Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920
From the outset, Ann Oakley’s Women, Peace and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880-1920 sets an ambitious goal of recovering the memory of the female reformers active during these years who made important contributions to a wide number of reform movements. Oakley is uniquely qualified to undertake a project of this sort. She has, in the course of nearly 50 years, amassed a body of sociological research and writing focused on sex and gender. In this work, she eschews a focus on the popular suffrage movement and famous names of the period, although some of them, such as the Pankhursts and Ida B. Wells, do make an appearance. Rather, Oakley’s goal is to uncritically present the stories of women forgotten by male historians across different disciplines. To this end, the author presents a panorama of the intersectional and transnational networks created by female reformers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This book accomplishes its goal of bringing to the forefront the names and accomplishments of women who have been overlooked.
While the book covers several areas of reform agitation - pacifism, labor reform, and municipal sanitation, just to name a few - they are all grouped under a single rubric: the women studied here leveraged their reform work to claim space in the public sphere in the years before gaining the vote. Indeed, Oakley demonstrates how the featured reformers used the connection between the issues related above and the private sphere of the home to claim authority and an active role in the wider world. For example, since women were considered responsible for feeding their families, the sanitary conditions of places like Chicago's meat-packing plants came legitimately under their purview. Oakley, however, points out one caveat, and that was inclusivity was mostly limited to women of the middle and upper classes. Of all the numerous women who are mentioned in this study, few came from the working classes.
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