First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.

This essay, a slightly revised version of the distinguished historian address presented to SHGAPE in April 2013, suggests that millennial learners are oftentimes inadequately introduced to the African American experience during the Progressive Era, a period that historians of the black past, sampling from Rayford W. Logan's 1954 opus, customarily call “the Nadir” or “the lowest point” in the African American struggle for social justice. When discussing the Progressive Era, normative U.S. history textbooks at high school and college and university levels tend to relegate blacks to the margins of cultural and historical change, minimize lynching and other forms of anti-black violence that characterized the period, and endorse the archaic W. E. B. Du Bois–Booker T. Washington dichotomy of black leadership at the expense of oversimplifying and even denigrating Washington's accomplishments and legacy. On the other hand, specialized African American history textbooks and monographs equip their readers with critical interpretations that challenge what historian Manning Marable called the “master narrative of American history.” In this essay, I offer my thoughts on these subjects and propose some basic suggestions for more effectively teaching, problematizing, and thinking about the African American experience during the complex Progressive Era.

This essay provides a reexamination of Henry George by focusing on how ideas about gender and nature informed one of the key objectives of the George movement: the transformation of the Gilded Age city into a metropolis of working-class suburbs tied together by single-tax funded public transportation. George was hardly a conservationist, and his understanding of nature was very different from those urban elites who sought to preserve nature. He simply did not accept the conservationist notion of depleted resources, which was inconsistent with his natural law belief in a boundless nature, a point that in turn grew out of the producerist emphasis of his political economy. Yet, George appreciated the need for a nonproductive relationship with nature, and he and his followers articulated this in terms of developing a healthier and more moral domestic environment. He applied such thinking to his political efforts in New York City during the mid-1880s, condemning the moral as well as the physical consequences of overcrowding that he blamed on land speculation. George enthusiastically embraced emerging transportation technologies as facilitators of mass residential decentralization. In so doing, he articulated a vision of a thoroughly reconfigured city that integrated nature into family life by enabling the development of a more spread-out metropolis.

In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novels The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.

This study of the Baltimore anti-smoke movement illustrates how Americans altered their approach to environmental regulation during the Progressive Era. After citizen groups came to recognize the limits of common-law regulation, they became enamored with administrative regulation and the promise of rationalized, professional agencies. While Baltimore did mirror the national regulatory trends, the city's unique circumstances limited its capacity to reduce the sooty, black smoke that provoked episodes of public activism. Fearful about the city's economic future, regulators exempted manufacturing from the city's early anti-smoke measures. Furthermore, although railroads were major polluters, they balked at electrifying the bulk of their tracks. Finally, the anti-smoke movement was narrowly based in the northeastern, more affluent parts of the city and failed to expand its support to working-class whites and African Americans. Hence, while the ideas about what constituted appropriate regulation “modernized” in Baltimore, the city did not alter its regulatory practices until the 1930s, long after other cities had done so:

On November 21, 1903, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that its north-south through trains would no longer enter Broad Street Station in downtown Philadelphia and would stop instead at West Philadelphia. Nor would the company sell tickets from that station to downtown. These schedule changes, which seemed minor to the company and were intended to reduce congestion in the central city, threatened downtown merchants and manufacturers who worried that buyers would shift to more accessible cities. Philadelphia had been sidetracked, the North American reported. The result was an eruption of boycotts, protests, and petitions that pitted nearly every local trade association against the railroad. Encouraged by the North American's editorials, partisan reporting, and stinging cartoons, the protesters forced the Pennsylvania to back down, and in March 1904, through trains returned to Broad Street. The newspaper cloaked this local business dispute in the language of antimonopoly, linking the fears of small businessmen to national anti-railroad concerns. The sidetrack episode also helped launch modern corporate public relations, as the Pennsylvania—stung by this threat to corporate autonomy—soon hired Ivy Lee as its first publicity agent.

Violence inevitably plays a part in discussions of the cowboy, historical or mythical. Traditionalists celebrated his manly fighting as what tamed the West and saved American manhood; revisionists have castigated the brutality with which he dealt with Native Americans and the environment. It is important, however, to consider what purpose violence served for the cowboy himself. To the working-class cowboy, violence could preserve social harmony, both through defending personal honor and through regulating social behavior of women and minorities. Its use was a clear marker of masculinity, as it allowed him both to show his equal worth with the men around him and to maintain social hierarchies that gave him an advantage over other people. The middle- and upper-class townspeople and cattlemen around cowboys, however, increasingly saw violence as counterproductive. Although parents encouraged aggression in boyhood, they thought that in order to become a real man, one should learn proper restraint and channel that aggression into socially acceptable activities. More and more, respectable ideas of maintaining social order left no room for violence, and consequently cowboys faced increasing social regulation of their masculine self-identities.

Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the “objectivity” of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balch's case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.

J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

This article discusses the ways that secretaries in the U.S. Young Women's Christian Association (USYWCA) used the Social Gospel to create a type of imagined community, which I call Y-space, in India. In the United States, USYWCA secretaries emphasized Social Gospel ideals such as the personal embodiment of Christ-like behavior, inclusivity, and working for the progress of society. In India, USYWCA secretaries used these same ideas to try to make Y-space an alternative to both the exclusive, traditional, British imperial “clubland” and the growing Hindu and Muslim nationalist movement. Instead, they promoted an idealized Americanized Anglo Indian/Christian woman who would engage in civic matters and embody Christian values, and serve as an alternative to the British memsahib, and the Hindu nationalist woman. Despite the USYWCA's efforts to distinguish itself from British imperialists, the secretaries' attempts to create these Americanized Indian women reveals that that the USYWCA supported transforming Indian society according to imposed Western models, in much the same way as the British.