population studies play a role in many facets of government funding and studies. The wealth of information on U.S. demographics is rooted in the U.S. Census Bureau. The first census was taken in 1790 and included men, women, free, and enslaved persons. For more information on the history of one of the first government agencies, read the Teachinghistory.org article, Stand Up and Be Counted: Teaching with the Census which also provides guidance on lesson plans.
The role of the First Lady has changed over time due to shifting social values as well as the individual personalities of the first ladies. Try to identify the correct first lady in each question based on the following descriptions.
1. What president's wife first spoke on national radio, broke precedent by inviting noticeably pregnant women to stand with...
Lou Hoover.
2. Several First Ladies were widely known as counselors to their husbands, but which one engineered her husband's run for ...
Helen Taft.
3. What First Lady was the first (and only) woman to have married a President in a White House ceremony?
Frances Cleveland.
4. What president's wife was the first to descend into a mine?
Julia Grant.
5. What president's wife was the first to invite spirit mediums to the White House to conduct séances?
Mary Lincoln.
6. Who was the first woman to see her husband being sworn in as President? A famous writer described her as "a fine, portly...
Dolley Madison.
7. Who was the first woman widowed as First Lady to be present for the inauguration of her husband's successor?
Jacqueline Kennedy.
[Question 1] The first photograph of either a president or a first lady broadcasting from the White House is of Mrs. Hoover. She began national broadcasts in 1929, even setting up a practice room in the White House where she could "improve [her] talkie technique." Many of her broadcasts were made from President Hoover's country retreat, Camp Rapidan, where she often devoted her programs to speaking to young people, urging girls to contemplate independent careers and boys to help with the housework. Mrs. Hoover had a degree in geology from Stanford University, as did her husband. She had accompanied him to China for two years, where he hadsupervised the country's mining projects. She later used the Mandarin Chinese she learned then to communicate with her husband privately when they were in the presence of others.
[Question 2] Her father and her maternal grandfather had both served in Congress. When she was 17, she had gone to Washington with her parents to visit their family friends, President Rutherford Hayes and his wife Lucy, and she had spent a week as a guest at the White House. She was politically ambitious, but saw little opportunity for women to advance their own political careers. She married William Taft, a lawyer, who would probably have been content to practice law, or to become a judge, but she strongly encouraged him to accept political appointments, and finally, to run for political office. On her husband's inauguration day, the outgoing President, Theodore Roosevelt, left Washington immediately after the swearing-in ceremony, and she skillfully maneuvered herself into the car, next to her husband, that drove them both back to the White House. William Taft coped with stress and unhappiness by eating. During his presidency, his weight ballooned to 340 pounds, making it necessary for theTafts to replace the White House bathtub with a super-sized one.
[Question 3] Bachelor President Grover Cleveland married 21-year-old Frances Folsom on June 2, 1886, in a White House ceremony at which John Philip Sousa played the wedding march. After the ceremony, the newlyweds escaped to a honeymoon cottage in nearby Deer Park, Maryland, where reporters camped out in the bushes. Frances Folsom was the daughter of Cleveland's former law partner. Cleveland had known her since she had been born, and had bought her first baby carriage. He was 27 years older than her.
President John Tyler's first wife, Letitia, was the first woman to die during her husband's presidency, in 1842. He remarried while he was President, to Julia Gardiner, at her church in New York City, on June 26, 1844. President Wilson's first wife, Ellen, died in the White House on August 6, 1914, and he remarried, to Edith Bolling Galt, while he was President, on December 8, 1915, in a ceremony at Edith's Washington, D.C. home.
[Question 4] Julia Grant, although it happened after her husband was no longer president. Mrs. Grant went down the Big Bonanza silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada with her husband after hearing that he had wagered that she would be afraid to go. The Grants, along with their son, Ulysses, Jr., visited the mine on October 28, 1879, more than two years after Grant had left office. The mine's fabulous production of silver during the Civil War had done much to undergird the Government's financial credit internationally. Lucy Hayes later descended into the same mine with her husband, President Rutherford Hayes. On May 21, 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt made the national news by visiting the Willow Grove coal mine in Bellaire, Ohio, to observe the working conditions of the miners.
[Question 5] After the Lincolns' son Willie died in February 1862, she grew despondent. A few of her acquaintances suggested that she and her husband could still receive consolation from him in the afterlife through the intermediary of a spirit medium. Mrs. Lincoln invited several—the exact number is disputed—to the White House for private consultations. Both Lincolns attended a few séances elsewhere in Washington, although it is a matter of conjecture whether the President regarded these as anything more than a kind of entertainment.
[Question 6] The famous writer was Washington Irving. James Madison was generally shy and reticent among crowds and at parties, but Dolley was a social gadfly and an accomplished hostess. She was also a couple of inches taller than her husband.
[Question 7] Lyndon Johnson, with his wife Lady Bird on one side and Jackie on the other, was sworn in aboard Air Force One less than two hours after JFK's assassination. The ceremony was delayed to wait for Jackie to arrive. The most famous photograph of the event has Jackie in the foreground, standing in a pink suit still stained with her husband's blood, with LBJ in the center with his hand upraised taking the oath, and with Lady Bird in the background.
