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

Preface

This book analyzes the life and work of Cora Wilson Stewart, a Progressive Era reformer who sought to eliminate adult illiteracy in a single generation, a goal she believed would also improve the quality of life in rural America. It illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of a grassroots movement, examines the politicization of the literacy crusade, and suggests that women’s activism and the woman vote had important effects on male political culture. Prior to suffrage, Stewart’s appeals for government aid evoked chivalrous attempts to “support” the reform agenda, generally with rhetoric and token legislation; however, after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, male politicians granted Stewart only limited and conditional participation in politics andusedbothlegislativemaneuveringandaccesstothepublicpursetoguard their own favored position in the polity. This study attempts to capture the enigmatic southern progressive and feminist whose historic persona lingers in the shadows of relatively narrow analyses that judge her work based on the numbers of illiterates taught or the degree to which her crusade actually reduced illiteracy.1 In the hope that both subjects will benefit from it, my work also seeks to establish Cora Wilson Stewart and the literacy campaign within the larger context of Progressive Era reform, a topic that defies precise definition and reflects broad interpretational debate among historians.2 Part of Stewart’s importance as a historical figure lies in her attempt, like many progressives and most progressive women educators, to humanize the functions of developing education and social welfare bureaucracies even as they sought to strengthen them. Like many others set to this task, she failed, at least in the short run. Nevertheless, many of the critical elements of Preface viii Preface her philosophy and approach are embedded in current literacy and adult education policy and practice, which suggests that her vision for a literate public was insightful and even prophetic. However, her insistence on voluntary service and reliance on the “each one teach one” method not only gave legislators at all levels a convenient excuse to underfund the literacy initiative but also allowed educators who sought to limit teaching to credentialed and university-trained professionals to cast her as an antiprogressive holdover from a bygone day, a tactic they frequently used against women educators who rejected the corporate model of bureaucratization and centralization. Stewart as a historical figure, then, has suffered in a gendered double bind of time and circumstance, caught in her own life between tradition and modernism in a transitional age, and, in historical analysis, trapped by her legend and her “failure” to achieve her stated goal. My conclusions are informed by interpretations that place Kentucky in the South and acknowledge its mountain counties as part of the social and physical construct known as Appalachia. I see Stewart as a southern reformer who embraced class-based ideals of uplift and progress that accepted, to some degree, the hierarchy of race and culture. What she did not accept was theirpermanenceorinevitability.Shebelievedinself-improvementasameans of eliminating such hierarchies, and she used education and the profession of teaching to blur those lines in her own life and to empower those who learned to read and write in her Moonlight Schools for adult illiterates. I have taken a thematic approach in dealing with Stewart’s networking, her attempts to secure state and federal support for adult literacy through legislation and appropriations, and her efforts to reshape and redirect the work of state and national education bureaucracies through campaigns at the local, state, national, and international level. I have, however, used the chronology of her life and work to organize these themes. Whenever possible, I have used the language of the literacy movement itself. I chose to do this because it illustrates the rhetoric of faith, uplift, and progress that characterized much of Progressive Era reform, and because such rhetoric proved essential in garnering public and private support for multidimensional initiatives like the illiteracy crusade. The language of the time also gives voice to the movement’s spirit and intent. Just as important, the original language enhances the understanding of public discourse in both politics and the education profession. Because I used oral histories to examine the legacy and memories of Cora Wilson Stewart, it seemed appropriate to treat her diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and even the newspaper clippings and magazine articles that she kept as a form of oral ix Preface history or memoir. This approach connects the reader more intimately with Stewart and...