Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women’s Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 by K. David Hanzlick (review)

K. David Hanzlick argues in Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women’s Activism in Kansas City, 1870 to 1940 that Kansas City, Missouri, was a revealing site for the evolution of American women’s activism in the later part of the nineteenth century. The city was unique: it was a major regional railway hub and a growing metropolis on the bluffs of the Missouri River and on the border between a former slave state and a free state. These competing puzzle pieces led to a diverse population of business elites, laborers, European immigrants, and black migrants. As the city grew, so did its problems. Kansas City women took it upon themselves to combat woes of urbanization. Female activists from a variety of backgrounds worked for decades to improve their rapidly transitioning society. Hanzlick’s interests lie in the specific ways that middle- and upper-class women approached reform, from sincere care and concern for the poor, to instilling middle-class values, to pursuing democratic gender equality. Using diaries, letters, city directories, newspapers, and organizational records, Hanzlick tracks how Kansas City women negotiated these different techniques, which he labels benevolence, moral reform, and equality, in an impressive account of a city much ignored.

From the years after the Civil War to the Progressive era, activist women in Kansas City mirrored their national counterparts in their calls for temperance, woman suffrage, and reform. However, Hanzlick contends Kansas City women’s organizations did not at first differentiate between the three strains of activism—benevolence, moral reform, and equality—as the national organizations did. Organizations such as the Women’s Christian Association of Kansas City, founded in 1870, combined efforts to assist the poor, to eliminate societal ills by instilling middle-class values, and to advocate for female equality. However, the “diverse currents of thought” surrendered to a late-nineteenth-century emphasis on benevolence and gendered notions of relief (p. 84). For the most part, women retreated from their public activism and acquiesced to male-led relief in a contested terrain of organized charities, political machines, and labor organizations.

As Kansas City grew in population and diversity after the turn of the twentieth century, women challenged social limitations. Local branches of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Young Women’s Christian Association helped integrate local women in the national conversation. These clubs, committees, and organizations taught women the skills they needed to organize and run meetings, speak in public, and see their efforts bear fruit in the community. Women in Kansas City never experienced the disunity that plagued national organizations in the early twentieth century. Hanzlick rejects the “‘eastern’ thesis” that women’s organizations fractured after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and were supplanted by men’s political organizations (p. 5). Instead, women in Kansas City continued to advocate social and political changes. For example, the Women’s Forward Kansas City Committee campaigned for better local governance and fought for women’s and children’s issues. Unsurprisingly, as Hanzlick notes, the women’s actions were successful when they “conformed to—rather than challenged—socially constructed gender norms” (p. 220).

Hanzlick’s work is a much-welcomed addition to the growing field of midwestern studies and adds a nuanced analysis of women’s approaches to benevolence, moral reform, and equality in uncertain times. While the research is thorough and draws attention to an understudied city, the book’s scope is unwieldy. The timeline allows for only cursory examinations of specific organizations and individuals, and the general theme of women’s empowerment tends to underplay the tension and diversity that marked many midwestern cities at the time. Hanzlick’s brief inspection of ethnicity and race is evidence that further work needs to be done on midwestern women. However, Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality is an admirable start.