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Lesson

Women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Duration
80 min
Published
Nov 5, 2020
Women holding banners demanding women's suffrage outside a government building in the early 20th century.
In the late nineteenth century, American suffragettes continued the decades-long struggle for the equal right to vote. Although the movement split into disparate elements with differing strategies, the movement united again in 1890 to fight for a women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After continuing struggle, in 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Meanwhile, women reformers engaged in a number of lesser-known movements to ban alcohol, provide better working conditions for women and children, and improve the lot of immigrants. Women also increasingly began to work outside the home in factories, department stores, and offices. Therefore, women began to enter public life politically and economically in a fundamentally new way to break with the past in which they were primarily confined to the domestic sphere of the home.

Founding Principles

Federalism, Equality, Liberty, Representative / Republican Government

Objectives

  • Students will examine the causes, struggles, and successes of various forms of civic engagement by women, including efforts toward economic, social, and political equality.
  • Students will understand the extensive array of reform movements in which women took the lead as part of the broader reform effort of the Progressive Era.
  • Students will compare and contrast the goals of the social reformers fighting for protective legislation with the goals of reformers who wanted an Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Materials

Lesson Components

ActivityHandout A: Background Essay: Women in the Gilded Age
ActivityHandout B: Women in the Gilded Age Graphic Organizer
ActivityHandout C: Timeline of Women’s Suffrage
ActivityHandout D: Images of Women’s Suffrage
ActivityHandout E: Protective Legislation for Women
ActivityHandout F: Extension Activity: Comparing and Contrasting Women’s and African-American Suffrage Movements
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Lesson plan

80 minClick a phase to open it

Key Terms

“Separate spheres”
Temperance
Settlement houses
Americanization
Protective legislation

Standards

Advanced Placement

  • National

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