In 1904, determined to support her son, Dr. Mary Jane McLeod Bethune opened a boarding school, the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls. Eventually, Bethune’s school became a college, merging with the all-male Cookman Institute to form Bethune-Cookman College in 1929. It issued its first degrees in 1943.

A champion of racial and gender equality, Bethune founded many organizations and led voter registration drives after women gained the vote in 1920, risking racist attacks. In 1924, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and in 1935, she became the founding president of the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune also played a role in the transition of Black voters from the Republican Party—“the party of Lincoln”—to the Democratic Party during the Great Depression. A friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1936, Bethune became the highest ranking African American woman in government when President Franklin Roosevelt named her director of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration, where she remained until 1944. She was also a leader of FDR’s unofficial “black cabinet.” In 1937 Bethune organized a conference on the Problems of the Negro and Negro Youth, and fought to end discrimination and lynching. In 1940, she became vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP), a position she held for the rest of her life. As a member of the advisory board that in 1942 created the Women’s Army Corps, Bethune ensured it was racially integrated. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, Bethune was the only woman of color at the founding conference of the United Nations in 1945. She regularly wrote for the leading African American newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender.

Source: National Women’s History Museum

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-mcleod-bethune

Victoria Claflin Woodhull was one of the 19th century’s most colorful characters. She was a women’s rights and suffrage advocate, a popular public speaker, a newspaper publisher who introduced American audiences to the works of Karl Marx, the first woman to operate a Wall Street brokerage firm, and the first female presidential candidate in 1872.

Source: National Park Service

https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-first-woman-to-run-for-president-victoria-woodhull.htm

On January 3, 1969, Shirley Chisholm made history as the first African-American woman elected to the United States Congress when she was sworn into the 91st Congress and took her seat in the House of Representatives. She was the first African-American woman to win a seat in the New York State Assembly from Brooklyn, and in 1972 she became the first African American to campaign seriously for the presidential nomination of a major political party.

Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote.

Source: National Archives

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/19th-amendment#:~:text=Passed%20by%20Congress%20June%204,decades%20of%20agitation%20and%20protest.

Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified that the Nineteenth Amendment—extending the vote to women—was ratified as part of the Constitution. The State of Tennessee ratified the amendment on August 18, 1920.  More than a year earlier, the House voted to approve the amendment on May 21, 1919. Introduced by Woman Suffrage Committee Chairman James R. Mann of Illinois, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment was successfully pushed by suffrage lobbyists who tied U.S. defense of democracy abroad to the extension of democracy at home. The bill gained momentum as the U.S. mobilized to fight World War I with the help of many women.

Credit: History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “The Nineteenth Amendment,” https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-19th-Amendment/ (March 15, 2023)

Crystal Eastman was a labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist who authored model legislation and helped create political organizations that survived this century's turmoil. In 1917, Eastman, Baldwin and Norman Thomas, together with other supporters, established the National Civil Liberties Bureau, an organization that would later become the ACLU, to fight government suppression of dissenters' rights during World War I.

In 1920, the NCLB was reconstituted as the ACLU, the suffrage movement triumphed, and Eastman continued her activities in support of women's rights. As one of the four authors of the Equal Rights Amendment, she was also one of the few socialists to endorse it when it was introduced in 1923.

Source: ACLU

https://www.aclu.org/other/crystal-eastman#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%2D%2DAmerican%20Civil,Saturday%2C%20the%20ACLU%20announced%20today.

The park commemorates women's struggle for equal rights, and the First Women's Rights Convention, held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, NY on July 19 and 20, 1848.

An estimated three hundred women and men attended the Convention, including Lucretia Mott and Frederick Douglass.

At the conclusion, 68 women and 32 men signed the Declaration of Sentiments drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the M'Clintock family.

Source: National Park Service

https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/the-first-womens-rights-convention.htm#:~:text=The%20park%20commemorates%20women's%20struggle,July%2019%20and%2020%2C%201848.

Jeannette Rankin voted against United States entry into World War I in 1917 and did not run for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1918. Ever since, historians have assumed that Rankin’s “no” vote cost the Congresswoman her seat in Congress.

Some of her contemporaries certainly believed it did. “I knew she couldn’t be elected again if she did vote against the war,” her brother Wellington Rankin said. “I didn’t want to see her destroy herself.” The formidable head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, charged that Rankin’s vote lost the woman suffrage cause “a million votes.” At the time, Catt announced, “Miss Rankin was not voting for the suffragists of the nation.”

Credit: History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “Jeannette Rankin: “I Cannot Vote for War”,” https://history.house.gov/Blog/2017/April/4-5-Rankin-War/ (March 15, 2023)

Since 1917, when Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman to serve in Congress, a total of 423 women have served as U.S. Representatives, Delegates, Resident Commissioners, or Senators.

Credit: History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “Women in Congress,” https://history.house.gov/Education/Fact-Sheets/WIC-Fact-Sheet2/ (March 15, 2023)