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

2. The Moonlight Campaign

The Moonlight Campaign T W O 37 When Cora Wilson Stewart celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday in January 1911, her only child was dead and her marriage was over, but she believed she had found the work God intended her to do, and with characteristic determination, she began. Having given the issue of illiteracy a lot of thought, like many of her contemporaries in mountain mission work, she agreed with Berea College president WilliamGoodellFrostandothersintheirinterpretationofthemountaineers as “a people of arrested civilization,” living much as their ancestors had generations earlier. In her speeches and in her book Moonlight Schools for the Emancipation of Adult Illiterates (1922), she used the rhetoric of Appalachian worthiness to justify the time, money, and energy necessary to bring this group into the twentieth century. A “noble people,” the mountaineers stood eager and hopeful , “anxious to enter in and take their part in the work of the world,” she wrote, citing Theodore Roosevelt’s description of the hardy Scotch-IrishPresbyterianbackwoodsmanin“WinningoftheWest.”1 At first glance the missionary uplift rhetoric appears to present a faith in education that rivals novelist Horatio Alger’s belief in the transformative power of the almighty American dollar. Just as the heroes of the dime novels needed only one lucky break and their own determination, hard work, and native intelligence to turn their rags to riches, these mythical Anglo-Saxon Appalachian mountain folk appeared to need only the benefit of education to revolutionize their lives and landscape. Just as the dime novels sold the working poor a capitalistic bill of goods, holding out the promise of wealth 38 Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentucky’s Moonlight Schools andpowertothepoorandpowerless,onthesurfaceitappearsthatschoolmen and schoolwomen held out the promise of equally unlikely transformations among the mountain folk. In this rhetoric, however, exists a fine and elusive line between myth and reality. Although Cora Wilson Stewart understood and employed this rhetoric, it is also likely that she, Frost, and others actually believed much of what they said, even though their intentions were partially subsumed in the language of benevolence work, fine-tuned to the ears of wealthy philanthropists. Although the rhetoric of benevolence work overstated both the negatives and the positives, upward mobility in Progressive Era America was a distinctpossibility.Andjustascitydwellersandsomeimmigrantgroupscould move, if not from rags to riches, at least from rags to respectability, so could rural folk move from poverty to reasonable comfort. While it is easy to criticize uplift as little more than social control—a misguided attempt to fit the poor to their circumstances—and its rhetoric as opportunistic and denigrating , Stewart believed that education enabled the rural poor to acquire some of the benefits of modern life. She saw that as a good thing. Moreover, acknowledging that schooling is deeply connected to the mutually reinforcing class and economic structure of capitalism and that women chose careers in teaching because it was socially acceptable does not preclude analysis of Stewart’s life and work from the perspective of individual and gender agency. In fact, Stewart, whether or not she considered herself a feminist, was an educational activist who chose her profession for a variety of reasons— not the least of which was a desire to improve rural society. Historians generally call women of Stewart’s generation social feminists and tend to overlook or minimize the degree to which they pursued political goals and political activity, and Stewart has been placed in this category.2 Historian Nancy F. Cott has assessed some of the limitations and problems of casting Progressive Era women solely in the role of social feminism and has urged historians to expand the vocabulary of women’s history. She also points out that “the use of social feminism as an umbrella term neither deals with the broad political spectrum from left to right that women’s politics occupied (as men’s did) nor recognizes that women’s loyalties and alliances outside of feminism shaped their woman-oriented activities.”3 Cora Wilson Stewart’s life history illustrates some of the shortcomings of wholesale application of the social feminist paradigm to women based on their location in time and circumstance. Of broader applicability is the category of “maternalism ,” which initially defined a type of activism that used the language of motherhood to justify women’s political activism. This analytical framework 39 The Moonlight Campaign has broadened to include a variety of reform initiatives begun and supported by individuals and organized women, and thus it is...