Gender In The Progressive Era Essay

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In Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, twelve scholars in separate essays examine the role of gender in Progressive era reform. More specifically, these scholars attempt to explain how gender was defined, used for reform efforts, and complicated and augmented by race and class during the Progressive era. In the view of the essays presented here, the key to gender during this period is the communities of women that organized around a particular set of issues to enact intentionally far-reaching reform. It becomes clear, however, that women Progressives were less successful in certain areas based on their inability to build consensus beyond a supposed common identity as women; that to be an African-American woman or a working-class …show more content…

In her study of Alice Hamilton, a pioneering scientist and public health official of the Progressive era, Barbara Sicherman argues that “as a group men never seemed so insistently or deeply concerned with the problems that animated her [Alice Hamilton’s] female associates. It was difficult to express this sense of difference other than in terms of gender. To do so made the reformers less sensitive to the way in which gender continued to constrain women, but their gender consciousness encouraged the personal and political bonding necessary to their endeavor” (141). Further, Ellen Carol DuBois points to the generational divide among the Progressive reformers: “the first generation of progressives constructed women’s class relations on the model of the family, in which poor women were as dependent as children on the loving protection of the reformer-mothers, the second generation of women progressives tended toward a professional model, with its mutually defining positions of expert and client” (164). These two defenses of gender as a tool for understanding Progressive era reform add another layer of analysis, but leave a more complicated picture of Progressive reform: one that was shaped by gender, race, class, and generations, opening the door for a multitude of other possible explanations for Progressive

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