ABSTRACT
Women's experience, individual and collective, had been largely left out of historical writings. But feminist scholars, paying closer attention to those experiences, have unearthed new findings and reconceptualized mainstream history as well. Only feminist historians have taken seriously the fact that discrimination against women in the workplace and in the political arena persisted well after suffrage was won. Another factor affecting the survival of equal rights feminism between the wars was, of course, the economic depression precipitated by the 1929 stock market crash but also fueled by the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl. The Great Depression brought a decade of bankruptcy, farm foreclosures, poverty, and unemployment in its wake. The 1940s brought with them World War II, which ended the Great Depression but was otherwise a mixed legacy from the point of view of American women and women's rights.
