Progressive era (part i)  (Page 18/19)

Some women wrote, believing that publication was the manner through which women could add their voice to the public discussions on the major issues of their time. Another American traveler named Mary Barney, for example, believed that women should write about politics and government as a way of becoming active in a political climate in which women were prevented from partaking any active roles because they were not allowed to vote. One of the most important authors during the Progressive era was Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Gillman examined a wide assortment of gender equality issues in her works, such as The Yellow Wallpaper .

The Civil War-era suffrage leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were replaced by younger, slightly more aggressive, and almost always formally educated women such as Carrie Chapman Catt and Reverend Olympia Brown from Wisconsin. Yet, one of this country’s more influential suffrage supporters was the relatively unknown Emma Smith DeVoe.

DeVoe traveled the West from Illinois to Washington giving speeches and entertaining the crowds with Civil War-related songs, suggesting that proper northerners and Republicans support women’s right to vote while southerners and Democrats do not. Unlike the unflinching, stark, dowdy perception that many Americans held of Susan B. Anthony who remained unmarried and who dressed in a black dress and always had her hair pulled back in a severe bun, DeVoe was described as “womanly” for how she dressed (in the modern style), how she kept her hair, the fact that she was married, and the fact that DeVoe seemed to not preach to the crowds but rather to urge them to do the right thing by supporting women’s right to vote. She was a central reason behind the successful Washington campaign of 1912 and the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920. Unlike many of her Progressive colleagues, DeVoe’s devotion to women’s political rights did not end in 1920. Rather, she would continue her work to help women more efficiently wield the vote by creating the League of Women Voters.

Environmentalism

The Progressive era is possibly most associated with the idea of launching the modern American conservation movement. Americans walked a fine line between the Jeffersonian ideal of living as independent yeoman farmers and gaining the wealth that came from urban living and industrialization. During the pre-Civil War industrial era, Americans worried about maintaining a balance between pristine lands of an agricultural-based economy and the inevitable ecological damage of an industrial-based economy. That was the paradox of industry. As Alexander De Tocqueville wrote, “from the filthy sewer, pure gold flows.”

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln recognized Yosemite Valley as a “public park” in the 1864 Yosemite Act, creating the federal precedent for the inevitable creation of a national park system. After the Civil War some people tried to bring examples of the Jeffersonian ideal to the Hamiltonian reality of urban life, such as Frederick Law Olmstead, who created a green space in the middle of New York City. He called this space “Central Park,” and helped to launch a national movement to build parks in urban centers. The federal government picked up the baton in 1872 by creating the first national park: Yellowstone. By 1890 national parks reached the west coast with the establishment of Yosemite National Park, which is known as one of this nation’s first “wilderness parks” in part due to its 1200 square miles of rugged, pristine terrain. The Forest Reserves law of 1891 proscribed the president with the power to “withdraw and reserve public lands wholly or in part covered by timber or undergrowth” in order to be used for the good of all Americans.