Tietjen Jill S. - Her story: the timeline of women who changed America

To the loving memory of our mothers:

ISABELLE SPILKY COOPERMAN
andBERNICE M. STEIN.

We proudly and humbly stand
on the shoulders of these strong and courageous women.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world.
Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Anthropologist MARGARET MEAD

These words of Margaret Mead encapsulate the thought that the world is changed when someone gets an idea, becomes its champion, mobilizes others to support the idea, and then sees the idea through to implementation. Our book, Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, is the product of a small, thoughtful group of committed women who believed in us and wanted us to succeed in preserving a record of historical and current American women of achievement and note.

Our book is an educational and fascinating look at the far-reaching endeavors of more than nine hundred incredible women. It provides an understanding of women and their achievements throughout U.S. history; the context is a chronological timeline. This illuminating book format starts in 1587, when Virginia Dare was born in what is now North Carolina, and continues throughout U.S. history until the current day, covering many of the more well-known women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The figures included here, whose accomplishments demonstrate the enormous range of achievements of American women, were selected from a pool of more than three thousand candidates and include artists and entertainers, athletes, doctors and scientists, activists and politicians, pioneers and adventurers, corporate and business women, writers and journalists, educators, and entrepreneurs.

Included within the timeline are some snippets of information about societal and political events occurring at that same time, to provide historical context. The information in each entry is brief, providing a snapshot of an individual event or woman. This perspective allows the reader to move quickly from woman to woman and from achievement to achievement.

Although there are many books on womens history and some books that identify themselves as using a timeline format, none provides the intriguingly vivid, visual, and informational experience that Her Story does. Our goal is to pique your interest so that you will want to find out more about the significant women shown in our book and their many incredible accomplishments.

This book can be read easily, and the many pictures capture readers interest and spur their curiosity. Some of the pictures are of the women described here, some illustrate the product or item they created, and some relate to the events that are noted. The images are the focus and heart of the timeline. It is our hope that the heavily illustrated format and the accessibility of the text will encourage both women and men to share this book with their children, especially their daughters, and encourage those daughters on the path to their own notable accomplishments.

We further believe our book will serve to record and preserve the legacy of the many remarkable women who came before us in the United States and on whose shoulders we in the twenty-first century stand. We hope you, our readers, will be inspired by the women profiled in this book and, in turn, will want to write both yourselves and your families into history.

Have you ever heard the phrase Remember the Ladies? In letters between Abigail Adams and her husband, then-congressman John Adams, in March 1776, the future First Lady encouraged her husband, a future U.S. president, to remember women while the Founding Fathers and their colleagues were putting together the governance structure of this country. She wrote, I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. Johns answer was that he could not help laughing at her saucy letter.

What he did not recognize was that with these words, Abigail became one of the first American women to clearly assert her desire for womens rights. The words of Abigail Adams have come to echo throughout U.S. history. For many other activists, including those in the suffrage movement, her words acted as a rallying cry for the equality of the sexes.

Remember the Ladies is still relevant to our times. By reading this book, you are honoring and remembering the women who came before us. We all have achieved so much because of the women profiled within its pages. It is no surprise that the year 2012 is much different for women (and men) than earlier times. The differences have been driven in significant part by the more than nine hundred women whose accomplishments are documented in this book. Many of the women and their achievements, particularly those in earlier years, have been forgotten or are invisible to the public at large.

We enjoy the rights and freedoms that we do today because of these earlier women and their courageous actions. At particular moments in Americas history, some women chose to speak out in public for causes they believed in (education and womens suffrage, for example) despite the fact that in many situations women were not allowed to speak. Women had to fight for an education and for the right to own their own propertyindeed, even to inherit property from their husbands or fathers. They fought to vote and to control their own reproduction. They often faced public ridicule, sometimes alone and sometimes with other women. We salute their courage and persistence.

In the twenty-first century it has become more common for women who are in their late teens and early twenties to believe that they are totally equal to men and can do anything they wish. This news is exhilarating! Todays women can do it all because of what all of the women who came before them did to pave the way. Todays young women need to know who all of these brave, courageous, fearless, resilient, high-spirited women were, and we intend to tell them. The work that we have done in putting this book together has given us an awareness of the many awesome accomplishments of our foremothers.

A question we are frequently asked is How did you select the women for inclusion in the book? We chuckle somewhat in response. We began by making a long list of criteria and measured each woman and her achievement against it, but many times we broke our own rules. In the final analysis, it was the two of us who considered, discussed, evaluated, and eventually chose. Our choices reflect our biases, as the works of earlier authors reflect theirs.

We fully believe that it is impossible to weigh one woman and her accomplishments against any other. Some of our choices were dependent upon the category of the contribution, its significance, its role as first of its kind, the time when the accomplishment occurred, or its overall contribution to American life. Sometimes we chose a woman because her influence and values touched a great number of people; sometimes we picked her because of the reverberations of her accomplishment. All these factors played a part in the selection process used in the making of this book.