The Politics of Education in the New South

Rebecca S. Montgomery seeks to do for white women's history what has been done for African American women's history: examine changing household relations in the wake of the end of slavery and the coming of industrialization. Indeed, The Politics of Education in the New South expands the familiar histories of Progressivism to cover previously unexamined groups of white female education reformers in the rural South. The author argues that white southern women used education as a tool to challenge antebellum female dependency. In Georgia, “female activists attempted to effect political change by gathering grassroots support in favor of a new relationship between family, community, and government” (p. 62). Shifting gender relations and new claims to citizenship challenged male individualism and in some cases replaced patriarchal care and control of women by increasing state responsibility for women and families. Montgomery's book demonstrates that while white women reformers followed a path similar to that of African American reformers of the same period, they did not travel that path together. White women in Georgia did not challenge segregation nor did they promote the interests of black households. Since white education reformers showed little interest in interracial cooperation and appealed to scientific racism in their rhetoric, their development is a separate story

Citizenship · Government (linguistics · Grassroots · Individualism · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society