The Most Important Events during the Period 1900-1940 - Essay Example

World War I, women suffrage, mass production, and economic prosperity are among the most remarkable events which cause great worldwide disorder yet through them, human beings discovered the capacity to transform in character and hope to impact progress either by individual or collective means. In the past, even dating to the most ancient of ages, woman had constantly been perceived as a man’s unequal counterpart or more specifically, the type whose strengths and potentials were often underestimated compared with those of the dominant male opposite.

Centuries prior to the 1900-1940 span had witnessed women under conditions of weakness and low self-worth having been subject to the rules and ways by which men desired to materialize their ideas of civilization and societies in which women were only allowed and expected to take a meager part of. This suppression which chiefly denied women of confidence and dues to express their preferences in the manner of living, by course of nature, led to women suffrage which began as early as the 1820s by advocates of women in support of free secular education, abolition of slavery, birth control, and divorce laws that were more flexible in terms to favor both parties.

As it proceeds for more than 100 years, women suffrage had met with success of being taken to a level where powerful men, like Pres. Woodrow Wilson in 1918 believed that the nation is of dire necessity of it during wars as “war measure” (USA History). Thus, the federal women suffrage required amendment in order to redefine and seek extension to the legal rights of women accordingly. At this stage, it is essential to note then that such event brought about a turning point wherein women were empowered to fight for their freedom of choice and raise arguments concerning equality with men so they eventually reached the extent of realizing that they could profess just as men did in fields such as of education, science, engineering, commerce, and medicine besides or instead of sole confinement to domestic tasks.

In the words of C. Eastman, an active campaigner: “The problem of women’s freedom is how to arrange the world so that women can be human beings, with a chance to exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely many ways, instead of being destined by the accident of their sex to one field of activity – housework and child-raising.” Though the World War I followed a period of peace with extremely destructive measures by former world powers, its significance is greatly proven through the height of social and political awareness at the time as majority of people the world over exhibited a sense of nationalism, unified contempt against imperialism, advanced degree of militarism and ideals thereof, along with the notion that rival alliances would require another war prior to settlement (Zaide & Zaide 335).

Apparently, these underlying grounds stirred the nations involved to action, thereby enabling them to think critically and learn the essence of courage, national liberty, as well as suffering with