Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918

Regionally distinct yet influenced by national trends, women's progressive
culture in Texas offers a valuable opportunity to analyze the evolution
of women's voluntary associations, their challenges to southern conventions
of race and class, and their quest for social change and political power.
Judith McArthur makes an important and accessible contribution to the
study of women's activism by tracing in detail how general concerns of
national progressive organizations--about pure food, prostitution,
and education reform--shaped programs at state and local levels. Southern
women differed from their Northern counterparts by devising new approaches
to settlement work and taking advantage of World War I to challenge southern
gender and racial norms. McArthur offers a unique analysis of how women
in Texas succeeded in securing partial voting rights before passage of
the Nineteenth Amendment.
Throughout her study, McArthur provides valuable comparisons between
North and South, among various southern states, and between black and
white, male and female progressives. This book will be very useful in
a wide range of courses on southern or women's history.
A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor
Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw