Book Review

The three books under review here reflect the maturation of the field of women's history. Beautifully written, deeply researched, and thoughtfully presented, they draw upon the thinking of a generation of scholars concerning the social and political significance of women's activism. The very fact that these three books are published almost simultaneously, all of them focusing on one historical era, the Progressive period, in one state, Texas, indicates the depth and complexity that the field has now attained. Not only do these works indicate the strength of the field itself; all three authors make persuasive arguments for the centrality of women's activism to the origins, nature, and successes of Progressive Era politics as a whole. Whether in the development of libraries, kindergartens, health facilities, pure food regulation, water purity standards, museums, or parks, white middle-class women and their organizations were there.	1
While these authors concur on the central role of these women and their organizations in mainstream cultural and political events, they make their case for the centrality of women's experience and agency from three distinct angles of approach. Elizabeth York Enstam considers the emergence of women as powerful players in turn-of-the-century social reform movements from the location of the social and economic development of one major urban center in Texas, the city of Dallas. Judith N. McArthur focuses on the organizational tactics and strategies of women's voluntary organizations and the role they played in establishing women's contributions to Progressive Era politics, and Jacquelyn Masur McElhaney argues for the significance of highly motivated and politically effective individuals in the development of women's activism in a biography of Pauline Periwinkle, a leading woman journalist in Dallas. In some ways these differences of approach reflect different underlying assumptions among these authors concerning the basis for women's public activism. While Enstam views the development of a more urban and industrial economy and social structure as key to women's newfound public agency, McArthur is inclined to emphasize the significance of women's strategic and tactical organizational efforts to parlay the openings created by the economic and social structural changes that Enstam discusses. McElhaney is similarly inclined to view the development of women's activism through the lens of her chosen historical subject, the professional woman, and to emphasize the critical role that powerfully located individuals can play in injecting new ideas and in galvanizing networks for an entire movement.	2
Despite these differences in approach, all three authors do, in the end, arrive at an overwhelming unanimity in their assessment of the basis for the success of Progressive Era women's activism. This unanimity is so overwhelming, and in such stark contrast to the first wave of writings on nineteenth-century women's activism, that it perhaps calls for recognition as a distinct school of thought. While early historians of the Progressive Era women's rights movement were critical of their political success, especially the acquisition of the vote for women, since that public political empowerment was based on what they viewed as the movement's jettisoning of the antebellum women's rights movement's claim for equality of women and men, all three of these authors appear to approve of this strategy. As these authors repeatedly demonstrate in one instance of public success after another, by working through their established domestic place in relative harmony with the men of their race and class, white middle-class women were able to secure a place for themselves as effective players in the conflicted world of burgeoning urban, industrial, turn-of-the-century America. By putting aside a direct demand for equal treatment with their men, they were able to use effectively what they shared with their men, their race and class privilege, along with their own domestic expertise as white middle-class women, to carve out a cleaner, safer, more aesthetically pleasing and meritoriously based urban industrial world. In the process, they were able to establish themselves as worthy of the full rights of citizenship, at least the full rights of political citizenship up to and including the vote.	. . .