Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era

With its massive industrialization, rapid urban growth, and immense social change, the Progressive Era as a period of reform marks the birth of contemporary American institutions, policies, and values. In this collection of informative essays, Noralee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye bring together work by such notable women scholars as Ellen Carol DuBois, Alice Kessler-Harris, Barbara Sicherman, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn to illuminate the lives and labor of American women from the late nineteenth century to the early 1920s. Revealing the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and social class, the authors of these essays explore women's accomplishments in changing welfare and labor legislation; early twentieth-century feminism and woman suffrage; women in industry and the work force; the relationship between family and community in early twentieth-century America; and the ways in which African-American, immigrant, and working-class women contributed to progressive reform. This challenging collection not only displays the dramatic transformations women of all classes experienced, but also begins constructing a new scaffolding for progressivism in general.