Browse Items (32 total)

In 1806, Virginia's General Assembly passed a law that required enslaved people who had been freed after that date to leave the state within one year's time. Those who remained in the Commonwealth more than a year could be re-enslaved and sold.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Touted as the largest and most magnificent exposition of all time, the New York World’s Fair opened at Flushing Meadows in April 1939. In the Court of States, one exhibition was strikingly different from the rest: the Virginia Room, “an island of…

"Agitate – Educate – Legislate” was the slogan of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the prohibition of alcohol. Established in 1874 in Ohio, the union became a national movement and Virginia women established a state chapter in…