Philadelphia Youth Cultural, PTA

In the late 1800s women weren't allowed yet to vote in elections, and thus it would seem that they wouldn't be able to wield the political power needed to bring about change.

The conventional wisdom of the time was soon to be challenged, however, by two women who first founded National PTA's predecessor, the National Congress of Mothers. On February 17, 1897, the two founders, Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, looked out at the 2,000 people from across the country who gathered for the Mothers Congress' first meeting in Washington, DC, and saw the beginning of the largest (and now oldest) volunteer organization that works exclusively on behalf of children and youth--a group of people who had even fewer rights at the time than women.