By the late 19th century, most women had to work outside the home for wages due to financial necessity. Women worked as farm laborers, in factories, and in other emerging jobs in offices and schools. As more women entered the workforce and received education, they began advocating for reforms related to issues like temperance, child labor, and suffrage. Groups like the National Association of Colored Women and the National Women Suffrage Association were formed to promote women's rights and social reforms. The suffrage movement in particular employed a three-pronged strategy of lobbying state legislatures, pursuing legal challenges, and advocating for a constitutional amendment to secure women's right to vote nationally.

1. Women in Public Life:
By the late 19th
century, only middle-class and upper-class
women could afford to not work. Poorer women usually had no
choice but to work for wages outside the home.

2. Women in the Work Force:
• Farm women: On the
farms in the South and
the Midwest, women had
household tasks such as
cooking, making clothes,
and laundering. Women
also helped raise the
livestock, plow the fields
and harvest the crops

3. Women in the Work Force:
• Women in Industry: As
better paying jobs
became available in
towns and cities,
women had new
options for finding jobs.
One out of every five
American women held
jobs, 25 percent of
them worked in
manufacturing

4. Women in the Work Force:
• Women also began to fill
jobs in offices, stores, and
classrooms. These jobs
required a high-school
education, and by 1890,
women high school
graduates outnumbered
men

5. Women Lead Reform:
• Dangerous conditions, low wages, and long hours led
many female industrial workers to push for reforms
• By 1910, women’s clubs, at which these women
discussed art and literature, were nearly half a million
strong. These clubs sometimes grew into reform
groups that addressed issues such as temperance or
child labor
• By the late 19th
century, many women entered the
workforce or sought higher education. Many of these
educated women began to apply their skills to needed
social reforms

6. Women and Reform:
• In 1896, African-American
women founded the National
Association of Colored
Women (NACW)
• Josephine Ruffin identified
the mission of the NACW as
the moral education of the
race with which we are
identified- managed
nurseries, reading rooms,
and kindergartens

7. Women and Reform:
• Susan B. Anthony, a leading
proponent of women suffrage,
the right to vote, formed the
National Women Suffrage
Association (NWSA) with the
help of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Eventually their group would join
with others to form the National
American Woman Suffrage
Association, or the NAWSA
Susan B. Anthony

8. A Three-Part Strategy for Suffrage:
• Women tried to convince state legislatures to
grant women the right to vote (Utah,
Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho)
• Women pursued court cases to test the
Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that
states denying their male citizens the right to
vote would lose congressional representation
• Women pushed for a national constitutional
amendment to grant women the vote