Women's Rights

Many of the fascinating stories tied to women across history are preserved in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution.

This Museum Tour Is the Perfect Guide to Celebrating Women’s History in Style

From the National Portrait Gallery to the Air and Space Museum, here’s where to find the stories of wondrous women come March

When news of Tennessee’s ratification reached Alice Paul on August 18, she sewed the thirty-sixth star onto her ratification banner and unfurled it from the balcony of Woman’s Party headquarters in Washington.

How Tennessee Became the Final Battleground in the Fight for Suffrage

One hundred years later, the campaign for the women’s vote has many potent similarities to the politics of today

Founders of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst. The group's motto was "deeds, not words," Marshall writes in his blog.

Photographs Documenting the Struggle for Women's Suffrage Are Reimagined in Full Color

Colorizer Tom Marshall's deft touch brings new life to 100-year-old photographs

Women stand in gutter for a poster parade organized by the Women's Freedom League to promote the suffrage message.

Stories of Forgotten Suffragettes Come Alive in New Exhibition

The Museum of London's "Votes for Women” show marks 100 years since women were first granted the right to vote in Britain

Emery Walker photograph of damage to the painting of Thomas Carlyle by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt, 1877.

See the Portrait Slashed by a Butcher's Cleaver During Height of Women's Suffrage Movement

In an act of protest, the London National Portrait Gallery work was damaged in 1914. It returns to mark 100 years of the Representation of the People Act

A YMCA gym in 1910.

The YMCA First Opened Gyms to Train Stronger Christians

Physical fitness was a secondary goal for the movement

Before the 1840s, women had no choice but to deliver children without anesthetic.

It Didn’t Take Very Long For Anesthesia to Change Childbirth

The unprecedented idea of a painless delivery changed women's lives

Carry A. Nation with her bible and her hatchet not long before she died in 1911.

Three Things to Know About Radical Prohibitionist Carry A. Nation

Nation was convinced she was on a mission from God

The Ten Best History Books of 2017

From presidential biographies to a look at the long rise of fake news, these picks will surely interest history buffs

You may know the woman depicted here as Rosie the Riveter, but she wasn't originally called that.

The Riveting Story of an American Icon

Rosie has a surprising history

A voting sign from the 2008 election.

For a Few Decades in the 18th Century, Women and African-Americans Could Vote in New Jersey

Then some politicians got angry

In her second book, The Sexes Throughout Nature, Blackwell argued that while male lions are physically larger and stronger, female lions were “more complex in structure and in functions” through their ability to reproduce and feed their young.

The Woman Who Challenged Darwin's Sexism

How a preacher with no scientific training ended up writing the first feminist critique of <em>Origins</em>

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Date: c. 1870 Albumen silver print

Central Park Has No Monuments Dedicated to Real Women. That's About to Change

The future site was dedicated during the state's centennial of women's suffrage; the State of New York also will build two statues of suffrage leaders

Harriot Hunt was accepted into Harvard Medical school and treated hundreds of patients over her 25-year-career, blazing a trail for future generations of female physicians.

The Medical Practitioner Who Paved the Way for Women Doctors in America

Harriot Hunt refused to let her gender limit her ambitions—or those of the next generation of physicians

Why Saudi Arabia Giving a Robot Citizenship Is Firing People Up

Saudi Arabia’s newest citizen is a robot named Sophia and she already has more rights than human women who live in the country

In July 1955, black children wait to register for school in Lawrence County, Arkansas, as schools desegregate in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

How a Psychologist’s Work on Race Identity Helped Overturn School Segregation in 1950s America

Mamie Phipps Clark came up with the oft-cited "doll test" and provided expert testimony in Brown v. Board of Education

Reaching the summit of the Matterhorn made Annie Smith Peck well-known.

Three Things to Know About Pants-Wearing Mountaineer Annie Smith Peck

Peck wasn’t wealthy and her family, who did have money, didn’t approve of her globe-trotting, mountain-climbing, pants-wearing lifestyle

The British Navy was a big deal in the 1700s.

Jane Squire and the Longitude Wars

The sixteenth-century debate over how to determine longitude had a lot of participants—and one woman

A Coco Chanel Little Black Dress, released in 1926.

Why Coco Chanel Created the Little Black Dress

The style icon created a... well.... style icon in 1926

In this Saturday March 29, 2014 file photo, a woman drives a car on a highway in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving. Saudi Arabia authorities announced Tuesday Sept. 26, 2017, that women will be allowed to drive for the first time in the ultra-conservative kingdom from next summer, fulfilling a key demand of women's rights activists who faced detention for defying the ban.

Saudi Women Win the Right to Drive

Next June, women in the ultra-patriarchal society will become the last in the world to receive driver's licenses

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