The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930.

The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930. By Rebecca S. Montgomery. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. [viii], 263. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-3108-3.)

Recent scholarship considering the roles played by women in the Progressive-era South has advanced our understanding of the gender-, race-, and class-specific nature of reform movements. Rebecca S. Montgomery's The Politics of Education in the New South: Women and Reform in Georgia, 1890-1930 furthers this development by posing questions about why white club women in Georgia embraced greater government involvement in social welfare and why education was central to their concerns. Her answers to these questions provide insight into the complex nature of southern society and women's educational reform efforts.

Montgomery's study begins with the struggle to expand post-Civil War educational opportunities for women. The obstacles to these campaigns, including a culture of masculinity that was defined by female (and African American) dependency, competition for scarce resources, and unfair taxation practices, set the stage for the many difficulties that white club women faced. Organizations such as the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs facilitated the progress of white women's efforts to enlist state assistance on behalf of impoverished women and children. In contrast to scholars who locate the primary motivation of middle-class women in their personal desires to transcend the home sphere, Montgomery suggests that the experiences of female reformers with discrimination enabled them to more readily identify with the suffering of others and to see education as the solution to inequality.

Subsequent chapters analyze the efforts of white club women to reform rural public schools, establish extension services, reach out to mountain residents, and build kindergartens in urban areas. In doing so, Montgomery finds that often club women, college faculty, school teachers, and home demonstration agents were not conceptualizing their work in terms of maternalist politics so much as they were attempting to create a new standard of manliness that exchanged individualism and patriarchy for inclusiveness and social commitment. Even when stressing the domestic skills of women, as in the extension service campaigns, women reformers fought against entrenched male attitudes that undervalued or ignored women's contributions to economically successful farms. Montgomery skillfully traces how women used their outsider status to their advantage in avoiding male political disputes; she further demonstrates how, when outsider status was a liability, female reformers worked on building community coalitions through like-minded women in order to create grassroots support for improvements to rural schools. She also considers how race influenced white women's reform efforts; though there are notable examples of interracial cooperation, some white women were willing to embrace racial prejudice in the service of achieving their goals, such as the emphasis on the Anglo-Saxon heritage of Appalachian Georgians as a fundraising strategy. In addition, Montgomery does an admirable job of tracing the connections between local, state, regional, and national women reformers and the positive impact that those connections had on their efforts.

Utilizing a wide array of primary sources from the archived collections of Georgia women's clubs and their leaders, Montgomery has fashioned a thoughtful and informative addition to the scholarship on southern progressivism. Her balanced account of club women's successes and failures enhances our understanding of the often paradoxical nature of Progressive reform and the contested meanings of education.

DEBORAH L. BLACKWELL

Texas A&M International University