Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70-year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as “Moses,” Frederick Douglass said, “Excepting John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman].”
Continue Reading »Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a very prominent proponent of a woman’s legal and social equality during the nineteenth century. In 1848, she and others organized the first national woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. She co-authored that meeting’s Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence, and introduced the most radical demand: for womens suffrage.
Continue Reading »The NWSA dealt with many issues of interest to women besides suffrage, such as the unionization of women workers. In 1872, it supported Victoria Woodhull, the first woman candidate for president of the United States. In 1890, the NWSA and AWSA overcame their previous divisions, joining as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), thereby strengthening the movement.
Continue Reading »The National Woman’s Party, representing the militant wing of the suffrage movement, utilized picketing and open public demonstrations to gain popular attention for the right of women to vote in the United States. The origin of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) date from 1912, when Alice Stokes Paul and Lucy Burns, young Americans schooled in the militant tactics of the British suffrage movement, were appointed to the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) Congressional Committee. Radicalized by their experiences in England–which included violent confrontations with authorities, jail sentences, hunger strikes, and force-feedings–they sought to inject a renewed militancy into the American campaign for womans suffrage?.
Continue Reading »At no time was the federal government more involved with African Americans than during the Civil War and Reconstruction period, when approximately four million slaves became freedmen. No agency epitomized that involvement more than did the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually called the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Continue Reading »Following the end of the Civil War and adoption of the 13th Amendment, many white southerners were dismayed by the prospect of living or working equally with Blacks, whom they considered inferior. In an effort to maintain the status quo, the majority of states and local communities passed “Jim Crow” laws that mandated “separate but equal” status for African Americans.
Continue Reading »Over the past two decades, social work educators and students have developed a body of literature, which describes the legacy, and contributions of African Americans or members of the Black community to social welfare historical developments.
Continue Reading »The cultural and political currents that shaped American society during the early decades of the twentieth century had a decided effect on the configuration of the American welfare system as it appeared in the 1930s.
Continue Reading »Progressivism is a term commonly applied to a variety of responses to the economic and social problems that arose as a result of urbanization and the rapid industrialization introduced to America in the 19th Century.
Continue Reading »In 2005, the passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote, celebrated its 85th anniversary. The resolution calling for woman suffrage had passed, after much debate, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, convened by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. In The Declaration of Sentiments, a document based upon the Declaration of Independence, the numerous demands of these early activists were elucidated.
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