Women's Civil Rights TImeline

By gabyhostsmith

  • Suffrage Movement, 19th Amendment

    Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton found the National Woman Suffrage Association, which coordinated the national suffrage movement. In 1890, they formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
    Passed by Congress June 4, 1919, and ratified on August 18, 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote. The 19th amendment legally guarantees American women the right to vote.

  • Rosa Parks, Civil Rights, Equal Pay

    Black seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. The move helps launch the civil rights movement.
    Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens.

  • The Food and Drug Administration

    The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the first commercially produced birth control pill in the world, allowing women to control when and if they have children. Margaret Sanger initially commissioned “the pill” with funding from heiress Katherine McCormick. The first oral contraceptive was submitted first for regulatory approval in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders and infertility, not as a contraceptive (although the drug had been developed as an oral contraceptive).

  • Equal Pay Act

    President John F. Kennedy signs into law the Equal Pay Act, prohibiting sex-based wage discrimination between men and women performing the same job in the same workplace.
    The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work. The jobs need not be identical, but they must be substantially equal.

  • Roe v. Wade

    In its landmark 7-2 Roe v. Wade decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declares that the Constitution protects a woman’s legal right to an abortion. In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Jane Roe and the others involved based their case on the following arguments: The Texas law invaded an individual's right to "liberty" under the 14th Amendment. The Texas law infringed on rights to marital, familial, and sexual privacy guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.