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Asserting the right to childhood, women in California added free kindergartens to the charitable landscape, starting in the late 1870s. They followed Friedrich Frobel, Elizabeth Peabody, and Caroline Severance to argue children learned through play; they also wanted to socialize working class children. After locating the kindergarten movement in global culture, the story returns to San Francisco where Kate Wiggin opened a free kindergarten in Tar Flat, the first on the West Coast. The charitable public eagerly supported it, and other women followed in Oakland, including Elizabeth Betts, Wiggin’s student at the California Kindergarten Training School. As the Women’s Christian Temperance Union escalated its campaign in California, Betts repurposed a saloon, turning a disreputable male preserve into a woman’s space, the West Oakland Free Kindergarten. During the devastating 1890s depression, as a new mood flowered in California politics and the Women’s Congress convened, Elizabeth Watt decided to expand the school.

Scholars agree in discerning discrepancies between men and women in discussions of secularization, yet often base such discussions on relatively shallow social survey data about individual piety. This chapter points away from views of women’s religiosity as a private matter towards the role of women’s organizations in public life. Such groups epitomize the voluntarism that is often suggested as an explanation of the vibrancy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious movements in the United States, in contrast to secularization in Europe. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union in particular offers opportunities for comparison. When its leader, Frances Willard, relocated to England, she expected to generate the same enthusiasm that had made her one of the most influential women leaders in America. The attempt foundered on the lack of receptivity among British women for Willard’s famous ‘Do Everything’ policy, an attempt they viewed as distinctively American.

This chapter examines the social and theological underpinnings of the large Protestant membership groups that helped build support for major Progressive Era reforms, including child labor restrictions, maternal health programs, and prohibition. It argues that the three factors were particularly important in motivating progressive religious activism in the early twentieth century. The first was the revival of a strand of Protestant social thought that stretched back to the Puritans—a prophetic tradition built on the interconnected ideas of stewardship, providential duty, and collective accountability for sin. The second was the sect dynamic observed by the sociologist Max Weber during his early twentieth-century visit to the United States—a social dynamic that incentivized upwardly mobile citizens to seek membership in Protestant churches and membership groups while also endowing church and group leaders with considerable influence over the beliefs and behaviors of their members. The third was the rise of an ecumenical infrastructure that promoted cooperation between elite reformers and average citizens, and also between believers of different social and denominational backgrounds.

At the end of the nineteenth century, many northern missionaries traveled to Appalachia to “uplift” mountain whites who, because of their geographical isolation, have continued to hold on to folkways that impede economic and moral progress. With help from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the missionaries focused their efforts on eliminating alcohol and illicit distilling, believing these are the leading causes of the inability of mountain whites to become “civilized.” But even before the missionaries arrived in the 1890s, rural highlanders were becoming increasingly connected with the market economy and embracing New South rhetoric as evidenced by a grassroots temperance crusade in western North Carolina that relied on local-option legislation to combat alcohol. By the turn of the nineteenth century, reformers began pushing for statewide prohibition after seeing that local-option and antiliquor laws were not doing enough to reduce alcohol consumption in the region.

In their pursuit of prohibition and moral politics, religious activists both harnessed and subverted two dominant regional discourses—those surrounding race and gender—to clothe themselves in the garb of righteousness. Prohibition did not merely reflect or reproduce regional norms, but neither did it occur in isolation from them. The creation of the clerics’ moral community depended on an ever-changing amalgamation of race, gender, class, religion, and politics. For instance, although white prohibitionists made explicit appeals to a “better sort” of black southerners, they simultaneously used African American opposition to moral reform as evidence for the need of laws disfranchising black voters. Likewise, male religious leaders loudly proclaimed themselves honorable defenders of female virtue, and while they welcomed female foot soldiers, their notion of male guardianship prevented them from accepting female activists as equal participants in the prohibition crusade.

The threat of prohibition inspired Willamette Valley hop growers to join their farming brethren on the Pacific Coast to enter a political fight. It was a fight, however, that failed, as Oregon voters approved an initiative to prohibit the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol five years before Congress ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. Many hop growers abandoned the trade in fear of prohibition, along with others farmers that moved in the direction of grain, fruits, and vegetables to help in the World War I era. But those who stayed planted in hops were wise to do so. As the Great War unfolded in Europe, agricultural lands lay ruined. Additionally, Germany’s aggression corroded their hold on the international hop market. Willamette Valley growers seized the opportunity to expand their distribution shortly after the war and through the 1920s. So great was the success that even during Prohibition that eliminated domestic beer markets, Oregon growers expanded acreage in every year of the “dry decade.”

Henry W. Blair supported legislation on federal aid to education introduced by other senators when he first arrived in that chamber. Starting in 1881 he introduced his own bill that distributed funds based on illiteracy. This would have directed that most funding to the southern states and insured the support of southern senators. The legislation easily passed the Senate, but it failed in the House of Representatives.