Were women important to United States history? Let’s be honest, majority of the time women get maybe a few pages in textbooks and are rarely covered in most history classes. The Progressive Era is where this changes; where women are finally brought into the limelight. The role of women within the Progressive Era and the establishment of the welfare system were both audacious and necessary because the welfare system could not have happened without women’s willingness to fight for the society as a whole, not just themselves.
In modern terms, the word welfare typically rears the idea of single mothers receiving aid from programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, but before then welfare was actually made for workers and their families.
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The General Federation of Women’s Clubs was the over-arching organization that control most of the women’s political actions after 1900. After a decade, the GFWC was representing thousands of women, who covered an impressive range of topics within each club. Topics that they GFWC stood be hind were ideas brought by the National Women’s Suffrage Association, but their true cause was their campaign for the passage of state mothers’ pensions laws. Also during this era, women where pushed out of the social sciences during the Progressive Era, so like every good outsider, women made their own clubs. By the 1890s, women could use the social sciences to prove that they deserve to play a part in reforms not just for themselves, but for children and their society, and work along side men for their overall betterment. Women had a hand in everything, Including education. The need for teachers rose along with the demand for higher education. With the population growing across the continent, public schools were vastly increasing, therefore the feminization of teaching had and did occur. Women were the better option to hire because schools could pay them less and many thought that women had a natural knack for teaching. This change in gender roles proves evident that women could and should be apart of making societal and governmental