Women's culture and community: Religion and reform in Galveston, 1880-1920

Abstract

Questioning why some white women in the South identified with Progressive reform movements, or became suffragists, provides the impetus for this case study based on women's organizations in Galveston, Texas. By employing the technology devised by urban historians to complement the already well-established methodologies of women 5 historians, this study explores two aspects of women's history--the roots of southern women's reform and the evolution of a Progressive era women's community stemming out of women's culture. Unlike previous studies, which argue that women from evangelical churches and the Women's Christian Temperance Union fueled the movement toward woman suffrage in the South, evidence from Galveston shows that suffrage leaders did not stem from evangelical churches but from elitist Episcopal and Presbyterian churches. Women from these churches had gained their experience in church-based associations whose focus was community-wide and addressed the dislocations caused by urbanization. In nearly every case, class and privilege determined civic leadership among white women rather than evangelical zeal, and from the start their interest was in societal betterment rather than in winning converts. The concept of women's culture and its evolution--the movement of women and their values, attitudes, and actions from home to church, to benevolent institutions, to clubs, to civic reform groups--and the resulting transformations provides the framework for this study. Women's culture remained a great underlying foundation, upon which activist women stood when entering the public realm. By the Progressive Era women had formed an informal community of civic activists whose focus on improvement grew out of their own cultural and domestic world, out of the disastrous storm of 1900, out of their previous experience as community builders, and, most important for the development of woman suffrage, out of the state's increasing urbanization. The study of the development of this women's community, equivalent to cultural studies of black or European ethnic communities, is essential to understanding the animus behind southern women's reforming activities.