This course explores how immigration, industrialization, racial segregation, and the growing authority of science transformed the fundamental conditions of women's lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on previous effforts by female reformers to perfect society, women at the turn of the century organized large social movements dedicated to improving the lives of women and children and gaining public access to political power. We will examine the fruits of this activism as well as the consequences of subsequent events for the rise of several important social movements in the latter half of the century -- including civil rights, women's liberation, and gay rights -- in which women played a vital role. The course concludes with an assessment of feminism in the present day, with special emphasis on the responses of younger women to its legacy.