On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was inaugurated as president of the United States after one of the most contentious elections in U.S. history. It had come down to the electoral votes in the state of Florida, which Bush won by 537 votes after a recount was stopped and the result upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of Bush v. Gore. Less than nine months later, on September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda militants hijacked airliners and launched suicide terrorist attacks that claimed 2,996 lives. The twenty-first century thus began in controversy and violence, while the tide of justice and women’s rights movements ebbed and flowed.