Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky's Moonlight Schools: Fighting for Literacy in America

Introduction: Creating “Miss Cora”

Introduction 1 Creating “Miss Cora” Cora Wilson was born in 1875 in rural eastern Kentucky. The daughter of a schoolteacher and a physician, she grew up in fairly modest circumstances. In an era when education and economic or social status largely defined what a woman could and could not do, Cora attended normal school rather than a finishing school, and instead of completing a university degree, she took a job in a oneroom school. Dictated by economic necessity and the realities of her life and family circumstances, these decisions later may have limited her ability to bring about change within her chosen profession , but they shaped Cora’s choice of her life’s work and guided her vision of the role of education in society. Cora was born to parents who expected each of their children to “be somebody,” and her whole life and body of work can be seen as an act of self-creation. From the age of four or five, when she declared her intention to be a teacher, through a career that lasted more than thirty years, Cora strove for perfection and accomplishment . Fifteen years younger than social reformer Jane Addams and eighteen years younger than muckraking author and journalist Ida Tarbell, her greatest heroes, Cora Wilson was part of a generation of reformers whose campaigns for woman suffrage and other reform issuesbroadenedthepublicsphereandthehorizonsofwomenacross the nation. Although she embraced the “new woman” ideal, she retained many traditional values. Schooled to selflessness and Christian service, she grew up thinking she had a mission in life, and once her vision of it emerged, she pursued it zealously. 2 Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky’s Moonlight Schools In fact, once she recognized the extent of rural illiteracy, campaigning against it seemed the only moral thing to do. Other progressives throughout the South were waging war on the hookworm and the boll weevil, reforming women in northern and eastern cities were seeking to eliminate child labor, settlement house workers were attacking the social problems of immigrants, and others were campaigning for woman suffrage or temperance. Women of Stewart’s generation took up a variety of causes, and although decades passed before historians acknowledged them, a large body of literature now documents their contributions to the Progressive Era and to American political culture.1 Stewart’s native state of Kentucky was also home to the rural settlement schoolmovement,whichbroughtschoolingtomountainchildrenatTroublesome Creek’s Hindman Settlement School and later saw others established at Pine Mountain and Caney Creek. Although a number of important differencesexistbetweenStewartandthegrouplocalsoftenreferredtoas “fotched on” women, the outsiders who brought education to the mountains of southeasternKentucky ,theywereremarkablysimilarintheirapproach,theirviews of the mountain people, and their shared faith in the ability of education to change lives.2 They generally relied on the same groups of volunteers, employed the same rhetoric, and sought funding from the same philanthropic and charitable organizations. They could have learned much from one another ,butlittleprofessionalorpersonalinteractiontookplacebetweenStewart and the settlement workers.3 Like her counterparts in mountain settlement school work, Cora Wilson Stewart possessed strong ambition and zealously promoted both the literacy cause and her role in it. During her thirty-year career, Cora enjoyed a measure of fame, some moments of high accomplishment and personal satisfaction , and a few moments of defeat and frustration. She embellished the former and attempted to minimize or even hide the latter, making her a historical enigma, a woman difficult to analyze and virtually impossible to categorize. She has been criticized for self-promotion and overstating the importance of the Moonlight Schools and her role in them, and ultimately her proclivity for self-promotion and her conscious effort to seek the limelight injured both her reputation with contemporaries and her historical legacy.4 Although some have questioned the efficacy of her crusade, Cora Wilson Stewart largely escaped the charges of cultural imperialism leveled at Katherine Pettit and May Stone for their work at the Hindman Settlement School, perhaps because she was a native of the region she sought to uplift.5 3 Introduction For the most part, Stewart has been romanticized as a hero whose selfless dedication to the Moonlight School movement made her a legend in her own time. Stewart enjoyed the recognition, awards, and public accolades she won, took great pride in her leadership of the literacy movement, and even maintained fairly detailed records of her life and work. An avid writer, she kept a number of “diaries” that, at first glance, promise a...