Book Review

Canada and the United States

Robert G. Barrows's biography of Albion Fellows Bacon is a welcome addition to Indiana University Press's "Midwestern History and Culture" series. The life of Bacon, named for her deceased father, gives us an intimate view of what it was like to be an upper-middle-class woman reformer during the Progressive era. Bacon is representative of many women of her class who were not women's rights activists but yet were reformers. For Bacon, the issue of woman's rights was not singularly important. It took third place, following family and tenement and child welfare.

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Barrows discerningly uses Bacon's life story to tell the story of Progressive-era activism, particularly in the areas of housing and child welfare. He does a great job of linking the literature on Progressivism to the local story of Bacon's life and activism and gives readers a firm understanding of the shape of that body of literature and changing historical perspectives over time. Barrows chronicles the evolution of what he calls "an inadvertent feminist," clearly showing Bacon's use of her qualities and the responsibilities of her traditional roles as wife and mother to describe and justify her move into the public sphere to do "municipal housekeeping."

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