Southern Women in the Progressive Era , livre ebook

Southern Women in the Progressive Era
Women s Diaries and Letters of the South Carol Bleser, Founding Editor Melissa Walker and Giselle Roberts, Series Editors
Southern Women in the Progressive Era
A READER
EDITED BY
Giselle Roberts and Melissa Walker
FOREWORD BY
Marjorie J. Spruill

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-925-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-926-2 (ebook)
Front cover photo : Mary McLeod Bethune, ca. 1904; inset , Bethune with a line of school girls, 1905; courtesy of State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory
Contents
Founding Editor s Preface
Foreword
Marjorie J. Spruill
Editorial Note
Introduction
Giselle Roberts and Melissa Walker
PART ONE: ACTIVISTS IN THE MAKING
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866-1948): Memoirs of a Southern Feminist
Anya Jabour
Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955): Autobiography of an Educator and Civil Rights Activist
Ann Short Chirhart
Mary Lee Cagle (1864-1955): Autobiography of an Evangelist Preacher
Priscilla Pope-Levison
PART TWO: A NEW SOUTHERN WORKFORCE
Anthelia Holt (1861-1950): The Correspondence of a Textile Mill Worker
Beth English
Henrietta Aiken Kelly (1844-1916): The Correspondence of a Special Field Agent
Debra Bloom
Florida s First State Health Nurses (1914-1916): Reporting on a Service for Health
Christine Ardalan
PART THREE: REGIONAL COMMENTATORS
Mary and Louisa Poppenheim (1866-1936; 1868-1957): The Keystone , Women s Clubs, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy
Joan Marie Johnson
Mary Johnston (1870-1936): The Suffrage Speeches of a Virginia Novelist
Lisa A. Francavilla
Corra White Harris (1869-1935): Essays on Women, Politics, and Southern Identity
Catherine Oglesby
Notes
Contributors
Index
Founding Editor s Preface
Southern Women in the Progressive Era is the twenty-ninth volume in this series, now titled Women s Diaries and Letters of the South. This series includes a number of never-before-published diaries, collections of unpublished correspondence, and a few reprints of published diaries-a wide selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern women s informal writings. The series may be the largest series of published works by and on southern women.
The goal of the series is to enable women to speak for themselves, providing readers with a rarely opened window into southern society before, during, and after the American Civil War and into the twentieth century. The significance of these letters and journals lies not only in the personal revelations and the writing talent of these women authors but also in the range and versatility of the documents contents. Taken together, these publications will tell us much about the heyday and the fall of the Cotton Kingdom, the mature years of the peculiar institution, the war years, the adjustment of the South to a new social order following the defeat of the Confederacy, and the New South of the twentieth century. Through these writings the reader will also be presented with firsthand accounts of everyday life and social events, courtships, and marriages, family life and travels, religion and education, and the life-and-death matters that made up the ordinary and extraordinary world of the American South.
Carol Bleser
Foreword
MARJORIE J. SPRUILL
Southern Women in the Progressive Era consists of primary documents that are as intriguing as they are informative. They were written by women living in a time and place in which tradition had a firm grip on people s thoughts and actions, even as numerous political, social, technological, and economic factors-and many people -promoted change.
This volume expands our knowledge of the American South during the turbulent years between 1890 and the end of World War I and how changing circumstances dramatically altered southern women s lives. The documents also help us understand the peculiar features of Progressivism in the region and southern women s varied responses to this political reform movement in which women, despite their disfranchised state, were vitally important.
As the Progressive movement took shape across the nation in the 1890s, the South was experiencing a race crisis. African Americans, who with the aid of northern philanthropists were making progress in education and employment, encountered considerable resistance, including escalating levels of violence and loss of political power. Efforts of white and black populists to engage in fusion politics across party lines achieved limited success, but it was enough to alarm the white elite. The result was a political crisis in which middle- and upper-class whites sought to reestablish hegemony over African Americans and poor whites by restricting access to the ballot and, having done so, enforcing institutionalized segregation. A complementary Lost Cause movement launched an all-out effort to preserve the values for which white conservatives claimed the Civil War had been fought, including white supremacy and state s rights. Meanwhile, New South boosters promoted industrialization and urbanization, and thousands of poor whites moved from farm to factory. A robust movement to curb the production as well as the use of alcohol gained strength with strong support from religious conservatives black and white.
All of these political crosscurrents shaped southerners diverse, conflicting, and sometimes paradoxical responses to Progressivism. A movement in which one of the central tenets was increased reliance on the power of the government to address social problems was complicated by southern whites resentment of outside intervention. Most white southerners insisted that only the South should resolve its problems, especially its Negro problem. White suffragists urged political leaders to enfranchise them by state action, to use woman suffrage-restricted by property or literacy tests to white women-to help restore white supremacy. Declining that suggestion in favor of standing by the polls with shotguns rather than dragging lovely womanhood into the mire, southern white politicians then devised means of limiting the franchise legally -which they hailed as a progressive reform that helped clean up politics. Textile mill owners who relied on cheap child labor, however, were as emphatic as Lost Cause enthusiasts in insisting that southern women (many of whom sought the vote to oppose child labor) be protected from political participation.
White conservative politicians then declared all-out resistance to a federal amendment to enfranchise women, invoking state s rights and insisting that approving the Nineteenth Amendment was tantamount to acknowledging the validity of the Fifteenth Amendment. As a result, the South was decidedly different from the rest of the nation in its response to this landmark legislation of the Progressive Era. Of the ten states that refused to ratify the woman suffrage amendment, nine were south of the Mason-Dixon line. Only Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas broke ranks with the Solid South. On the other hand, the Woman s Christian Temperance Union, which endorsed woman suffrage, thrived in the South, and in no region were politicians more supportive of the Eighteenth Amendment, which imposed Prohibition on the nation.
The documents in this volume illustrate in the most convincing way possible the tremendous differences in the experiences of women living in the South during this period and the ways in which class, race, and religion shaped their ideas and actions. In the South as well as the North, progressive reformers were often condescending to those they sought to help. White suffragists, often led by women from elite southern families, demanded voting rights for themselves while supporting suffrage restrictions affecting poor and black people, believing that they and the men of their class and race should govern maternalistically and paternalistically in the spirit of noblesse oblige .
Southern women of the growing middle class, like middle-class women throughout the nation, flocked to the club movement and increasingly turned their attention from self-improvement to civic improvement. Conscious of widespread opposition to women s involvement beyond the home, many argued that supporting reforms to improve their communities and aid the poor was consistent with the traditional role of the southern lady as well as the spirit of Christian charity. Many supported extension of public health services to African American communities as well as to whites, though some did so by arguing that unhealthy blacks carried germs that would contaminate white homes. African American women in the South, forming women s clubs of their own, often sought white women s support for reforms that would aid their communities and-as long as they did not demand the vote-were often successful.
The documents in this volume richly demonstrate the complexities of southern society and the wide range of political opinions in this era. The women whose stories appear in this book came from many parts of the political spectrum. We hear from a congressman s daughter and the daughter of slaves, from a best-selling novelist to a barely literate mill worker, from a wealthy clubwoman who graduated from Vassar and never held a paid job to an itinerant minister who had little education and lived off contributions to h