Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Activists

Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Activists Martha H. Swain For a long time I have heard Southern Association for Women Historians' colleagues speak of the scant material on women in standard histories of the South and particularly in monographs and coUected essays on twentieth-century topics. More disturbing is the omission or only passing reference to southerners in widely acclaimed studies in women's history that too often focus on eastern elites or working women in urban centers outside the South. It is now gratifying that seasoned scholars and an energetic new corps of graduate students, mostly at southern universities, have turned things around. Some of the best new work in American history is on the experience of women in the South. It is commonplace knowledge that women's clubs were proving grounds for activists. History is already rich in accounts of federated clubs and their affiliates. The American Historical Association dissertation register , conference programs, and word of mouth inform us that important new works are forthcoming on state club histories. An example is that of Anastasia Sims, who has in press The Power of Femininity: Women and Politics in North Carolina, 1883-1930. Exemplary of new approaches, it examines the work and interconnectedness of a number of clubs, patriotic societies, and voluntary associations. At the city level, new work abounds. Read Elizabeth Hayes Turner on Galveston women who spearheaded major reforms and Pamela Tyler's new Silk Stockings and Ballot Boxes: Women and Politics in New Orleans, 1920-1963. Marsha WedeU's Elite Women and the Reform Impulse in Memphis, 1875-1915 is about club women who were behind educational reform in a city long identified as a bastion of boss rule and indifference to its less privileged citizens. Take note of Sandra Tread way's new Women of Mark: A History of the Woman's Club of Richmond, Virginia, 1894-1994 that portrays verbally and visually the variety of reforms that engaged upper-class women, whose clubs have customarily been viewed as merely social or literary. Now approaching their centennial and touting a hundred years of service, women's clubs in the South have scrapbooks and minutes that will likely be mined for even more substantive studies that will dispel any remaining notions that southern women's clubs were primarily nesting grounds for social butterflies. When Carlson Publishing Company brought out eleven books of rediscovered or new scholarship in women's history, selected by Gerda Lerner, it included an older work, Matronage: Patterns in Women's Organizations , Atlanta, Georgia, 1890-1940, that described "unsuspected © 1996 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 8 No. 3 (Fall) 170 Journal of Women's History Fall connections" of, among others, the Daughters of the American Revolution , the Colonial Dames, and the African-American Chautauqua Circle. That such groups, long chastened for their conservatism or their memorializing of the past, actually engaged in progressive activities is one of the surprises of the account. To be sure, newer "revisiting" with clubs that sprang from Lost Cause roots wiU stiU find among them a common resistance to reforms that threatened the racial status quo in the South. Young scholars at early stages of work are exploring the complex relationship between black and white club women and mixed motives in their organizational goals. A richly constructed dissertation on South Carolina federated clubs argues that the social reform work of white club women was part of a larger agenda to rebuUd a southern identity after the Civil War, and thus women focused upon endeavors to perpetuate tradition even whUe pursuing progressive reform. Similarly, African-American club women sought a southern identity for the race even as they strategized for racial uplift and challenged segregation. In this comparative study of the clubs demonstrating how region and race affected reform work among women of both races, Joan Marie Johnson reaches a new level of sophistication in writing club women's history. The "new woman" in the southern progressive movement is the subject of two fairly recent books. One of them, The New Woman in Alabama : Social Reforms and Suffrage, 1890-1920, is a model for future work that will flesh out the victories and failures women had in advancing reform...