Click! in the Classroom

About These Lesson Plans

Clio Visualizing History is dedicated to supporting curricular advances that foster gender equality and improved gender relationships.

We have created these free lesson plans to give teachers content materials and activities that will allow them to integrate the history of the modern women’s movement into their curriculum and help students engage with important historical questions about the struggles that have made the United States more equal and democratic.

Each lesson plan focuses on a historical topic that engages with the concerns of students: politics and social movements; body and health; and workplace and family. These topics are investigated through the histories of individual women, their organizations, and their struggles for greater rights and social justice. Their stories are situated within larger histories to help students connect the modern women’s movement to other changes in post-World War Two America.

Lesson Plans by Grade Level

How to Navigate our Interactive Timeline

You will find unique content in each chapter’s timeline.

Place the cursor over the timeline to scroll up and down within the timeline itself. If you place the cursor anywhere else on the page, you can scroll up and down in the whole page – but the timeline won’t scroll.

To see what’s in the timeline beyond the top or bottom of the window, use the white “dragger” located on the right edge of the timeline. (It looks like a small white disk with an up-arrow and a down-arrow attached to it.) If you click on the dragger, you can move the whole timeline up or down, so you can see more of it. If the dragger won’t move any further, then you’ve reached one end of the timeline.

Click on one of the timeline entries and it will display a short description of the subject. It may also include an image, a video, or a link to more information within our website or on another website.

Our timelines are also available in our Resource Library in non-interactive format.

Timeline Legend

  1. Yellow bars mark entries that appear in every chapter

  2. This icon indicates a book

  3. This icon indicates a film

1971 The Click! Moment

The idea of the “Click! moment” was coined by Jane O’Reilly. “The women in the group looked at her, looked at each other, and ... click! A moment of truth. The shock of recognition. Instant sisterhood... Those clicks are coming faster and faster. They were nearly audible last summer, which was a very angry summer for American women. Not redneck-angry from screaming because we are so frustrated and unfulfilled-angry, but clicking-things-into-place-angry, because we have suddenly and shockingly perceived the basic disorder in what has been believed to be the natural order of things.” Article, “The Housewife's Moment of Truth,” published in the first issue of Ms. Magazine and in New York Magazine. Republished in The Girl I Left Behind, by Jane O'Reilly (Macmillan, 1980). Jane O'Reilly papers, Schlesinger Library.