Timeline: Through the Centuries

• Antiquity: 10,000 BC to AD 500
• Medieval times: 501 to 1500
• Early modern period: 1501 to 1800
• The spread of industrialization: 1801 to 1860
• Suffrage and social reform: 1861 to 1908
• Early 20th century: 1909 to 1929
• Economic and political upheaval: 1930 to 1945
• Postwar growth and social reform: 1946 to 1974
• Postindustrial advances: 1975 to present

• 1930
  White South African women get the right to vote.
• 1930
  
  
  Ellen Church becomes the first airline stewardess.
• 1931
  
  
  Jane Addams receives the Nobel Prize for Peace.
• 1932
  Women of Brazil and Thailand are granted the right to vote.
• 1932
  
  
  Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
• 1933
  Franklin D. Roosevelt appoints Frances Perkins secretary of labor, and she becomes the first American female cabinet member.
• 1933
  Portugal's new constitution specifically denies women's equal rights.
• 1933
  In Nazi Germany, girls are inducted into the Jungmädel (“Young Maidens”) and Bund Deutscher Mädel (“League of German Girls”). The organizations stress the importance of virtue and motherhood.
• 1933
  
  
  American author Gertrude Stein publishes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
• 1933
  In Italy, Mussolini rewards women who have more than 14 children.
• 1934
  
  
  African American author Zora Neale Hurston publishes her first book, Jonah's Gourd Vine.
• 1934
  Cuban law requires equal pay for equal work.
• 1935
  
  
  Anthropologist Margaret Mead publishes Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, challenging Western assumptions about gender relations.
• 1936
  
  
  British pilot Beryl Markham becomes the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.
• 1937
  Women in the Philippines get the right to vote.
• 1937
  The American Medical Association recognizes birth control as a legitimate topic for medical school classes.
• 1938
  In France, women are admitted into unarmed military divisions.
• 1939
  
  
  Marian Anderson gives a concert to an audience of 75,000 at the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution prevent her from singing at Constitution Hall because of her race.
• 1940
  Margaret Chase Smith is elected to fill her late husband's seat in the U.S. Congress; she becomes the first woman to serve in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
• 1940
  The U.S. Republican Party comes out in support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
• 1941
  The Soviet Union creates three all-female pilot regiments. The most highly decorated is the 586th Women's Fighter Regiment.
• 1941
  
  
  Pacifist Jeannette Rankin places the only congressional vote against U.S. entry into World War II.
• 1942
  American women enlist in two newly created military bodies, the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES).
• 1942
  Elise Richter, the first female professor in Austria and a noted linguist, is deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt, where she later dies.
• 1943
  The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League is founded by Chicago Cubs owner Philip Wrigley.
• 1943
  
  
  More than 310,000 women take jobs in the U.S. aircraft industry. Wartime propaganda urges women to join the labour force for the duration of World War II.
• 1943
  Physicist Elda Emma Anderson is recruited to work at Los Alamos on the development of the atomic bomb.
• 1944
  Indian Muslim Noor un Nissa, the first British secret agent in the Nazi Party, is shot by the Gestapo.
• 1945
  
  
  Diarist Anne Frank dies in the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Two years later her father publishes her diary of their years spent in hiding.
• 1945
  Eleanor Roosevelt becomes a delegate to the newly created United Nations.
• 1945
  More than six million American women who entered the workforce during World War II are pushed out of their traditionally male jobs at war's end.

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