Search Results

The years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were defined in part by a national obsession with domesticity and respectability and a redefinition of public/private spheres. Beginning with the efforts of the Christian Woman’s Exchange, and continuing with the work of the Traveler’s Aid Society, the Catholic Woman’s Club, the Catherine Club, and the Young Women’s Christian Association, reform-minded women in New Orleans organized to promote white women’s economic security and provide respectable and affordable residences as alternatives to prostitution. This essay considers women’s organizing and institution-building as creating an unchartered, interstitial spatial territory situated in-between the geographically-defined private household and the public boarding houses and brothels of Storyville.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the first generation of women racial reformers after the 1954 Brown decision. Brown marked a turning point in the history of these “lady activists” for it led them to condemn segregation publicly, putting them at odds with their communities and leaders. Although their support of the Brown decision placed them among radicals in the eyes of segregationists, these women continued to rely on suasion and a non-confrontational approach to win the hearts and minds of their white fellow southerners. Churchwomen continued to advocate racial equality in the name of God's will. The chapter also examines the key contribution of the older generation to racial progress, through organizations such as the Fellowship of the Concerned, Councils on Human Relations, and local and state Leagues of Women Voters. It then focuses on “save-the-school” groups created by white women in Little Rock, Atlanta, and New Orleans between 1958 and 1961. It finally demonstrates that all these women developed similar tactics during the desegregation crisis, playing the cards of respectability, moderation, and ladyhood to confront segregationist male leaders successfully. At the same time, it analyzes the sense of empowerment that the crisis brought to many of them.

In 1909, Schneiderman, Newman, Cohn and Lemlich helped organize the largest women’s strike in U.S. history to that date, New York’s “Uprising of the 40,000.” This chapter tells the story of that strike and follows its ripples across the U.S. as it sparked garment worker strikes in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Kalamazoo, Chicago and Brooklyn. By the end of the decade 40% of garment workers were in unions, most of them young women and girls.

The Campbells undertook an extensive tour, through the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, visiting industrial schools and talking to social workers. After hearing accounts of the deplorable medical conditions, denominational conflicts, and immoral conduct of the inhabitants at nearly every stop, they got lost on a harrowing trip in the dark, going through the North Carolina mountains back to Tennessee.

The successful attempt to remove the prohibition against mixed marriages in Massachusetts (such a law continued to exist in Maine where it wasn't enforced and in Rhode Island until the 1880s) did not occur in isolation from the larger movement for equal rights. Advocating the end of the ban, however, was tricky for politicians and reformers in general (particularly women), because they would be charged with promoting “amalgamation,” but nonetheless year after year the demand to change the law grew. Petitions kept the issue alive in the legislature, The Liberator had called for repeal since its second issue, and eventually good sense prevailed in part because the cause was just but also because so many politicians believed it to be only a symbolic issue. In 1843 the Massachusetts legislature voted for repeal of the marriage restriction and against the desegregation of the railroads-an issue with immediate impact.