Tennessee Women in the Progressive Era: Toward the Public Sphere in the New South

Discussions of Tennessee women’s history during the Progressive Era tend to focus narrowly on the critical issue of suffrage and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. While the achievement of Tennessee’s suffragists remains a feather in the state’s historic cap—pushing the legislature to cast the votes that settled the issue for the nation—reform-minded Tennessee women in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries participated in a wide range of other public-sphere activities...