NEAR CLOSING TIME ON MARCH 25, 1911,
a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Factory in New York City. Within 18 minutes, 146 people were dead as a result of the fire.

This site includes original sources on the fire held at the ILR School's Kheel Center, an archive of historical material on labor and industrial relations.

More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared "that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage." Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures, publishing a feminist newspaper--all for a cause that would not succeed until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment fourteen years after her death in 1906.

The beginning of the fight for women suffrage is usually traced to the "Declaration of Sentiments" produced at the first woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, N. Y. in 1848. Four years later, at the Woman's Rights Convention in Syracuse in 1852, Susan B. Anthony joined the fight, arguing that "the right women needed above every other...was the right of suffrage."

A champion of the strenuous life, TR embodied the notion of an expanded presidency. Stamping the presidency with his own colorful personality, Roosevelt's enormous popularity gave him political clout that matched his celebrity status. "Get action, do things," sums up his attitude toward all endeavors, political and otherwise.

She was a daughter of one of Illinois' richest men, but instead of leading a life of leisure, she dedicated her life to aiding the urban poor. A friend of labor, a proponent of women's suffrage, a foe of city bosses, and an opponent of war, she struggled to make the ideal of civic equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence a reality. Instead of offering charity, she sought to assimilate the immigrant poor into American society and became a pioneer social worker.