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

• 1946
  Sudan's first modern women's organization, the Sudanese Women's League, is founded.
• 1947
  The new Japanese constitution guarantees women's equality.
• 1947
  The U.S. Congress passes the Army-Navy Nurse Act, creating permanent commissions for military nurses. The first officer commissioned is Florence Blanchfield.
• 1948
  In the newly created countries of Israel and South Korea, women win the right to vote.
• 1949
  Argentinian Eva Perón founds the Peronista Feminist Party.
• 1949
  
  
  French feminist Simone de Beauvoir publishes the controversial and influential Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex).
• 1950
  Harvard Law School admits women.
• 1950
  The U.S. Census Bureau recognizes a woman's right to continue to use her maiden name after marriage.
• 1951
  The Women's Equal Rights Act, which prohibits gender discrimination, is passed in Israel.
• 1952
  Chilean Ana Figueroa becomes the first woman on the United Nations Security Council.
• 1953
  
  
  In Westminster Abbey, Elizabeth II is crowned queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
• 1954
  Colombian women are granted the right to vote.
• 1955
  
  
  Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her arrest for this act sparks the Montgomery bus boycott.
• 1956
  Golda Meir becomes the only woman in the Israeli cabinet when she is made minister of foreign affairs.
• 1958
  The British House of Lords admits its first female members.
• 1961
  
  
  Eleanor Roosevelt chairs U.S. President John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women.
• 1961
  Paraguay is the last republic in the Americas to give women the right to vote.
• 1961
  
  
  Wilma Rudolph runs the 100-metre dash in 11.2 seconds, thereby setting a a new world record for the event.
• 1961
  American women organized by Women Strike for Peace stage a one-day strike asking the government to “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race.”
• 1962
  American biologist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring.
• 1963
  
  
  Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.
• 1963
  American feminist Betty Friedan publishes her highly influential The Feminine Mystique.
• 1963
  Ellen Ash Peters becomes the first woman to be granted tenure at Yale Law School.
• 1964
  The U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, creed, national origin, or sex.
• 1965
  The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Griswold v. State of Connecticut that laws prohibiting the use of birth control are unconstitutional.
• 1966
  Betty Friedan and other delegates to the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women establish the National Organization for Women (NOW).
• 1966
  Indira Gandhi wins leadership of the Congress Party and becomes the first female prime minister of India.
• 1967
  Muriel Siebert becomes the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
• 1968
  Nguyen Thi Binh, a member of the Central Committee of the National Liberation Front, leads the Vietnamese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.
• 1968
  
  
  Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko starts a movement against pollution by publishing Kukai jodo (“Sea of Suffering”), documenting the damage done by dumping mercury into Minamata Bay.
• 1969
  In Ecuador a “malaria control” program is used as a cover to sterilize peasant women.
• 1969
  
  
  Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.
• 1970
  Marie Cox founds the North American Indian Women's Association, the first national Native American women's group.
• 1970
  The Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves.
• 1971
  The National Commission on the Status of Women in India is created.
• 1971
  Helga Pederson of Denmark becomes the first female judge on the European Court of Human Rights.
• 1971
  Women in Switzerland win the right to vote.
• 1972
  The U.S. Senate approves the Equal Rights Amendment and sends it to the states for ratification.
• 1972
  The National Conference of Puerto Rican Women is founded.
• 1973
  
  
  American tennis champion Billie Jean King defeats champion player Bobby Riggs in a “Battle of the Sexes” match.
• 1973
  Jordanian women are granted the right to vote.
• 1973
  Mothers of Nicaraguan political prisoners go on a hunger strike.
• 1973
  The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Roe v. Wade that a woman has a constitutional right to abortion.
• 1974
  The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy becomes the first U.S. service academy to enroll women.

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