An Incomplete, Episodic, and Still Evolving Timeline of U.S. Gender and Sexuality History
Happy Women's History Month! Some samplings of the long, complex history of gender and sexual rights and feminism in the United States.
Several years ago, I put together a very loose timeline of the history of gender and sexuality in the United States for my Women’s Studies students. I wanted to give them a snapshot, a trajectory of sorts, of where we’d been and how, through constant struggle, we’d gained important rights as humans in this country. As time went on and I used this timeline in other classes, I decided to open it up to my students for their own input. As a result, it grew and became much more rich and interesting. It’s still definitely incomplete and episodic, but it represents many different voices and perspectives. I wish it ended well, but, alas, with the recent election, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the attacks on trans folks, the hard turn to the right and towards a reinvigoration of traditional patriarchy, and more, we risk losing many many gains we’d made over the decades towards a more just and equitable society.
But fight on we must. Knowing our past and the struggles of those who came before us gives us both inspiration and a roadmap for organizing for the future.
Happy Women’s History Day 2025! Let’s keep the good works rolling. As best we can.
Please check out the Women’s Union History videos featuring Brigette Browning, President of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, and yours truly following the timeline
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1776—Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, second president and one of the Framers of the founding documents of the United States, urged her husband in a letter written four months before the Declaration of Independence to be careful of how much power his cohorts and he were going to put in the hands of men in the Constitution of the proposed new country:
I long to hear that you have declared an independency -- and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. . .. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness. (http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760331aa).
To which her husband replied: “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems” to the “Despotism of the Petticoat.”
1787—A Cherokee woman wrote Benjamin Franklin telling him how she had urged her people to maintain peace with the new United States. As she told him:
I am in hopes that if you Rightly consider that woman is the mother of All--and the Woman does not pull Children out of Trees or Stumps nor out of old Logs, but out of their Bodies, so that they ought to mind what a woman says. (qtd. in “Cherokee Women and the Trail of Tears” by Theda Perdue)
This exchange demonstrates how the Cherokee nation during this period was a matrilineal and matrilocal society, and shows why, in part, the Cherokee opted to elect Wilma Mankiller as their president and primary spokesperson in the 1980s-’90s.
1792—A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft was published in England and quickly re-printed in the new United States of America.
late 1700s-mid 1800s—women's literacy rate doubled; female factory workers started striking for better work conditions and better wages; women became elementary school teachers, health reformers, abolitionists, journalists.
1821—Emma Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary, the first school for women in the U.S.
1830–Sojourner Truth was the first known African American women suffragist and won a case against a white man to get her son back in 1828.
1830s—Maria Stewart, the first African American woman to speak publicly about women’s rights, started lecturing and publishing pamphlets on women’s rights, abolition, and religion. Her second speech, before the New England Anti-Slavery Society on September 21, 1832, marked the first lecture by a woman of any race before a mixed audience of men and women.
1839–Mississippi was the first state to grant married women the right to hold property in their own name without their husband’s permission
1840s—Inspired by the Abolition movement, a clear feminist movement began to emerge in the U.S.
1845—Woman in the Nineteenth-Century was published by Margaret Fuller. The text is a feminist indictment of the inequities women had to suffer in the U.S., not the least of which was having no voting rights. This was a clarion call against the stifling Cult of True Womanhood, which limited women’s ability to work, divorce, live freely, etc.
1847—Lucy Stone began lecturing on women's rights (she was also active in the American Anti-Slavery Society).
1848—First Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, NY. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott issued a Declaration of Principles based on the Declaration of Independence. Susan B. Anthony was also a part of this
1849--Elizabeth Blackwell becomes the first woman to graduate from medical school and become a doctor
1851—Sojourner Truth, born into slavery in New York, first spoke at a women's rights convention where she where, in her famous “Arn’t I a Woman?” speech, she emphasized her humanity as a black woman.
1861-1865—the Civil War takes place. One of the results of this war was the end of slavery.
1870—Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly begins publication. Produced by Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, this was a radical feminist newspaper and was the first American periodical to publish the Communist Manifesto.
1872—Victoria Woodhull, a proponent of free love, socialism, and women’s suffrage, ran for the President of the United States with Frederick Douglass as her vice-presidential running mate.
1873–the Comstock Act was passed by the U.S. Congress. It made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials through the mail, including novels, health pamphlets, birth control and abortion implements, comic books, newspapers, etc.. The law was used to suppress birth control and abortions. Recently, in light of the Dobbs decision, anti-abortion forces have been reviving the law to try to prevent the medications used for abortion to be sent through the mail. This would effectively end someone’s ability to have a safe medical abortion in any state in the US. For more on this go here.
1870-1920—the women's rights movement (suffrage) intensified. Between the late 1860's and 1920, more and more women went to college; Margaret Sanger pioneered birth control education; women published and joined political organizations.
1884—Belva Lockwood runs for president with Marietta Stow as her vice-presidential running mate, making this making this the first all-woman ticket in the history of the U.S.
1889–Jane Addams wore many hats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: suffragist, social worker, activist, Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Notably, Addams founded Chicago's Hull House in 1889, a time when many new immigrants lived and worked in harsh conditions. This settlement house provided health care, day care, education, vocational training, cultural and social activities, and legal aid to the immigrant community, creating a new model for social welfare. Addams maintained a decades-long relationship with philanthropist Mary Rozet Smith, marked by loving letters.
1892-1893—Ida Wells-Barnett, the anti-lynching crusader and African American feminist leader, becomes editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech (1892) and founds the Alpha Suffrage Club (1893), the first black woman’s suffrage organization.
1893—World’s Congress of Representative Women at the Columbian Exposition (i.e. the World’s Fair) in Chicago. Because of African American women’s marginalization, this event also marks the inauguration of the National Association of Colored Women, founded by Mary Church Terrell.
1893—Magnus Hirschfeld attends Colombian Exposition, and discovers the first proof an active queer community within the African American community of Chicago. Begins the basis of research needed to open the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft, the first medical institute devoted to homosexual and transgender medical care and study, as result of his activism.
1896—Plessy v. Ferguson passed and meant the initiation of “separate but equal” facilities on trains, buses, in restaurants, bathrooms, etc. for people of African American descent.
late 1800s-early 1900s—Many young Chinese women who immigrated to the United States were either sold or entered into prostitution. Yet because there was a reform movement taking place in China, which worked to liberate women from such practices as foot binding, polygamy, and arranged marriages, women who moved to the U.S. were able to look to their homeland for models of ways Chinese women might become emancipated.
1909—The Uprising of Thirty Thousand occurs on November 22. This was a general strike in New York called by a local of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) who made shirtwaists, and it concerned the approximate number of workers who rose up in order to answer the union’s call to protest the inhumane working conditions they suffered through in sweatshops. This strike united society matrons, socialists, and strikers (who were mostly teenaged girls), and thus became known as the “woman’s movement strike.” It also was ethnically diverse in that many of the workers were Russian Jews, Italians, as well as native-born Americans.
1911—On March 25th, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory caught fire, causing the deaths of 146 garment workers—123 women and 23 men—who died from smoke inhalation, the fire itself, or from jumping out of the building. Most of those who died were young Jewish and Italian immigrant women who had been locked in the factory because the owners believed they would take unauthorized breaks or steal from them. The outcry over this terrible event led to an upsurge in membership for the ILGWU, which fought for better working conditions in sweatshops, particularly for women workers.
1916—Margaret Sanger, Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. It later changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. The clinic distributed birth control, birth control advice, and birth control information. All three women were arrested and jailed for violating the Comstock Act. Sanger was key in advocating for women’s rights to control their own bodies. However, by the 1920s, Sanger found common cause with some of the ideas of the eugenics movement, which was troubling. Nevertheless, she advocated for “voluntary motherhood” for all women, regardless of race, class, immigration status, or marital status and that birth control and sterilization should be voluntary and not based on race.
1916–17-year-old Mexican immigrant Carmelita Torres resisted the practice of gasoline baths at the border leading a group of 2,000 women in revolt, sparking the bath riots which shut down the border for days. Carmelita and a trolley full of women resisted the practice of gasoline baths and invasive genital inspections because the border security guards would photograph their nude bodies and post the pictures in bars around El Paso.
1917-19—American involvement in World War I. A probable result of women’s work both in the war and on the home front was passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
1920—Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. The passage of the 19th Amendment essentially ended the first wave of feminism. As time passed, other women won other essential rights: the right to own their own property, to keep their own wages if they were married, to get custody of their children if they divorced, to divorce if they were in a bad marriage, to hold office, etc.
1929—the Stock Market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. This was a terrible hardship on poor and working class families.
1930s—Tremendous activism in the Labor Movement. Many women union members were extremely important in agitating for labor rights during this period. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a prominent leader and a tireless advocate of the working classes as was Mother Jones, Luisa Moreno, Emma Goldman, and many others.
1938—the federal ban on birth control was lifted.
1941-1945—World War II: women worked in the war industry and as nurses while men fought. From this situation, we have the image of an independent "Rosie the Riveter," a woman who could do a man's job just as well as a man—because she had to. When the GIs came home from the war, women were forced to give up their jobs and "return to the home" (that is, if they were in the middle to upper-middle classes and, primarily, white. As always, throughout the history of the U.S. the stereotype of the woman staying at home to take care of the children is a specifically white middle-class and industrial-age phenomena: many working class women have always had to work outside the home to support their families.) There was a huge post-war propaganda campaign to get women to embrace the homemaker image as well. This also represents the beginning of the Baby Boom.
1944—Korematsu v. United States upheld Civilian Exclusion order No. 34 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This order forced all people of Japanese ancestry into internment camps as of May 9, 1942. It wasn’t until just recently that the United States officially apologized to Japanese Americans for this executive order.
1947-1950— The Lavender Scare : Similar to the Red Scare, but instead of communists everyone was scared of/on the lookout for queer people, men specifically, especially in federal jobs. 1700 men and women were denied federal jobs .
1949—The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir is published.
1950s-60s—the Civil Rights movement to eradicate the "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws that kept black people segregated from whites (for example, Brown v. Board of Education passed in 1954 which desegregated public schools). As with the abolition movement in the nineteenth century, many women (both white and black) began by working in the Civil Rights movement, and from this experience, started looking at their own lives and what was expected of women in American society, and started their own movement calling for reproductive rights (i.e. birth control and legalized abortion), equal opportunities in work, school and society. In addition to the Civil Rights and Women’s movements, other movements, such as Chicano Rights, the American Indian Movement, and gay rights were beginning.
1960—The Feminine Mystique is published by Betty Friedan and marks one of the beginnings of thesecond wave of feminism. This text documents a housewife's oppression and was the rally cry for a generation of middle class white women.
1960—the birth control pill goes on the market. Margaret Sanger secured the initial funding for it in the 1950s, and in May 1960, the FDA approved of hormonal contraceptives. This helped to usher in the sexual revolution.
1960s—the United Farm Workers of America, a union of agricultural workers in California founded by Cesar Chavez along with Larry Itliong, began to take shape. Dolores Huerta, a teacher and mother of 11, was instrumental in its founding and organization.
1960s—Friedan founded NOW (National Organization of Women), a largely white and middle-class liberal feminist group dedicated to getting equal rights for women. Liberal feminists must be distinguished from Radical feminists: not all second wave feminism was the same. Liberal feminists wanted to integrate women into the public sphere by getting laws passed that would give women the same rights as men. Radical feminists saw the whole structure of American society as being racist and classist, and until these larger issues were solved, NO ONE could be equal in this society.
1961—on September 11, the first US-televised documentary about homosexuality aired on a local station in California
1965—Griswold v. Connecticut made it illegal for states to ban contraception for married couples.
1967—Radical feminist groups began meeting. According to Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975: "[Radical feminists] fought for safe, effective, accessible contraception; the repeal of all abortion laws; the creation of high-quality, community-controlled child-care centers; and an end to the media's objectification of women.” They also questioned such things as family, love, marriage, normative heterosexuality, and rape as being constricting to women's ability to be free subjects in American society (all these things, radical feminists felt, kept women in their place—in the home and not in society at large). This is when the term "the personal is political" was coined to reflect that the very private life of women was political because home was where they were supposed to stay. Radical feminists also were responsible for creating "consciousness raising" groups.
1968—at the United Nations 1968 Conference on Human Rights, the non-binding Proclamation of Tehran was the first international document that recognized reproductive rights. It stated: “Parents have a basic human right to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” Also during this year, IUDs were approved in the U.S.
1968—Entertainer and activist Josephine Baker performed in vaudeville showcases and in Broadway musicals, including Shuffle Along. In 1925, she moved to Paris to perform in a revue. When the show closed, Baker was given her own show and found stardom. She became the first African American woman to star in a motion picture and to perform with an integrated cast at an American concert hall. At the March on Washington in 1968, Baker was the only woman speaker. In her speech, she honored fellow women civil rights activists. She had relationships with both men and women throughout her lifetime.
1969—On June 28th, gays and lesbians rose up against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, NYC, and rebelled against the constant raids and the criminalization of homosexuality. The Stonewall Rebellion (or uprising or riots) constitutes one of the earliest, most visible actions that sparked the Gay Liberation Movement in the U.S.
1970—the Women's Strike for Equality, a national women's strike demanding twenty-four hour childcare centers, abortion on demand, and equal employment and educational opportunities for women drew between 35,000 and 50,000 women to New York and was held on August 26th, the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage.
1970—the first issue of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a woman’s health book produced by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, was published by the New England Free Press and sold a quarter of a million copies by 1973, at which time, Simon & Schuster picked up the publishing rights. This book is still being updated and re-issued every couple of years.
1970-80—a clear Chicana feminist movement began to emerge to address the specific issues that affected Chicanas as women of color. It emerged largely as a result of women’s experiences within the Chicano movement.
1971—Ms Magazine was founded by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pittman Hughes as a periodical providing “feminist news and information.”
1972—Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman to seek the presidency, running for the Democratic Party’s nomination
1973—Roe vs. Wade made abortion legal throughout the U.S.
1973—Black feminists began joining forces. Black Women Organized for Action was formed by fifteen Black women in the San Francisco area and quickly grew to over 300. The National Black Feminist Organization also formed in this year.
1973—Homosexuality is removed from American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental illnesses.
1974—The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group taking its name from a guerrilla action planned and led by Harriet Tubman during the Civil War which resulted in the freeing of more than 750 enslaved people, was formed. In 1977, three members of the collective, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, issued “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” which tells the story of the first three years of the group’s existence.
1977— Harvey Milk was elected as the first gay official in California. He was on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors until he was assassinated in 1978.
1989—The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw.
1994—The Clinton Administration’s policy of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” prohibited harassment of gay and lesbian military service members while still upholding the official ban on people from these communities from serving their country. This began the slow process of eliminating the ban on homosexuals serving in the military. Since DADT ended in 2011, people have been able to serve in the military regardless of their sexual orientation.
1996—The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman and it allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states. This barred same-sex married couples from being recognized as “spouses” by federal laws, depriving them from receiving marriage benefits and other protections, including those laws protecting families.
1998—Emergency contraception, i.e. “the morning after pill” was approved by the FDA.
2000—the abortion pill, mifepristone, was approved by the FDA for distribution in the United States. This safe, effective, widely available, and easy to use medication has made abortion a much simpler procedure. In 2017, mifespristone accounted for approximately 40% of all recorded abortions and 60% of abortions performed up to 10 weeks, though it’s probably higher since many self-managed abortions are not recorded. The medication is also used for a variety of other health issues.
2008—Hillary Clinton ran for the Democratic Party’s nominee for President against Barack Obama, who wins to become the United States’ first African American president.
2009— RuPaul’s Drag Race first airs on Logo, showcasing queer talent on television.
2010—the Affordable Care Act not only made health insurance a mandate for US citizens, it also declared Contraception a form of preventative care and that it would be available without a copay, thus for the first time in US history, most forms of contraception were available for free to people with health insurance.
2012— PrEP was approved on July 16, by the FDA. Truvada for HIV negative individuals who are at high risk of acquiring HIV.
2013—United States v. Windsor, a landmark civil rights case, was brought to the Supreme Court by the Obama Administration to strike down the 3rd clause of DOMA, which then allowed same-sex marriages to be performed under federal jurisdiction, thus legalizing same-sex marriage nation-wide.
2016—Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Party’s nomination and ran for President of the United States. Donald Trump, her opponent, a supposed billionaire businessman and reality TV star, was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. In this same election, Jill Stein ran for President of the U.S. as the Green Party nominee. Donald Trump won the election with a narrow Electoral College victory while losing the popular vote to Clinton.
2017–Following the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault and harrassment case (the New York case against him was overturned in April 2024), the #MeToo movement formed. Women who had also been sexually assaulted or harassed took to media and social media to share their experiences and the names of their abusers.
2017-20—Under the Trump Administration, attacks on women’s, people of colors’, immigrants’, transpeoples’ rights were constant. The Supreme Court gained three new, very conservative Justices, one of whom, Bret Kavanaugh, was accused of attempting to rape a young woman at a party when they were in high school. He was appointed anyway. The third Supreme Court Justice’s appointment—Amy Coney Barrett, an extremely conservative Originalist—replaced the liberal and highly respected Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died right before the 2020 election. Former President Trump himself has been the subject of multiple lawsuits and accusations of sexual assault and inappropriateness. Threats to funding Planned Parenthood (where many women get all their healthcare needs met), the right to abortion, the rights of transpeople and transchildren to use the bathroom of their choice, and a plethora of other things were and continue to be a nearly daily occurrence in especially conservative states.
2019 –the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that military personal accused of rape between 1986 and 2006 can be charged for the crimes.
2020—Joe Biden and California Senator Kamala Harris won the Presidential election. Harris became not only the first woman VP, but also the first African American and Asian/Indian American person to do so.
2021—Texas passes Senate Bill 8 which bans abortion after 6 weeks, effectively eliminating abortion in the state. The US Supreme Court refused to block the law because of its enforcement mechanism which doesn’t criminalize the person seeking the abortion, but instead criminalizes abortion providers and anyone helping someone get an abortion. This was the most restrictive abortion law in the country and given the conservative make-up of the Supreme Court began to spell the end to Roe v. Wade, which ensured abortion access across the country. More states passed their own restrictive abortion laws.
2022—With a 6-3 deeply conservative majority, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022. The Supreme Court did not have to go so far as to overturn Roe when making its decision about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sought to limit abortions to 15 weeks, but Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority, argued that Roe was “egregiously wrong” and therefore a person’s right to abortion is not constitutionally protected. This decision has thrown abortion rights to the states, which has meant a steady drumbeat of ever-more draconian laws limiting or eliminating abortion protections across the country. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas threw into doubt that things like contraception, gay marriage, and the lifting of the criminalization of homosexual acts were protected by the constitution, saying, "’For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all’ of those precedents. because they are ‘demonstrably erroneous.’”
2022—In August of 2022, Kansans voted overwhelmingly to protect abortion rights, in the first state proposition put directly to voters. Several other states followed suit, which has resulted in the U.S. resembling a chaotic patchwork quilt of abortion access, restriction, or outright bans.
2022—Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida started systematically attacking the rights of transgender youth, LGBTQ+ people, access to abortion, people of color, and others with a series of orders limiting what rights people have in the state with regard to education and healthcare. This was a template being taken up in other states such as Texas and throughout the south and would be a key campaign focus in the 2024 presidential race.
2022-24–State after state in the US has either banned or limited abortion or affirmed abortion. See this useful website by the Center for Reproductive Rights for a map of where states stand with regard to abortion
2024–As noted above, the Supreme Court heard a case brought by antiabortion forces seeking to make it illegal to send mifrepristone, one of the two drugs given for an abortion, through the mail using the Comstock Act of 1973 as justification.
2024–Using a law passed in 1864, which outlawed abortion in the state of Arizona (and made the legal age of “consent” for sex and marriage 10 for a girl), Republicans in the legislature tried to revive it to ban abortion in the state. After tremendous backlash and two other attempts, Democrats, with the help of three Republicans, voted to overturn the 1864 law, thus making abortion legal in Arizona.
2024–Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s nominee for president after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Harris was the first Black and Asian American woman to run for the presidency. Donald Trump, her opponent, ended up narrowly winning the 2024 election and was sworn in as President of the United States in January, 2025 for his second term. His election has ushered in a terrible new era with regard to gender and LGBTQIA+ rights as he and his administration have vowed to undo many rights Americans have bravely fought for, using the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as a particularly vicious roadmap to institute a Christian Nationalist, hard right agenda.
2025 and beyond—Organize, Resist, Rebuild
Sources include: A Peoples’ History of the United States (Harper-Collins) by Howard Zinn; Unequal Sisters (Routledge, 2nd edition) edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz; Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota P) by Alice Echols; Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, vol.s I and II (Vintage) edited by Miriam Schneir; Race, Class, and Gender in the United States, 9th edition (Worth) edited by Paula S. Rothenberg and Kelly S. Mayhew, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Gail Collins (Little Brown); Threshold Concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies: Ways of Seeing, Thinking, and Knowing (Routledge) by Christie Launius and Holly Hassel; “11 Crucial Moments in the History of the Reproductive Rights Movement” by Emma Gowan (Bustle, 6/12/2017 https://www.bustle.com/p/11-crucial-moments-in-the-history-of-the-reproductive-rights-movement-62745); The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (Beacon) by Angela Saini