The Rest of the Story:  Female
Leadership in Progressive Education

Lynne M. Getz
Appalachian State University

SADOVNIK, ALAN R., AND SUSAN F. SEMEL, EDS.  Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders during the Progressive Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xx + 268 pp.  Introduction, illustrations, notes, and index, $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-3122-3297-7; 23.95 (paper), ISBN 0-3122-9502-2.

Educational historians have long focused on the work of a few prominent male educational leaders, such as John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, George Counts, and others, to define and evaluate the progressive educational movement of the early twentieth century. This historiographical focus on male educators has, purposely or not, also meant a focus on educational theory rather than classroom practice. This collection of essays seeks to address this imbalance by illuminating the work and lives of sixteen women who founded progressive schools or contributed to educational reform movements.	1
The women educators included in this volume range from the relatively well-known figures of Ella Flagg Young and Margaret Haley, to regionally renowned women such as Charlotte Hawkins Brown, to previously obscure educators such as Marietta Johnson, Carmelita Hinton, and Laura Bragg. Eight of the women were founders of schoolsÑBrown, Johnson, Hinton, Margaret Naumburg, Caroline Pratt, Helen Parkhurst, Elsie Ripley Clapp, and Flora J. CookeÑand the rest, including Haley, Young, Bragg, Charl Williams, Margaret Willis, Susan Isaacs, Lillian Weber, and Deborah Meier worked as administrators, teachers union leaders, or theorists. Each essay takes into account the background, education, and family life of the subject, and sets them in the context of progressive educational developments of the time.	2
As a collection of biographical essays, this book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the history of progressive education in two ways: it tells us what progressive female educators were actually doing to advance the principles of their pedagogical approach, and it directly addresses the question of female leadership style in an era so characterized by female leaders.	3
Founding Mothers and Others is the product of a remarkable group of scholars who have endeavored over a decade to examine the women of the progressive education movement. In this representative selection of their work, as well as their previous publication, "Schools of Tomorrow," Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education, and their individual monographs,1 they have initiated an important reinterpretation of progressive education, drawing attention to the myriad of ways in which women applied theory in real situations.	4
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