Browse Items (32 total)

Maggie Lena Walker was an African American woman who became a banker, business leader, and social reformer. She was the first woman to establish and become the president of a bank in the United States. Walker was born in 1864 in Richmond, Virginia.…

World War I brought about great shifts in American society. As the war began, women were not allowed to vote or serve in military combat roles. As the nation was gripped by war, the entire population was mobilized to produce weapons and supplies for…

American society underwent changes during both WWI and WWII. The roles of women shifted from domestic roles as caretakers and home makers to working in male- dominated fields like agriculture and manufacturing in factories. Many factories shifted…

After the United States entered WW I in 1917, young men who worked in agriculture left to join the military or find better jobs working for the government and the burgeoning defense industry. The departure of them men left farms without enough people…

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the powerful paramount chief of the Algonquin Indians in eastern Virginia. She was about eleven years old when the English colonists arrived at Jamestown in 1607. Although she had been named Matoaka, she has…

Between 1877 and the mid-1960s, authorities enforced racial segregation throughout Virginia. In 1902, the Virginia State Constitution, authorized by the Virginia General Assembly, instituted a poll tax in which all Black and persons of color would…

In 1919, at the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) conference, President Carrie Chapman Catt proposed in her address the creation of a “league of women voters to finish the fight and aid in the reconstruction of the nation”. In…

In January 1975, the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year was a presidential commission established by President Gerald Ford. The purpose of the commission was to work in conjunction with the International Women’s Year…

During World War II booklets were published to assist homemakers, who were mostly women at that time, provide for their families and meet the requirements of the wartime ration system created after the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. President…

During World War II, the United States Army established a unit that enabled women to fill non-combat roles. Prior to the creation of this unit women mostly served as nurses supporting combat troops. In May 1941, Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers of…