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[americaswomen]

“We didn’t go to dinner, we all got in line to sign up.”

The WACs (Women’s Army Corps)

“The first five WACs flown to Europe had been trained to serve as executive secretaries. They arrived in England and were promptly put on a boat for North Africa, which was sunk. Although all five were rescued, Oveta Culp Hobby, the Texas newspaper publisher who had been appointed head of the WACs, flew to the training center at Daytona Beach to warn the women about the dangers of going into a combat theater. After her speech, the WACs were given a break to eat and were urged to think about whether they still wanted to volunteer for duty overseas. ‘We didn’t go to dinner, we all got in line to sign up,’ one woman wrote. ‘The whole battalion, one behind the other…. The officers were walking around with tears running down their cheeks, especially Colonel Hobby.’ 

Of the 300 women at Daytona Beach, 298 volunteered.”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pg 376.

[americaswomen]

"...Women who had spent their lives wrapped in corsets and weighed down by heavy skirts must have been thrilled to be able to go flying down the street on two wheels."

The Bicycle

“If there’s any symbol for the transformation that had occurred in the lives of American women as they approached the twentieth century, it ought to be the bicycle.

“Wheeling” offered independence as well as speed, and it was not only respectable; it was fashionable. ... Susan B. Anthony enthused that bicycling “did more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.”

The Victorian standards of proper dress were not going to survive the wheeling generation. “A few years ago, no woman would dare venture on the street with a skirt that stopped above her ankles,” wrote an essayist in Scribners. But the bicycle, the writer said, “has given to all American womankind the liberty of dress for which reformers have been sighing for generations.” ... Life noted approvingly in 1897 that “a large proportion of the bicycle girls look exceedingly well in bicycle clothes…. Not the least good thing the bicycle has done has been to demonstrate publicly that women have legs.”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pgs 279-280

via Ella Cycling Tips

[americaswomen]

“...Her status as the ideal of the era made it certain that virtually nobody was ever going to be happy with the shape of her body again.”

Twiggy

“Twiggy was Leslie Hornby, a 90-pound British teenager who had been discovered while working as a shampoo girl in a London beauty shop and turned into the world’s most famous model by the time she was seventeen. Her sticklike figure (31-22-32), pale skin, and huge eyes defined the sixties look.

While American teenagers had been obsessed with dieting long before Twiggy hit the magazine covers, her status as the ideal of the era made it certain that virtually nobody was ever going to be happy with the shape of her body again. (Twiggy wasn’t particularly happy with hers, either. Asked once whether she had the figure of the future, the model replied, “It’s not really what you call a figure, is it?”)”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pg 423

[americaswomen]

“It produced a sort of social liberation for American girls because the Twist was the first universally popular dance in which a couple never touched.”

The Twist

“Throughout the twentieth century, girls had been better at dancing than boys, but they had always been trapped by the necessity of following the man. The Twist, which was succeeded by many, many other variations on the same theme, freed girls to enjoy themselves without having to match what they were doing with their partner. They actually didn’t even need a partner, and as time went on it became easier and more socially acceptable for a girl who wanted to get up and dance to simply go and do it.”

Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pgs 421-422

[americaswomen]

“[Her] fearlessness inspired men half her age and rallied an unexpected militancy in their wives and daughters.”

Mother Jones

“...One of the more remarkable female union leaders of the era, Mother Jones, was devoted to organizing the all-male mining industry. 

‘I have been in jail more than once and I expect to go again. If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, actually to the Lord you ought, to see one old woman who is not afraid.’

Mother Jones was unusual for her era in that she was an equal-opportunity organizer, who welcomed African American workers and brought women and children into the strikes. She organized the wives of miners into teams armed with mops and brooms so they could guard the mines against scabs. She staged pageants where one child was crowned queen of the strikers and parades with children carrying signs that read: “We Want to Go to School and Not to the Mines.” 

Along with the miners, child workers were her particular concern. During a silk strike in Philadelphia, 100,000 workers, including 16,000 children, left their jobs over a demand that their workweek be cut from sixty to fifty-five hours. Mother Jones organized a children’s march of 100 boys and girls from Philadelphia to New York City “to show the New York millionaires our grievances.” The march attracted considerable publicity, but national bans on child labor were not successfully passed into law until 1941.”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pgs 287-289.

[americaswomen]

“During World War I, the number of American women who died from the effects of childbirth was greater than the number of men who died on the battlefield.”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pg. 336

[americaswomen]

“...Reporting was still one of the professions where, early on, a few women had been able to have adventures in full public view.”

Dorothy Thompson

“Dorothy Thompson became an incredibly influential columnist in the 1920s after she went to Europe and sold freelance stories on the German political situation. At the time, international reporting was a new field, not particularly prestigious or well paid— fertile territory for ambitious women. Thompson’s analysis of what was going on in Germany and Eastern Europe was must-reading in the years before World War II....”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pgs 361-362

[americaswomen]

“Serving as labor secretary during the Great Depression turned out to be an endless crisis.”

“Frances Perkins...became the secretary of labor— the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet-level position. She was the highest-ranking woman to serve in the federal government and a lightning rod for conservative opponents of the Roosevelt administration.

When Perkins worked for Roosevelt, she repeatedly calmed down labor crises by getting government officials to withdraw their police and state troopers and let the employers and strikers work out things on their own. On one of those occasions, the grateful workers took her to a house where she watched men emerge from the basement with sacks and suitcases full of dynamite they had been planning to use to blow up their factory. They dumped it into a nearby canal instead.

Her predecessor never spoke to her and left her a desk full of cockroaches. The Supreme Court rejected many of her attempts to establish minimum wage laws and maximum workweeks. Conservative congressmen resented Perkins’s support for collective bargaining and her lack of enthusiasm for deporting illegal aliens— a job her predecessor had embraced so avidly he sometimes wound up shipping off people who were American citizens. ... In a xenophobic Washington, many people believed Perkins was actually a foreign-born alien named Matilda Watski. In 1938, her opponents began a movement to forcibly remove her from office. “I didn’t like the idea of being impeached,” she stated. 

The effort failed, and in the meantime, Perkins had become one of the central figures in the creation of the Social Security Act. FDR rejected all her attempts to quit, and in the end, she served through his entire administration. On April 12, 1945, when the Cabinet learned that the president was dead, Perkins and Eleanor Roosevelt went out in the hall together, and the stolid labor secretary and the First Lady “sat on a bench like two schoolgirls” and cried.”

- Gail Collins, “America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines,” pgs 361-362