The state’s ability to rear, educate, and prepare all the little Texans to take their place in the national economy is going to be an excellent predictor of how well the whole country will be faring d...
But there were a few well-known real-life cowgirls, and the most famous by far were Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. They were America’s first action heroines, amalgams of femininity and fighting spiri...
Texas is a great place to be rich and a terrible place to be poor. It's got the highest percentage of people without health insurance in the country. If you get injured on the job, good luck getting w...
It was a raw country, and the first generations of colonial women did things that their granddaughters would have found unthinkable.
And even in circumstances less critical, women were almost always welcomed in new enterprises that hadn’t yet become either prestigious or profitable—whether it was early radio or early cattle drives.
The history of American women is all about leaving home—crossing
The bottle of morphine is wrapped up and passed to the child over the counter, a Tennessee doctor wrote. Doctors and pharmacists had little compunction about dispensing narcotics. Young women cannot g...
Mary Johnson may have been the first African American woman. She arrived sometime before 1620 as the maid of a Virginia planter. Like white women, the black residents of the early southern colonies fo...
Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising...
Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not fr...
Charley Parkhurst ran a stagecoach through dangerous territory for years and no one knew Charley was actually a woman until she died in 1879. He was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated...
But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of s...
The dissolution of the normal boundaries between women’s work and men’s allowed some women to operate with an independence the nation would never really see again until the twentieth century.
The theory that women should only be asked to do work that was safe and relatively mundane was ignored whenever something risky or difficult actually needed to be done.
Sanger was asked to write a column on sex education, What Every Girl Should Know, for The Call, a daily newspaper with socialist sympathies. When she tackled the subject of venereal disease, her colum...
One law prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court, and carefully defined negro as anyone who had one nonwhite grandparent.
Many of her male friends in the labor movement or politics found the crusade either strange or irritating. One night, Sanger and Bill Haywood, the famous labor leader, addressed a group of women strik...
Under slavery, African Americans led desperately constricted and frequently brutal existences. But ordinary life went on as well. For most, the average day was filled with couplings and quarreling, fr...
The sense of solidarity among the poor was often—although certainly not always—strong. Housewives with very little still fed hungry tramps who came to their back doors. Pauline Kael, a teenager during...
The near-universal message of television programming was that girls never got to do anything interesting, and then grew up to be women who faded into the woodwork completely.