14. Progressive Women
In the absence of the vote, women sought change through progressive social movements, efforts that stretched the traditional roles of women, and dragged them ever-more into politics. Women sought reform on temperance, child labor, lynching, public schools, reproductive freedom, and more. Women's efforts were central to and the backbone of the progressive movement.
Temperance (Noun.), abstinence from alcoholic drink.
How to cite this source?
Remedial Herstory Project Editors. "14. PROGRESSIVE WOMEN." The Remedial Herstory Project. November 1, 2025. www.remedialherstory.com.
The industrial revolution wasn’t very revolutionary for women. While new technologies revolutionized the public sphere, the domestic sphere remained inefficient. Women increasingly took jobs outside the home and life became a bit faster, but law had not yet caught up with societal change. Children were laboring in factories, alcoholism was rampant, public education was underfunded and limited, immigrants needed support, and more. Women led the way to reform society in what today is known as the Progressive Era.
Forewarning, this chapter will discuss lynchings and racial violence.
Between about 1890 and 1914, the United States experienced a period of reform that has earned the label “Progressive.” Women were active leaders of reform groups, guaranteeing the safety of the food supply, supporting crusades for temperance, the elimination of child labor, and the improvement of working conditions in factories. Women’s writing, organizing, and protesting efforts were not always successful, but they did raise the consciousness of the American public to many of the negative consequences of rapid industrialization.
Considering the time, the Progressive Era was incredibly intersectional with women reformers working on many issues from industrialization to race relations.
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Jim Crow
During the Progressive Era, race relations stagnated. Racial violence, riots, and neglect of Black Americans prevailed. Black women played a vital role in combating racism and organizing for change. Jim Crow laws severely oppressed Black women, impacting education, employment, accommodations, and voting rights. They resisted these injustices through activism.
Segregated schools for Black students were often underfunded and provided inferior resources and facilities compared to those available to white students. Black women, along with other community members, worked tirelessly to establish and maintain independent schools, known as "colored schools," to provide better educational opportunities for Black children.
Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation in public spaces, including restaurants, theaters, and transportation. Black women faced humiliation, violence, and denial of basic services and accommodations. In response, Black women organized boycotts, sit-ins, and protests, advocating for equal access and challenging the discriminatory policies.
Jim Crow laws aimed to suppress the political power of Black women and men by implementing poll taxes, literacy tests, and other voter suppression tactics. Despite these obstacles, Black women played a crucial role in mobilizing and organizing voter registration campaigns, advocating for suffrage, and fighting for equal representation.
Prominent Black women activists such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and many others led and participated in resistance movements against Jim Crow laws. They used various strategies such as grassroots organizing, civil disobedience, public speaking, journalism, and legal challenges to expose the injustices and fight for civil rights and social equality.
In 1884, Wells-Barnett sued a railroad company in Memphis, Tennessee for forcing her into a segregated car, even though she had a valid first-class ticket. She won her case at the local level but lost on appeal. This case was among the first of many in which African-Americans sought relief for discrimination in the courts. Wells-Barnett also organized a boycott of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 for the World’s Fair’s negative portrayal of people of color.
Ida. B Wells 1922, Public Domain
Lynching
The effect of widespread social, political, and economic discrimination against Black people in America was prejudice driven racial violence, and even state violence against Black people.
One incident of racial violence in particular would inspire perhaps one of the most significant American women in history. Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart lived in Memphis, Tennessee and owned the People's Grocery Company, which competed with a nearby white-owned store. In 1892 a dispute between Black and white residents escalated, leading to violence. Moss and his associates were arrested, but before they could stand trial, a white mob stormed the jail, brutally murdered the three men, and burned down their store. The incident hit Ida B. Wells-Barnett deeply. The lynching of her close friends served as a turning point in her life and activism. She moved to Chicago and began investigating and documenting lynchings, aiming to expose the true motivations behind these acts of racial violence. In her pamphlets, she exposed the systemic racism and sexism, white supremacist ideologies, and economic competition that often lay behind lynchings, challenging the prevailing narrative that portrayed Black victims as criminals deserving punishment.
She also used her platform to defend Black men in particular against the racial and gendered fallacy of the Black-male predator. White people stoked fear that Black men were out to rape and molest their white daughters and so white women needed to be protected and segregated from Black men. Not only was this not statistically true, it was in fact the exact opposite based on criminal records. White men were molesting Black women. Wells wrote, “There are thousands of such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insatiate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Afro-Americans who consort with their women.”
The People’s Grocery Lynching, Public Domain
Temperance
Gender dynamics hit every progressive cause including the crusade for temperance. The image of the male factory worker drinking away his weekly salary while his wife and children starved motivated Progressive Era women to pick up the cause for abstinence from alcohol where their grandmothers had left off. In the 19th century, temperance, not suffrage, was the largest, most politically powerful women’s movement.
The struggle for a ban on alcohol was a mass women-led movement. Alcohol was associated with poverty and violence inflicted on wives by their inebriated husbands. At the beginning of the twentieth century, state and local legal systems gave husbands almost total authority and control over their wives, up to and including inflicting serious physical damage, casting a woman out of the home, and taking full custody of children.
The Women's Crusade was a grassroots movement that emerged in Ohio in the early 1870s. It was a significant precursor to the larger temperance movement. Groups of women organized and conducted prayer meetings, hymn singing, and peaceful demonstrations outside saloons and alcohol-selling establishments. They would enter these establishments, often singing hymns and praying for the owners and patrons to give up alcohol. The Women's Crusade was remarkable for its emphasis on women's moral authority and their ability to effect change through peaceful and persuasive means.
However, despite its initial momentum and the fervor of its participants, the Women's Crusade ultimately failed due to the formidable and well funded resistance posed by the alcohol industry.
The largest temperance organization was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU, which had chapters all over the country. The first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was Annie Wittenmyer. She served as the organization's president from its founding in 1874 until 1879. She was restrained in her approach and failed to see the way in which various women’s organizations could work together to the same end, in particular suffrage. She viewed the suffrage movement as separate from the temperance movement and did not prioritize it.
Frances Willard succeeded her and served as the president of the WCTU from 1879 until her death in 1898. Under her leadership, the organization became the largest women's organization of its time, with thousands of members across the United States and around the world. Willard's organizational skills, strategic thinking, and oratory skills helped the WCTU grow in size and influence. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU officially endorsed suffrage in 1881, and many WCTU members actively campaigned for women's voting rights. For Willard, the two causes were linked. Women as voters could vote to restrict the sale and distribution of alcohol.
The WCTU held conferences, protested outside taverns to embarrass male drinkers, and even hacked open barrels of whiskey. Carrie Nation was fed up with the state of Kansas’ failure to enforce anti alcohol laws and, convinced God had sent her, walked into bars and destroyed them with small rocks she called “smashers.” After her then husband picked her up from jail he ridiculed her and gave her the idea that would become her signature. He said she would be more effective if she used a hatchet, so she did. She went to bar after bar, town after town, smashing, amassing a following of members from the WCTU. They eventually divorced.
In the 1880s, the WCTU wanted to push for federal laws, so they started setting up chapters in the South. They thought that white Southern women could make a big impact in furthering these causes, but they faced some challenges. The society in the South had strict traditional gender roles, and lots of women didn't support suffrage because they were worried it would undermine their status as proper Southern "ladies." On top of that, many white Southern women were hesitant about collaborating with Black women.
Similarly, the WCTU was also active in Indigenous communities across the country—sometimes in cooperation with their women, though at other times in direct conflict with them. Given the devastating effect of alcohol consumption in their communities, Indigenous women often joined or partnered with the WCTU to improve the enforcement of existing laws banning the sale of alcohol to individuals of Native descent but also to promote abstinence amongst their own people. This proved to be a slippery slope, however, as efforts to instill temperance were often followed by and used as justification to separate Indigenous children from their families, promote conversion to Christianity, and overall, forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She used her platform to battle for an intersectional approach to temperance and took to the press to challenge Willard to take a stand against lynchings in the south. Willard was worried that a public position on lynching would hurt the temperance cause in the South. Willard insisted that she had "not an atom of race prejudice," but her statements in the press upheld racial stereotypes and portrayed black men as specifically threatening white women.
Wells called her a coward. Willard eventually convinced the WCTU to put out a position statement on lynching after a private meeting with Wells.
By 1917, rural and religious forces contributed to Congress's passage of the 18th amendment, which prohibited the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcohol. The amendment was the law of the land in the United States until its repeal in 1933.
Women’s Christian Temperance Union Members, Public Domain
Frances Willard, Public Domain
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New Hampshire W.C.T.U. Executive Committee, in Keene New Hampshire, Public Domain
Black Women's Clubs
The second class status that Black women experienced in organizations like Temperance and Suffrage led Black women to form political clubs. Black women experienced intersecting forms of discrimination based on their race and gender. They faced racial segregation, limited access to education, employment discrimination, and restricted civil rights.
Black women's clubs provided a platform for addressing gender-specific issues and fostering solidarity among Black women. In this context, middle and upper class Black women adopted the “politics of respectability,” a set of social and cultural norms aimed at countering negative racial stereotypes and gaining acceptance within the larger society. They encouraged Black women to conform to societal expectations of proper behavior, appearance, and morality. It emphasized the importance of education, chastity, self-discipline, economic success, and adherence to traditional gender roles. By adhering to these standards, Black women sought to challenge prevailing racist beliefs that portrayed them as inferior or morally degenerate.
Critics argued that respectability politics served as a means of attaining acceptance, rather than advocating for structural change and social justice, which arguably would have helped Black women more.
Immigration
During the Progressive era, almost 30 million immigrants came from around the world to port cities like New York and San Francisco before traveling further to the interior. Ethnic neighborhoods popped up everywhere as people settled near people from their home countries for social as well as practical support as they navigated a new nation.
Anti-immigrant sentiment raged around the turn of the twentieth century. Nativists argued that refugees from poverty in Italy and pogroms in Russia could not assimilate into their vision of a white and Protestant America. Fulfilling maternal roles, many middle-class and wealthy women were moved by the plight of the new immigrants to provide material help to the new arrivals. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was founded in 1881 by Jews of German ancestry to provide aid to poor immigrants.
In 1893, Lillian Wald (pictured below) founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York to provide English language classes, healthcare, and other social services to the Lower East Side immigrant community.
The Henry Street Settlement followed the example of Chicago’s Hull House, founded in 1889 in a poor neighborhood of the city by Jane Addams, Jane Gates Starr and a small group of women dedicated to serving the needs of poor people who had no political voice or power. Addams, a graduate of the Rockford Female Seminary, grew up with a strong commitment to social justice and humanitarian service. Addams used her organizing ability to improve sanitary conditions in the Hull House neighborhood, and she provided a wide range of services and classes to immigrants who worked in Chicago’s factories and slaughterhouses. An opponent of World War I, Addams served as President of the Women’s Peace Party and later the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. An avid and active feminist, she supported women’s suffrage and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, a few days before her death.
Navitist (Adj.), relating to or supporting the policy of protecting the interests of native-born or established inhabitants against those of immigrants.
Lillian Wald, Public Domain
Comstock Laws and Reproductive Freedom
While some women worked on temperance, others advocated for suffrage, black women organized to support their communities, end lynching, and demand respectability, other women worked on the problems of women’s health and ability to control the timing of their pregnancies. Women were encouraged to be chaste until marriage. The societal standards of the time decided that men were the pursuers and women the consenters, along with the job of resisting male advances. This notion was grounded in female consent, yet when women did consent, men had the power to decide whether they would provide for, or even acknowledge their offspring, or agree to a divorce. Women had little recourse against men who abandoned them, didn’t acknowledge children born out of wedlock, or divorce, even when faced with neglectful or abusive husbands. Men accused of rape and sexual assault benefitted from all male juries, and a legal system that required proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict. In marriage, sex was considered a male right and marital rape remained legal in the US until the 1980s, long after women had the right to vote and the modern feminist movement.
Reproductive freedom is the idea that women should have access to healthcare, especially birth control, alongside autonomy over their bodies and their reproductive future, a concept men had access to for millennia. Without these freedoms, women could be pregnant from puberty to menopause. As life expectancy improved alongside the industrial revolution, more babies survived childhood and women were tasked with raising larger and larger families. Women wanted more freedom to limit the number of children they had and choose when those pregnancies came to preserve their health and gain access to educational and career opportunities that could fit alongside family responsibilities. Abstinence, or not having sex, was the only option for those women. So women who wanted careers often had to choose having a career over a family. As society was socially engineered for men, they had long been able to have careers and a family. Reproductive justice efforts aimed to give women this same opportunity, yet prevailing beliefs about women’s biological responsibility and sexist cultural attitudes about female sexuality presented consistent barriers.
Major restrictions to women’s reproductive freedoms started with the formation of the American Medical Association (AMA) in 1847. Male doctors banded together to delegitimize the mostly female midwives who were competing for services with them. Over time, the midwives’ practices disappeared in favor of male doctors. Despite having little experience or exposure to pregnancy and birth practices, these doctors assumed that their medical degrees afforded them greater expertise in the field of women’s health and childbirth. Victorian custom meant that many male doctors had only read about birth in a textbook before assisting in a live birth. Pregnant mothers opted to be clothed during birth due to the presence of a male doctor, and doctors sometimes didn’t look while operating. These were poor conditions for women’s health and death rates for mothers rose. Still, the professionalization of the field of Medicine meant that male doctors controlled the market because they had the degrees and certifications.
State laws enacted during this time sought to control women's reproductive choices and limit access to contraception and abortion. These laws reflected the prevailing cultural and ideological shifts of the era, but they also sparked resistance and advocacy, laying the groundwork for future battles for reproductive rights. It is important to consider these laws in the historical context of women not being able to vote, having limited access to college, power, and law and which illustrate the necessity of reproductive autonomy, or choice, and the ongoing struggle for reproductive justice in contemporary society.
Contraceptives, or birth control are broad terms used to describe devices or chemicals that could help prevent pregnancy. They include all forms of condoms, hormones, implantable devices in the vagina, and sterilization. People like Anthony Comstock believed that birth control would cause people to have riskier sex because the threat of pregnancy would be removed. Many religious people also believed that sex should be reserved solely for the purpose of reproduction.
State laws enacted in the late 19th century often aimed to restrict women's reproductive autonomy, reflecting prevailing societal values, and the influence of religious and moral beliefs. These laws varied across states but generally criminalized the dissemination and use of contraceptives and established restrictions on abortion. The Comstock Acts at the federal level were a series of federal acts starting in 1873 that prohibited the distribution of “obscene materials” through the mail. The laws were named after their chief architect, Anthony Comstock, a zealous advocate against what he saw as “vices.” Comstock was a devout Christian and a special agent of the United States Postal Service. Under the Comstock Laws, it was illegal to send through the mail any materials, including books, pamphlets, and contraceptives, that were considered obscene or lewd. The laws also targeted the distribution of information about abortion and contraception, making it punishable by imprisonment or fines, effectively limiting women’s access to reproductive freedom and justice.
Women of the late 19th century didn’t take these laws sitting down. Emma Goldman, for example, was an influential political activist and writer, born in 1869 in the Russian Empire (now Lithuania) and later emigrated to the United States. She played a prominent role in various social and political movements, advocating for women's rights, workers' rights, free speech, and anarchism. She was a vocal proponent of birth control and reproductive freedom, advocating for women's right to access contraception. As an anarchist, she believed that women should have control over their bodies and reproductive choices without male or government interference. She played a significant role in raising awareness about contraception methods and challenging the legal and societal barriers surrounding it. She was eventually arrested for distributing information about birth control in violation of the Comstock laws, and was deported back to Russia.
The battle for reproductive justice continued into the early 20th century and was emboldened by scientific breakthroughs that made greater equity between men and women. In 1905, while working at Bryn Mawr College, Nettie Stevens identified how X and Y chromosomes were responsible for sex-determination by studying mealworms proving that fathers, not mothers, determined the sex of the baby. Discoveries like this helped to alleviate the notion that women alone were responsible for reproduction and the magical thinking surrounding childbirth.
Emma Goldman, 1911, Public Domain
Boston Marriages
It should not be surprising that many women opted out of conventional relationships in favor of freedom, education, and economic opportunity. This era saw the rise of “Boston Marriages” a phrase describing a committed and long-term relationship between two women who lived financially independent from men together. These relationships were not necessarily sexual. Victorian era social norms encouraged the separation of the sexes, so women were encouraged to have close relationships with other women. Of course some women were queer. In his 1849 novella Kavanagh, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow depicted one of the first lesbian relationships in American fiction, inspired in part by the real-life partnership of Charlotte Cushman and Matilda Hays. Cushman and Hays defied convention by openly embracing a romantic relationship, challenging societal expectations of marriage and female desire.
Many notable suffragists of this time cohabitated in Boston Marriages including Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt, both presidents of NAWSA. Catt, an early graduate of Iowa State University, had two marriages to men. The first was to newspaper editor Leo Chapman, who passed away after just a year of marriage, and then to wealthy engineer George Catt. After George's death, Carrie and Mary (Mollie) Garrett Hay, a fellow suffrage activist, formed a close bond and campaigned together, eventually living together as a power couple in New York State suffrage circles. They traveled extensively, giving speeches and advocating for women's rights. Many decades later, Catt chose to be buried beside Mollie Hay instead of her first two husbands, highlighting the importance of their relationship. Historians view their partnership as an example of the suffrage movement providing a safe and accepting space for unconventional lifestyles. Yet Catt used the word “friendship” to describe the relationship she had with a woman whom she decided to be buried next to for eternity.
Carrie Chapman Catt, Public Domain
Muckrakers
Progressive women believed in the power of the written word and picked up their pen to improve society. Teddy Roosevelt dubbed these writers of the period Muckrakers because they were “raking through the muck” of American society. These women were sure that, if the American public could be informed about the evils of the factory system, citizens would support efforts to raise wages, limit working hours, promote the production of healthy food, and end child labor. These efforts were frequently couched in terms of protecting women and families from the evils of industrialization. Reporters like Marie Van Vorst wrote numerous exposes of factory conditions. Van Vorst, who came from a wealthy family, posed as a factory girl in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her descriptions of conditions of the workers in a shoe factory there led to the publication of The Woman Who Toils in 1903. While efforts to curb working hours, raise wages, or improve conditions in the factory did not bear fruit until the 1930s, reformers, including writers for “Good Housekeeping” magazine were successful in lobbying for the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Once again, women were successful in achieving reforms through a maternal approach to social reform.
Conclusion
By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Would writing books and articles and organizing commissions to lobby for social change be sufficient to bring about improved conditions for Americans? Even as women worked hard for change, do you think they found themselves limited by the fact that they did not yet have the vote? Do you think Progressive women were successful? What was the role of race in limiting the activism of many women in this period?
