1919 Madeline Southard forms the American Association of Women Preachers, which begins publishing the journal Woman's Pulpit in 1921.

1919 The House of Representatives passes the woman suffrage amendment, 304 to 89; the Senate passes it with just two votes to spare, 56 to 25.

1920 Female college undergraduates have doubled in number since 1910.

1920 The Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor is formed to advocate for and keep statistics on women in the workforce.

1920 Despite the efforts of a number of black women voters' leagues, when Black women try to register to vote in most southern states they face property tax requirements, literacy tests and other obstacles.

1920 On August 26, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing American women citizens the right to vote. It is quietly signed into law in a ceremony to which the press and suffragists were not invited.

1920 Suffrage passed, Carrie Chapman Catt founds the League of Women Voters to educate the newly enfranchised voters about the issues.

1921 The American Association of University Women is formed.

1921 Margaret Sanger organizes the American Birth Control League, which evolves into the Federation of Planned Parenthood in 1942.

1923 Supreme Court strikes down a 1918 minimum-wage law for District of Columbia women because, with the vote, women are considered equal to men. This ruling cancels all state minimum wage laws.

1923 Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party succeed in having a constitutional amendment introduced in Congress which said: "Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction." In 1943 the wording was revised to what we know today as the Equal Rights Amendment.

1924 The National Association of College women is formed by Black women, to parallel the AAUW.

1924 Nellie Taylor Ross of Wyoming becomes the first woman elected governor of a state.

1926 Bertha Knight Landes is the first woman elected mayor of a sizable U.S. city (Seattle).

1928 The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women is organized by women as women's history is ignored by the American Historical Association. Their triennial conferences will promote historical scholarship by women throughout the century.

1932 The National Recovery Act forbids more than one family member from holding a government job, resulting in many women losing their jobs.

1932 Hattie Wyatt Caraway is the first woman elected to U.S. Senate. She represents Arkansas for three terms.

1933 Frances Perkins, the first woman in a Presidential Cabinet, serves as Secretary of Labor during the entire Roosevelt presidency.

1935 Margaret Mead's Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies challenges sex-role assumptions.

1935 Mary McLeod Bethune organizes the National Council of Negro Women as a lobbying coalition of black women's groups, and serves as president until 1949. The NCNW becomes foremost at fighting job discrimination, racism, and sexism.

1936 United States v. One Package declassifies birth control information as obscene. Contraceptive devices can finally be imported to the United States.

1938 Crystal Bird Fauset of Pennsylvania becomes the first black woman elected to a state legislature, by an overwhelmingly white district.

1940 One-fifth of white women and one-third of black women are wage earners. 60% of the black women are still domestics, compared with 10% of white women. Among Japanese American women workers, almost 38% are in agriculture and 24% in domestic service.

1941 A massive government and industry media campaign persuades women to take jobs during the war. Almost 7 million women respond, 2 million as industrial "Rosie the Riveters" and 400,000 joining the military.

1945 The Equal Pay for Equal Work bill is again introduced into Congress (see 1872). It passes in 1963.

1945 Women industrial workers begin to lose their jobs in large numbers to returning service men, although surveys show 80% want to continue working.

1948 Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) becomes first woman elected to the U.S. Senate in her own right. In 1964, she becomes the first woman to run for the U.S. Presidency in the primaries of a major political party (Republican). She serves in the Senate until 1973.

1950 30% of all women are in the paid labor force. More than half of all single women and more than a quarter of married women.

1955 Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian organization, is founded in San Francisco.

1955 Women earn an average of 63=9B for every dollar earned by men.

1956 The Presbyterian Church of the USA approves ordination of women; Margaret Towner is first ordained.

1957 The number of women and men voting is approximately equal for the first time.

1960 The Food and Drug Administration approves birth control pills.

1960 Women now earn only 60 cents for every dollar earned by men, a decline since 1955. Women of color earn only 42 cents.

1961 Birth control pills are approved for marketing in the United States

1961 Pres. Kennedy creates the President's Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Fifty parallel state commissions are eventually established.

1963 The Equal Pay Act, proposed twenty years earlier, establishes equal pay for men and women performing the same job duties. It does not cover domestics, agricultural workers, executives, administrators or professionals.

1963 The report issued by the President's Commission on the Status of Women documents discrimination against women in virtually every area of American life. It makes 24 specific recommendations, some surprisingly far-sighted (example: community property in marriages). 64,000 copies are sold in less than a year and talk of women's rights is again respectable.

1963 Betty Friedan's best-seller, The Feminine Mystique, detailed the "problem that has no name." Five million copies are sold by 1970, laying the groundwork for the modern feminist movement.

1964 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bars employment discrimination by private employers, employment agencies, and unions based on race, sex, and other grounds. To investigate complaints and enforce penalties, it establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which receives 50,000 complaints of gender discrimination in its first five years.

1964 Patsy Mink (D-HI) is the first Asian-American woman elected to the U.S. Congress.

1965 Griswold v Connecticut, Supreme Court overturns one of the last state laws prohibiting the prescription or use of contraceptives by married couples.

1965 Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246 takes the 1964 Civil Rights Act a step further, requiring federal agencies and federal contractors to take "affirmative action" in overcoming employment discrimination.

1965 Weeks v. Southern Bell marks a major triumph in the fight against restrictive labor laws and company regulations on the hours and conditions of women's work, opening many previously male-only jobs to women.

1966 Fifty state Commissions on the Status of Women convene in Washington, D.C., to report on their findings.

1966 In response to EEOC inaction on employment discrimination complaints, twenty-eight women found the National Organization for Women (called NOW) to function as a civil rights organization for women.

1967 Chicago Women's Liberation Group organizes, considered the first to use the term "liberation."

1967 New York Radical Women is founded. The following year they begin a process of sharing life stories, which becomes known as "consciousness raising." Groups immediately take root coast-to-coast.

1967 California becomes the first state to re-legalize abortion.

1967 Executive Order 11375 expands Executive Order 11246's non-discrimination measure to include women. Enforcement is not won until 1973, however.

1968 New York Radical Women garner media attention to the women's movement when they protest the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City.