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Content: Women and the New Deal: Gaining Ground in Politics and Public Life
In the first decades of the twentieth century, American women began to throw off some of the constraints under which they had labored for generations. Urbanization and the absence of men during World War I allowed them to enter paid employment. They got involved in unions and the movement for female suffrage, at last winning the vote in 1920. Opportunities for higher education increased. Middle-class women joined the reform work of the Progressive movement, volunteering in community organizations called settlement houses to help the poor and study such issues as housing and work conditions. Social mores grew more flexible. Wearing clothes that permitted freer range of motion than the long skirts and corsets of the nineteenth century, women increasingly entered the public arena to speak their minds and earn a living. As president, Franklin D. Roosevelt hired these educated, politically astute, activist women in unprecedented numbers. One of his gifts as a leader had always been an ability to recognize talent in different kinds of people and tap it.