For decades, the push to acknowledge women’s contributions gained traction, but progress may have flatlined.

The goal of the movement was not to simply hold women leaders up as heroines or societal anomalies, to paraphrase the 18th-century feminist author and activist Mary Wollstonecraft; its advocates wanted women and gender to be treated as more than “sidebar history.” Though showcasing women’s stories on their own is important, women’s-history pioneers also saw unearthing and integrating women’s stories as a gateway to better understand the laws, institutions, systems, and movements that are most familiar to Americans—and to correct and complicate them.

Why does violence against women endure? Why are women still paid less than their male counterparts? Why does the United States continue to battle over reproductive rights? The answer partially lies in the practices of coverture, embedded in the old law of domestic relations that American colonists inherited from the British and didn’t change after the Revolution.

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