Review of Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas by Judith N. McArthur

Authors

Nancy Baker Jones, University of Texas at San Antonio

Date of this Version

1999

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 19:4 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

This book is another significant contribution to the growing list of scholarly studies of the history of Texas women. Within the larger contexts of southern culture, the Progressive Movement, and the history of feminism, McArthur has produced a convincing chronology of the transformation of middle-class, white Texas women from members of a "patriarchal, evangelical culture that discouraged the formation of independent women's networks" to "volunteerists" who worked openly for social and political reform through their own clubs and associations. Between the 1890s and World War I, women's increasing use of "maternalist politics" challenged male dominance of the public sphere, thereby opening a door through which Texas women ever-so-carefully moved to carve public niches in which they then successfully agitated for and won civic, social, and political reforms that benefited themselves and their families.