| Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife,
and vulnerability of women after the upheavals of Reconstruction,
female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system
of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for
women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational
reform transfigured private and public social relations in the
New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in this expansive
study. The Politics of Education in the New South provides
the most complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic
promise of education in the South and reveals how concern about
their own status motivated these women to push for reform on
behalf of others.
Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational
improvements reflected their concern for distributing public
resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia
recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state
inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender
and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women
to Georgia's state colleges and universities and for rural
school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens,
child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding
schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process,
a distinct female political culture developed that directly
opposed the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness
that plagued formal politics in the New South.
Rebecca S. Montgomery is an associate professor of
history at Texas State University at San Marcos.
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