Mary Martha Thomas

Between 1890 and 1920, middle-class white and black Alabama women created many clubs and organizations that took them out of the home and provided them with roles in the public sphere and spearheaded the drive to eliminate child labor, worked to improve the educational system, upgraded the jails and prisons, and created reform schools for both boys and girls. Thomas’s book is the first of its kind to focus on the reform activities of women during the Progressive Era, and the first to consider the southern woman and all the organizations of middle-class black and white women in the South and particularly in Alabama