WOMEN'S HISTORY TIMELINE

1899 Illustrator Charles Gibson introduces the Gibson Girl as a fashion and beauty ideal.
1900 Women are included in modern Olympic Games, in golf and tennis.
1910 Average female factory worker earns $1.57 for a nine-hour day.
1911 A fire kills 146 women and girls at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York City. The fire leads to improved safety rules and boosts organizing by the new International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
1913 5,000 suffragists led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns march in Washington, D.C., to demand women's right to vote.
1914 The demise of the restrictive corset is set in motion by the first patented U.S. brassiere, invented by New York debutante Mary Phelps Jacobs.
1915 Jeanette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to Congress.
1915 Margaret Sanger opens the USA's first birth control clinic, in Brooklyn.
1918 More than 1.4 million women go to work to replace men overseas during WWI.
1919 18th Amendment to the Constitution (Prohibition) is ratified. The drive for the liquor ban was led by a key Progressive-era group: the Women's Christian Temperance Movement.
1920 19th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified to give women the vote.
1921 Alice Robertson is the first woman to preside over the U.S. House of Representatives - for only 30 minutes.
1921 Edith Wharton wins the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence.
1922 Rebecca Felton of Georgia is name the first female U.S. senator.
1926 New Yorker Gertrude Ederle, 19, is the first woman to swim the English Channel, in 14 hours and 31 minutes, breaking the men's records.
1928 British women boycott the Olympics to protest the lack of women's events. After several women collapse at the end of the 800-meter run, the event is declared dangerous to women and banned until 1960.
1932 Amelia Earhart flies solo across the Atlantic in 15 hours and 39 minutes.
1932 Katharine Hepburn has the first starring role in Christopher Strong, a feminist-themed film directed by the only woman director at the time, Dorothy Arzner. Hepburn is forced out at RKO in 1938 for wearing slacks and refusing to do pinups.
1933 Congress creates WAVES (Women accepted for volunteer emergency service) and WACs (Women's Army Corps). The women perform noncombat duties.
1937 Home freezers become widely available.
1940 First nylon stockings go on sale in the USA.
1944 Epitomized by the Norman Rockwell image of Rosie the Riveter, more than 6 million women enter the labor force to aid the war effort. The percentage of women working would never again fall below 305.
1948 Former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt wins passage of the United Nations Declaration of Human rights. She had become a delegate in 1945.
1955 Rosa Parks, considered the mother of the modern black civil right movement, refuses to giver her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
1959 Pantyhose is introduce by Glen Raven Mills.
1960 The firs commercially available birth control pill, Enovid 10, goes on sale.
1963 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan raises issues of gender inequality.
1963 Congress passes the Equal Pay Act, which make it illegal to have different rates of pay for women and men. At the time, the women working full time earned on average about 58 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
1966 The National Organization for Women issues a manifesto calling for "true equality for all women in America" and plans to organize female vote.
1966 Pampers diapers are introduced in Sacramento, California, by Proctor and Gamble.
1967 Amana introduces the first microwave oven.
1969 Williams, Trinity and Vassar colleges go co-ed.
1971 Sally J. Priesand becomes the firs woman ordained as a rabbi in the USA.
1972 Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin start Ms., a feminist magazine. The first stand-alone issue sells out its run of 300,000 in eight days.
1972 The anti-feminist movement emerges as activist Phyllis Schlafly, opposing an Equal Rights Amendment, launches STOP E.R.A. group.
1972 New York Democrat Rep. Shirley Chisolm is the firs black woman to run for president.
1974 Eleven women are ordained as Episcopal priests in defiance of church law.
1975 Women are admitted to military academies.
1975 Federal rules are issued requiring equal sports opportunities for men and women in schools under Title IX of the Education Act.
1981 Sandra Day O'Connor is the first woman on the Supreme Court.
1982 Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space.
1984 The firs women's Olympic marathon is won by Joan Benoit of the USA.
1989 The Rand Corporation reports women earn an average 65% of men's wages.
1990 Norplant 5-year contraceptive implant is approved.
1997 The Women's National Basketball Association makes its debut.
1998 Women's average pay is 75% of men's - 88% where skills and experience are equal, according to the White House's Council of Economic Advisors.
1998 For the first time, younger women (ages 25-29) pass men in high school graduation, 88.9% to 85.8%, and in college degrees, 29.3% to 26.3%.

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[Taken from USA Today, Wednesday, February 17, 1999, pages 8A-9A. Sources: A History of the Breast by Marilyn Yalom, The People's Chronology, Census Bureau, Amazon.com, What Every American Should Know About Women's History, Chronicle of America, UC-Berkeley. Compiled by Anne Carey, Cindy Hall, and Tammi Wark.]