Celeste Parrish and Educational Reform in the Progressive-Era South follows a Civil War orphan’s transformation from a Southside Virginia public school teacher to a nationally known progressive educator and feminist. In this vital intellectual biography, Rebecca S. Montgomery places feminism and gender at the center of her analysis and offers a new look at the postbellum movement for southern educational reform through the life of Celeste Parrish. Because Parrish’s life coincided with critical years in the destruction and reconstruction of the southern social order, her biography provides unique opportunities to explore the links between southern nationalism, reactionary racism, and gender discrimination. Parrish’s pursuit of higher education and a professional career pitted her against male opponents of coeducation who regarded female and black dependency as central to southern regional distinctiveness. When coupled with women’s lack of formal political power, this resistance to gender equality discouraged progress and lowered the quality of public education throughout the South. The marginalization of women within the reform movement, headed by the Conference for Education in the South, further limited women’s contributions to regional change. Although men welcomed female participation in grassroots organization, much of women’s work was segregated in female networks and received less public acknowledgement than the reform work conducted by men. Despite receiving little credit for their accomplishments, by working on the margins, women were able to use the southern movement and its philanthropic sponsors as alternate sources of influence and power. By exploring the consequences of gender discrimination for both educational reform and the influence of southern progressivism, Rebecca S. Montgomery contributes a nuanced understanding of how interlocking hierarchies of power structured opportunity and influenced the shape of reform in the U.S. South.

A Separate Sisterhood examines the personal lives and professional accomplishments of a group of wise and persistent women whose collective work in the early twentieth century crucially influenced educational reform in the New South. Working at the intersection of race, gender, and class, these women fought for educational improvement in a region of exceptional poverty, rural isolation, and racial prejudice. Their work, explored collectively for the first time in this groundbreaking text, demonstrates the roots of early advances in southern literacy education, vocational education, community outreach education, adult education, equal educational opportunity, curricular integrity, public support, and teacher pay equity.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War relates uncommon narratives about common Southern folks who fought not with the Confederacy, but against it. Focusing on regions in three Southern states--North Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas--Victoria E. Bynum introduces Unionist supporters, guerrilla soldiers, defiant women, socialists, populists, free blacks, and large interracial kin groups that belie stereotypes of Southerners as uniformly supportive of the Confederate cause. Centered on the concepts of place, family, and community, Bynum's insightful and carefully documented work effectively counters the idea of a unified South caught in the grip of the Lost Cause.

Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife, and vulnerability of women after the upheavals of Reconstruction, female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational reform transfigured private and public social relations in the New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in this expansive study. The Politics of Education in the New South provides the most complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic promise of education in the South and reveals how concern about their own status motivated these women to push for reform on behalf of others. Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational improvements reflected their concern for distributing public resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women to Georgia's state colleges and universities and for rural school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens, child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process, a distinct female political culture developed that directly opposed the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness that plagued formal politics in the New South.