“Stories of personal tragedy, economic hardship, and personal conviction . . . a valuable addition to both southern and women’s history.” —Journal of Southern History From the 1890s to the end of World War I, the reformers who called themselves progressives helped transform the United States, and many women filled their ranks. Through solo efforts and voluntary associations both national and regional, women agitated for change, addressing issues such as poverty, suffrage, urban overcrowding, and public health. Southern Women in the Progressive Era presents the stories of a diverse group of southern women—African Americans, working-class women, teachers, nurses, and activists—in their own words, casting a fresh light on one of the most dynamic eras in US history. These women hailed from Virginia to Florida and from South Carolina to Texas and wrote in a variety of genres, from correspondence and speeches to bureaucratic reports, autobiographies, and editorials. Included in this volume, among many others, are the previously unpublished memoir of civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded a school for black children; the correspondence of a textile worker, Anthelia Holt, whose musings to a friend reveal the day-to-day joys and hardships of mill-town life; the letters of the educator and agricultural field agent Henrietta Aiken Kelly, who attempted to introduce silk culture to southern farmers; and the speeches of the popular novelist Mary Johnson, who fought for women’s voting rights. Always illuminating and often inspiring, each story highlights the part that regional identity—particularly race—played in health and education reform, suffrage campaigns, and women’s club work. Together these women’s voices reveal the promise of the Progressive Era, as well as its limitations, as women sought to redefine their role as workers and citizens of the United States.

Discussions of Tennessee women's history during the Progressive Era tend to focus narrowly on the critical issue of suffrage and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. While the achievement of Tennessee's suffragists remains a feather in the state's historic cap—pushing the legislature to cast the votes that settled the issue for the nation—reform-minded Tennessee women in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries participated in a wide range of other public-sphere activities. The first exploration of the work and lives of Progressive Era Tennessee women beyond their involvement in the battle for the right to vote, this pioneering compilation provides a fuller portrait of the work undertaken by these bold activists to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. Ranging in subject matter from the role of women's missionary organizations and efforts to end lynching to the challenges of agricultural reform and the development of stronger educational institutions, these essays consider a wide variety of reform efforts that engaged progressive women in Tennessee before, during, and after the suffrage movement. Throughout, the contributors emphasize the influence of religion on women's reform efforts and examine the ways in which these women expanded their public roles while at the same time professing loyalty to more traditional models of womanhood. In demonstrating Tennessee women's engagement with politics long before they had the vote, ran for office, or served on juries, these essays also support the argument that a broader definition of “politics” permits a fuller incorporation of women's public activities into U.S. political history. By focusing on the actual work reform-minded women performed, whether paid employment or volunteer efforts, this anthology illustrates myriad ways in which these individuals engaged their communities and reveals the motivations that drove them to improve society. Marshaling precise and detailed evidence that illuminates the meanings of progressivism to Tennessee's female activists, the essays in this valuable compendium connect Tennessee women to the larger movements for reform that dominated the early-twentieth-century American experience.

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.

This is the most comprehensive synthesis of the political history of the American South during the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1983, this work represented the master work of a gifted historian's career of reflecting on this period of the region's history. This new printing is accompanied by an insightful foreword by William A. Link, addressing the work's continuing relevance for today's students.

In this comprehensive, unflinching account, David W. Southern persuasively argues that race was the primary blind spot of the Progressive Movement. Based on the voluminous secondary works produced over the last forty years and his own primary research, Southern’s synthesis vividly portrays the ruthless exploitation, brutality, and violence that whites inflicted on African Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the former Confederate states, where almost 90 percent of blacks resided, white progressives followed the lead of racist demagogues such as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and James Vardaman by consolidating the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and the disfranchisement of blacks, resulting in the emergence of the one-party Democratic South. When legal discrimination did not sufficiently subordinate blacks, southern whites resorted liberally to fraud, intimidation, and violence—most notably in ghastly lynchings and urban race riots. Yet, most northern progressives were either indifferent to the fate of southern blacks or actively supported the social system in the South. Yankee reformers obsessed over the concept of race and became ensnared in a web of “scientific racism” that convinced them that blacks belonged to an inferior breed of human beings. The tenures of both Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote more about race than any other American president, and Woodrow Wilson, who was reared in the Deep South, proved disastrous for African Americans, who reached their “nadir” even as Wilson led the United States on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. Southern goes on to persuasively reveal that African Americans courageously fought to change the implacably racist system in which they lived, against overwhelming odds. Indeed, it was the rise of the militant “New Negro” during the Progressive Era that provoked much of the anti-black repression and violence. Dr. Southern further examines how the origins of the modern civil rights movement emerged in the wake of the rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, going beyond an analysis of their leadership to illuminate other important African American activists who held strong views of their own. Finally, an epilogue assesses the malignant racial heritage of the progressives by looking at the discrimination against African Americans, both those in and newly returned home from the armed forces, during World War I and the numerous race riots in northern cities that were in part occasioned by the large-scale migration of southern blacks.

During the opening decades of the twentieth century, highly visible red-light districts occupied entire sections of many American cities. Prostitution, still euphemistically referred to as the "social evil," became one of the dominant social issues of the progressive era. Mark Thomas Connelly places the response to prostitution during those years within its complete social and cultural context. He shows how the antiprostitution movement became a focus for many of the anxieties and social tensions of the period. For many, prostitution seemed ominously linked to the changing status of women, the emergence of permissive sexual morals, uncontrolled immigration, the rampant spread of venereal disease, the decline of rural and small-town values, and urban political and moral corruption. Indeed prostitution became a symbol and code word for a host of unsettling issues and social changes. Connelly probes the complex relationship between prostitution and the other major social issues of the time. He shows that the response to prostitution was ambiguous. It was forward-looking in that it violated a traditional taboo by openly discussing an important aspect of sexual behavior, but it was also one of the last efforts to rebuttress traditional Victorian beliefs about the proper role and position of women in American society. Combining the techniques of social, cultural, and intellectual history, Connelly interprets every major aspect of his subject: the relationship between prostitution and the issue of independent, mobile women in the cities; the obsession with "clandestine" prostitution; the belief in a direct relationship between prostitution and immigration; the problem of venereal disease; the urban Vice Commission reports on the extent of commercialized sex in the cities; the "white slavery" issue and the belief that a conspiracy was afoot to debauch native American womanhood; and the concern about prostitution in connection with the last great issue of the progressive years, the mobilization for World War I. The Response ot Prostitution in the Progressive Era shows that great tension, anxiety, and doubt were important aspects of the profound reorientation in American society that gives the progressive era its distinctiveness as a historical period. Connelly reasserts their historical importance in this study of a major social and cutural episode in American history. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Focusing on the cultural conflicts between social reformers and southern communities, William Link presents an important reinterpretation of the origins and impact of progressivism in the South. He shows that a fundamental clash of values divided reformers and rural southerners, ultimately blocking the reforms. His book, based on extensive archival research, adds a new dimension to the study of American reform movements. The new group of social reformers that emerged near the end of the nineteenth century believed that the South, an underdeveloped and politically fragile region, was in the midst of a social crisis. They recognized the environmental causes of social problems and pushed for interventionist solutions. As a consensus grew about southern social problems in the early 1900s, reformers adopted new methods to win the support of reluctant or indifferent southerners. By the beginning of World War I, their public crusades on prohibition, health, schools, woman suffrage, and child labor had led to some new social policies and the beginnings of a bureaucratic structure. By the late 1920s, however, social reform and southern progressivism remained largely frustrated. Link's analysis of the response of rural southern communities to reform efforts establishes a new social context for southern progressivism. He argues that the movement failed because a cultural chasm divided the reformers and the communities they sought to transform. Reformers were paternalistic. They believed that the new policies should properly be administered from above, and they were not hesitant to impose their own solutions. They also viewed different cultures and races as inferior. Rural southerners saw their communities and customs quite differently. For most, local control and personal liberty were watchwords. They had long deflected attempts of southern outsiders to control their affairs, and they opposed the paternalistic reforms of the Progressive Era with equal determination. Throughout the 1920s they made effective implementation of policy changes difficult if not impossible. In a small-scale war, rural folk forced the reformers to confront the integrity of the communities they sought to change.