Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Jane Addams and Florence Kelley, took a major role in modernizing American liberalism, transforming it from a defensive attitude toward government power as tyrannical over individuals (still used this way in Europe), to a modern positive understanding that government can and should have a role in establishing basic social and civic standards (like European social democracy). It now seems the basic elements of the American social welfare system were established first in the Progressive Era and that women, who did not yet have voting rights, were its leaders. This reevaluation of the role of women in the changing nature of American government reaches up all the way to presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, when social welfare and labor reform programs established in the 1910s at the local and state level were federalized, for instance in the establishment of national standards for minimum wages and maximum working hours. And once gain Again women’s role was important especially a powerful women’s lobby within the Roosevelt administration, organized around the figure of