1)Discuss one major theme or idea that stood out to you in this week’s reading selection

1)Discuss one major theme or idea that stood out to you in this week’s reading selection.

What did you notice about the style of writing?

How did the writer connect with the reader?

Social Change: Racial Identity, Worker’s Rights and the 19th Amendment.

After 60 years, the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920, gave women the vote in the United States. The originators of the movement, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not live long enough to see the amendment. But, while they were not able to legally vote in their lifetime, their work was ultimately successful. This was also a victory for African American women who also were finally given the vote (although, due to Jim Crow laws, violence and lynching they were, for many decades, forcibly kept from exercising that right).

While the Suffrage movement seemed to dominate the early part of the 20th century, there were other movements that were just as important and influential. This era was known for Muckrakers. Muckrakers were reformists and journalists who exposed wrong doing and corruption by political and business leaders.

Muckrakers were part of a large-scale reform movement from roughly 1890-1920 called the Progressive Era.

Writers included Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, among others.

Their work changed child labor laws, helped create worker’s rights and protections, and brought attention to social issues such as poverty, urban living conditions, and child labor. In addition, the muckrakers also helped the Women’s suffrage movement because they exposed the problems faced by working women, widowed women, childbirth, poverty and childcare.