Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A Reader ed. by Giselle Roberts and Melissa Walker (review)

In Southern Women in the Progressive Era: A Reader, editors Giselle Roberts and Melissa Walker use selected diary entries and letters to explore the changing attitudes and prejudices of southern women pertaining to gender, race, class, and politics in the Progressive era. Progressivism in the South developed in the shadow of both New South ideals and the Lost Cause. Therefore, these women’s thoughts and deeds were a mix of scientific racism, political liberalism, and economic reform. Roberts and Walker maintain that the opportunities presented to these women through education and women’s clubs provided a new avenue for their public growth and the development of differing interpretations of southern womanhood.

The chapters are organized in three sections, which focus on activism, industrialization, and woman suffrage in the South. Each section contains short biographies of activist women, written by contributors, followed by primary source materials that illustrate the theme of each chapter. Part 1, “Activists in the Making,” features Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Lee Cagle. Collectively, these women sought educational advancements and opportunities for all women regardless of race or class. Their words illuminate how access to education made a difference in the lives of southern women’s Progressive thought. Roberts and Walker artfully weave these biographical sketches throughout each chapter, encouraging the reader to understand, sympathize, or criticize these Progressive leaders’ actions. As Priscilla Pope-Levison writes of Cagle, these women “drew inspiration from a progressive world that found women ‘slowly but surely pressing their way to the front’” (p. 91). It is evident in their letters and diaries that Breckinridge, Bethune, and Cagle knew that they were living in exciting and changing times and welcomed it, but they still had a lagging conflict of romanticizing the comforts of the past.

Part 2, “A New Southern Workforce,” focuses on the impact that the New South’s economic changes had on the lives of southern women, including the devastating effects of the “‘stretch out’” system in textile mills (p. 114). The primary sources included in this section illustrate how the work that southern women performed for wages influenced and shaped every aspect of their lives. The most interesting chapter in this section contains medical reports from Florida nurses. These selections vividly describe the daunting tasks of treating and preventing hookworm, polio, and tuberculosis in the face of heartbreaking poverty. Due to societal norms, many female Progressive leaders often held racist and condescending attitudes toward those they were attempting to aid. One of the most progressive elements of the Florida sanatoriums was that “in Florida black and white nurses worked together, and in collaboration with clubwomen, to deliver a surprisingly inclusive service to its rural communities” (p. 184). Christine Ardalan asserts that white Progressive-era reformers were dedicated to improving public health but also claimed scientific racist justifications to explain why some communities were plagued by disease and poverty.

Part 3, “Regional Commentators,” features the suffrage activities of Mary Poppenheim, Louisa Poppenheim, Mary Johnston, and Corra White Harris. The authors of these chapters use editorials, correspondence, and speeches written by these suffragists to depict contradictions in Progressive thought, specifically that suffrage and political representation for women were of paramount concern but universal racial suffrage was not. White women’s suffrage crusade, “like much of southern Progressivism, was an uneasy mix of regional reform and racism” (p. 179). Race dictated the limits of suffrage in the South. The inclusion of Harris’s editorial “A Southern Woman’s View” (1899), which centered on the racist assumption that the lack of character among black women justified their exclusion from suffrage, illustrates this point. Even though race was the loudest concern, Lisa A. Francavilla asserts that the southern antisuffrage campaign was also concerned that the emergence of women voting would change “‘the...