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Neo‐Brandeisian legal scholars have recently revived the ideas of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who championed state regulation that preserved market competition and economic liberty in the face of concentrated private power. Yet ultimately and perhaps paradoxically, it has been Europe and not the United States that has proved more hospitable to accommodating key features of the Brandeisian approach. We explain this outcome by tracing the evolution of EU competition law to gain insight into the social learning processes through which such regimes change over time. We argue that the EU's administrative system, which provides the European Commission with significant bureaucratic discretion, has facilitated processes of ongoing deliberative adjustment to policy and practice, which over time has resulted in a system of "regulated competition" with striking similarities to the Brandeisian vision. The analysis highlights how administrative law institutions condition how regulatory regimes evolve in response to acquired experience and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary Defund the Police movement has renewed interest in social work's role in public safety, leading some to call for increased police–social work collaborations. However, claims regarding the potential virtues and pitfalls of social work–police collaborations are largely ahistorical. To contextualize current debates, a systematic investigation into the evolution of social work and its relationship with law enforcement is necessary, particularly the impact that gender norms have had on this relationship. Drawing from the National Conference on Charities and Corrections proceedings, we examined how gendered underpinnings have shaped social work's relationship to law enforcement and the understanding of social work's role in public safety. During the Progressive Era, social workers acted as an intervention to reform police by infusing 'rehabilitative', 'protective', 'preventative', and 'quarantining' approaches in law enforcement. What emerges from the archives is a chronicle detailing how using social work as a gendered intervention for police reform during the Progressive Era fell short of addressing the root causes of carceral issues, drawing parallels between the Progressive Era reforms and today's contemporary reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the origins of primary elections has important implications for evaluating their role in American elections. While there is little argument about the importance of primaries to the American electoral system, there is less agreement about why states adopted the direct primary and what they were intended to accomplish. Previous scholarship has laid out three theories: the strength of the progressive movement, parties' efforts to maintain one-party rule, and the urbanization of American society. Using comprehensive state-level data from 1892 to 1930, we test these theories of states' adoption of direct primaries. We find a strong influence of the strength of the progressive movement and the rate of urbanization on the adoption of the direct primary, but we do not, however, find any influence of state partisan competition. Our findings reinforce original arguments about the importance of the progressive movement and urbanization in the adoption of the direct primary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines students' experiences at Southern Baptist colleges that educated women during the Progressive era (1880–1920). Denominational leaders and school faculty attempted to recreate Christian home life on college campuses by tightly restricting students' freedoms and behavior. This article examines female college students' publications to better understand their views on family and home life on the college campus. Their writings indicate that students did believe that the college was like a family. However, students reinterpreted the meaning of home life and family on the college campus by reimagining the use of residential space, developing alternative hierarchical and intimate relationships on campus, and exercising more autonomy over their religious rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This archival study explores the life and work of Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith (1885–1942), a Progressive Era social worker and prison warden. Specifically, I explore the first phase of her career as a House Physician at the Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas (1911–1915) and as the first Superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas (1916–1925). Using archival research, I detail three conflicts that defined Dr. Smith's superintendency: her fight to reclassify a youth prison as a school, her challenges to a Ku Klux Klan-dominated legislature, and her refusal to cede authority to a State Board of Control. Together, these conflicts led the Board to terminate Dr. Smith's position, an outcome that would replay twice more before she retired from prisonwork. I argue that when most reformers made significant concessions, compromising their visions to maintain state funding and political allyship, Dr. Smith stood out for her record of refusal. And yet, like other reformers, she left Texas with the capacity to imprison more women and girls than ever before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pauline Lord's article "My Anna Christie" (1922) was an important intervention in the discourse regarding Progressive Era brothel dramas. Describing how she researched and originated the title role in "Anna Christie," Lord's article was also one of the few pieces about the play written by a woman during this time period. When the piece appeared, contexts for understanding "Anna Christie" had shifted: whereas previous prostitute plays had been censored for obscenity, Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie" garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. "My Anna Christie" followed in the wake of two pioneering actresses who portrayed courtesans or sex workers and wrote about it: Mrs. Leslie Carter and Mary Shaw. "My Anna Christie" examines sexual exploitation, abandonment, and double standards of sexuality, conjuring sympathy for Anna's character. More significantly, Lord interviewed prostitutes as part of her research. Rather than sensationalizing or denigrating sex workers as "The Social Evil," Lord sought to understand them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1900s, Washington, D.C. contained many alleys in the interior of blocks inhabited by impoverished Black residents. Elite reformers engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate alleys, on the grounds of their purported unsanitary environment and high disease prevalence. In this paper, I combine quantitative, qualitative, and spatial sources to explore new perspectives on segregation, public health, and the racialized efforts of housing reformers during this period. I find that reformers overstated the horrors of conditions in alleys and their effects on residents' health: poorer health among alley residents was in large part due to Black residents' marginalization wherever they might live. Alleys' status as racialized space, coupled with progressive paternalistic racism, facilitated the discursive construction of alleys as pathological "breeding grounds of disease." Further, my findings shed new light on micro-configurations of segregation within racially mixed neighborhoods, as well as the social experience and meaning of such configurations. Far from indicating harmonious coexistence, the proximity of such alleys to white homes and institutions spurred elite Washingtonians' self-interested fear of disease spreading beyond the alleys. Thus, this pattern of segregation helps explain the zeal of the campaign to eradicate alleys: as a means of achieving separation from undesired Black neighbors whom white reformers associated with contagion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note reproduces a brief article by Thomas Nixon Carver, a leading Progressive Era American economist on what was then called the 'Negro Question'. This virtually unknown piece represents a striking instance of blaming the victim for her/his condition which is to be found in the economic literature of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the historical origins of the term red-light district. It argues that red lights became associated with prostitution in the United States not only because of red's popularity in the decor of nighttime businesses but also because of color symbolism popularized by the transportation revolution. As red signal lights on railroads came to indicate "stop—danger," people accustomed to viewing prostitution as a moral and physical threat read that symbolism onto nighttime businesses' existing practices of display. Meanwhile, places of prostitution that were located near railroad tracks in the American West embraced the red light as a form of advertising. The red light's simultaneous status as a lure and warning captured ambivalent responses to prostitution. As a result, it became a potent symbol of late nineteenth-century efforts to keep the sex trade at arm's length while also treating it as ineradicable. When city officials tried to control the harms of prostitution by segregating it, the products of their efforts came to be known as "red-light districts." Although the term has in some ways transcended its roots, scholars should be conscientious about their use of it given its implicit moralization of both the sex trade and urban space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of women in the Progressive Era through different stories written during similar times, as well as to develop deeper insight into the social and emotional impact on the personal freedom of women. During the 1900s, women were considered inferior in a patriarchal society. They were subdued and discriminated against in all walks of life, and they were obliged to perform family duties and society. Before the Progressive Era, women were oppressed and treated as second-class citizens. They were considered only wives and mothers, created only to obey and serve their husbands, to look after their children and to take care of the household. As women's attitudes changed, reform movements gained momentum in the late 19th century. American women were no longer seen as mothers or wives confined to their homes; rather, societal change demanded that they be educated, work and contribute to the social order. As a result, the Women’s rights movements in the 19th century and the Feminist Movements in the early 20th century were involved in a series of efforts to fight for the restoration of gender equality. Thus, female roles in American society in the Progressive Era changed drastically in terms of education, job opportunities and improved living conditions. The objective of this study is to examine and analyze the women characters, their issues, as well as the changing gender roles in the works of Charlotte Gilman, Kate Chopin and Susan Glaspell based on the structural elements, using qualitative research with documentation technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles William Macfarlane (1852-1931) represents an almost unique and completely forgotten economist during the Progressive Era: although he was outside Academis, he was able to take an active part in the theoretical debate of the time by proposing a peculiar version of marginalism far away from the Austrian school version and close the classical approach. This paper deals with Macfarlane’s theory of value and distribution, by discussing its influence in the discipline, and it presents an archival appendix which reproduces an unpublished response by Clark to Macfarlane which provides further evidence on the reception of Macfarlane’s work among his contemporaries.

Fully a century ago, the people of Indiana successfully campaigned to protect certain portions of the local landscape as state parks and to keep these areas as a heritage passed down to future generations. This essay argues that these seemingly "natural" sites are also inexorably linked to urban matters, dynamics, and systems. Close examination of archival source material and contemporary newspapers shows that the Indiana state parks were central to the dissemination and display of modern ideas about technology and personal health, as well as evolving cultural values concerning bureaucratic efficiency. Ultimately, these sites afforded Indiana space to position itself in the vanguard of Progressive-Era social and economic growth while simultaneously creating a veritable laboratory to consolidate the newly minted authority of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'To Think a Little of You' takes the case of the author's attempts to write a small vignette about Rena Merrill, a Portland, Maine teenager in the 1890s, to examine the ethics of reconstructing historical lives. Merrill's diary presents readers with an overabundance of information about her and her private thoughts, alongside instructions that no one should read her diary and that it should be destroyed. By drawing on arguments from Janet Malcolm, Jill Lepore, and Saidiya Hartman, 'To Think a Little of You' addresses the complicated questions of how a historian relates to his or her subjects, and what it is that historians ultimately do when they make use of what other human beings have left behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary Defund the Police movement has renewed interest in social work’s role in public safety, leading some to call for increased police–social work collaborations. However, claims regarding the potential virtues and pitfalls of social work–police collaborations are largely ahistorical. To contextualize current debates, a systematic investigation into the evolution of social work and its relationship with law enforcement is necessary, particularly the impact that gender norms have had on this relationship. Drawing from the National Conference on Charities and Corrections proceedings, we examined how gendered underpinnings have shaped social work’s relationship to law enforcement and the understanding of social work’s role in public safety. During the Progressive Era, social workers acted as an intervention to reform police by infusing ‘rehabilitative’, ‘protective’, ‘preventative’, and ‘quarantining’ approaches in law enforcement. What emerges from the archives is a chronicle detailing how using social work as a gendered intervention for police reform during the Progressive Era fell short of addressing the root causes of carceral issues, drawing parallels between the Progressive Era reforms and today’s contemporary reforms.

This article examines students’ experiences at Southern Baptist colleges that educated women during the Progressive era (1880–1920). Denominational leaders and school faculty attempted to recreate Christian home life on college campuses by tightly restricting students’ freedoms and behavior. This article examines female college students’ publications to better understand their views on family and home life on the college campus. Their writings indicate that students did believe that the college was like a family. However, students reinterpreted the meaning of home life and family on the college campus by reimagining the use of residential space, developing alternative hierarchical and intimate relationships on campus, and exercising more autonomy over their religious rituals.

This archival study explores the life and work of Dr. Carrie Weaver Smith (1885–1942), a Progressive Era social worker and prison warden. Specifically, I explore the first phase of her career as a House Physician at the Virginia K. Johnson Home in Dallas, Texas (1911–1915) and as the first Superintendent of the Texas State Training School for Girls in Gainesville, Texas (1916–1925). Using archival research, I detail three conflicts that defined Dr. Smith’s superintendency: her fight to reclassify a youth prison as a school, her challenges to a Ku Klux Klan-dominated legislature, and her refusal to cede authority to a State Board of Control. Together, these conflicts led the Board to terminate Dr. Smith’s position, an outcome that would replay twice more before she retired from prisonwork. I argue that when most reformers made significant concessions, compromising their visions to maintain state funding and political allyship, Dr. Smith stood out for her record of refusal. And yet, like other reformers, she left Texas with the capacity to imprison more women and girls than ever before.

During the Progressive Era (1890–1920) in the U.S., the debate on women's enfranchisement involved two opposite sides: detractors (Antis) and supporters. Detractors converged on the idea that women's enfranchisement might have harmed the natural harmony of society, based on a strict division of roles between sexes. Supporters developed three different arguments: women's suffrage would have reinforced the democratic system; it would have strengthened social cohesion; it would have led to several economic advantages of the society as a whole. Major American economists of the time joined the debate. The aim of this paper is to describe the position of the foremost male academic economists of the time by digging the lesser-known propaganda literature of the period. By showing the position of those who were against women's suffrage, we point out their illiberalism which, in some cases, was actual chauvinism. By showing the arguments of those who supported women's suffrage, we point out different nuances of endorsement: while some were in favor in the name of gender equality, others did not give up forms of biologically determinism and gender-biased stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the United States was transformed from an agrarian nation to an industrial one, significant changes in the nation's economic, social, and political structures, and the challenges that ensued, led to a multitude of diverse reform movements and a surge of regulatory measures from the federal and state governments. State governments played a particularly significant role in education reform by establishing new standards and regulations and taking steps to implement them in the nation's schools. State education officials often met with resistance to reform from the residents of small rural school districts, who had enjoyed a long history of local control and resented the state's interference. Conflict became more complicated when the residents within a rural community differed among themselves about school reform. This historical study investigates and analyses two documented disputes between the New York State Education Department and two common school districts in the Town of Conklin, Broome County, which occurred during the early 1900s. The physical condition of the schoolhouses led to both conflicts, and rural school consolidation and community infighting were additional factors that marked the second dispute. Both cases highlight the forces of local democratic governance and the central authority of the state over local schools and its role in the process of school reform. The Conklin cases are discussed and analysed within the larger contexts of localism, state-local tensions during the Progressive Era, rural school consolidation, and the reform initiatives of the New York State Education Department during this historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the phenomenon of "Hawaiian Fevers" in US popular culture during the Progressive Era. Examining the careers of "hula" celebrities Toots Paka and Doraldina, I examine how both dancers sought to legitimize their appropriations of Hawaiian culture through performances of timelessness and wildness that established iconography of Hawai'i as an otherworldly territory. The racial masquerade of this performed Hawaiianness eased white identification with embodiments of "going native" while also promising transformational access to a leisure-class paradise. Examining the press rhetoric surrounding both dancers, I consider how cross-race performances of hula instructed American women on how to be adeptly modern postindustrial imperial subjects. In fantasizing Hawai'i as the restorative otherworld foil of the United States, these celebrities and the hula craze in which they participated reveal how the United States authenticates its own imagination of itself as a modernizing missionary of industrial imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While historians of modernity often associate efficiency with the so-called Efficiency Movement of the Progressive Era, the ideal of efficiency remains powerful today. But what is efficiency? What does it demand and promise? This article addresses these questions by exploring examples of efficiency ideology from the early twentieth century. Focusing especially on the careers of the financial guru Roger Babson and the minister Reverdy Ransom, these examples not only illustrate how and why religious initiatives and ideas became conduits for "the gospel of efficiency" but also reveal efficiency's tendency to produce distinctions that define many people, practices, and priorities as waste. Although often seen as a benevolent and even scientific ideal, efficiency ideologies have promised to create a better and more prosperous world while often conferring prosperity unequally. Highlighting efficiency's appeal and peril, this article invites readers to reimagine the visions of prosperity that efficiency continues to call into being. Mientras los histórianos de la modernidad a menudo asocian la eficiencia con el llamado Movimiento de Eficiencia de la Era Progresista, el ideal de eficiencia sigue siendo poderoso en hoy día. Pero ¿qué es eficiencia? ¿Qué es lo que exige y promete? Este articulo hablara de estas preguntas explorando ejemplos de ideología de eficiencia de los principios del siglo veinte. Especialmente concentrando en las carreras del gurú financiero Roger Babson y el ministro Reverdy Ransom, estos ejemplos no sólo ilustren como y porque iniciativas e ideas religiosas vienen siendo conductos para "el evangelio de la eficiencia" sino que también revelan la tendencia de la eficiencia a producir distinciones que definan varias personas, prácticas y prioridades como desperdicio. Aunque a menudo se las consideran un ideal benévolo y también científico, las ideologías de la eficiencia han prometido crear un mundo mejor y más próspero, mientras a menudo confieren prosperidad de manera desigual. Destacando lo atractivo y lo peligroso de la eficiencia, este artículo invita a los lectores a reimaginar las visiones de prosperidad que la eficiencia continúa llamar a existencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a case study of British trade union organizer Margaret Bondfield, this article begins the task of adding a working class perspective to accounts of women's participation in Progressive era urban reform and expansion of public policy while also showing how international networks of support among trade union women undergirded American reform efforts. The narrative expands the consideration of intersectionality and positionality in analyzing women's role in developing public administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the Progressive Era, settlement houses in the urban Northeast and Midwest operated robust summer camp programs for the children of their neighborhoods. Each summer, campers enjoyed two weeks of hiking, swimming, nature study, and relaxation. This article argues that summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement-house workers during the Progressive Era. Unlike smoke abatement, sanitation reform, or playground construction, which addressed isolated components of the urban environment, camps allowed them to articulate a deeply ecological critique of the industrial city. Settlement-house workers constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to atmosphere, city streets, and immigrants' homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. Summer camps demonstrate that settlement-house workers' environmental philosophy permeated their reform agendas, influencing social work and recreation in addition to politics and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1920, maternal mortality rates in the United States exceeded those of other industrialized nations. To redress this statistic, the federal Children's Bureau set its sights on improving access to prenatal care at a time when 80 percent of American women received none. In 1921, following lobbying by urban, middle-class progressive women working at or in support of the Bureau, the government legislated for prenatal care programs through the Sheppard-Towner Act. To date, historians have focused on how successfully women implemented the act's provisions, paying less attention to whether support for rural mothers reduced maternal mortality rates. Using Children's Bureau pamphlets, documents pertaining to the Sheppard-Towner Act, and letters written to the Bureau from poor, rural women, this article brings government workers, medical professionals, and the women they served into dialogue to analyze the first push to establish prenatal care for underserved American women and the obstacles that stood in the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first occupational therapy school was founded at Jane Addams Hull House in 1915. In that process, Jane Addams inspired the first generation of occupational therapists, especially Eleanor Clarke Slagle. This article is divided into two parts, the first explores the relationships within the foundation of occupational therapy at the Hull House, in the early twentieth century in Chicago; Through an in-depth bibliographic review, from primary sources, the relationships and influences between the residents of the Hull House and the first occupational therapists in Chicago are identified. The second part considers some reflections on some Addams influences in the development and current identity of occupational therapy, mainly in one of its collaborators, Slagle. Jane Addams was a role model for many of the first occupational therapists, especially for Slagle. She learned from Addams her tenacity and leadership, central aspects for the foundation of the first school of occupational therapy. Some of these aspects are valid in the current practice of occupational therapy. Today, more than 100 years after its foundation, occupational therapy has much to learn, again, from the philosophy of Jane Addams.

While T.H. Marshall's famous three-tiered general analysis of citizenship stands as a landmark development, no one has examined how during the Progressive Era (1890–1920) and thereafter a female group of thinkers and labor leaders in the United States redefined the previously restricted definition of citizenship to produce an ameliorative response to the new trends of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration. Reformers such as Florence Kelley and Jane Addams established the principles of industrial citizenship in various publications. Kelley then started a movement called social justice feminism to effectuate this new theory. Social justice feminists' goal of a gender-specific agenda to provide an entering wedge for the eventual inclusion of all workers under the state's protection originally centered on court action and legislation. Then, labor leader Rose Schneiderman brought the fight of industrial citizenship in the United States to female workers even extending the concept to African-American female laundry workers from 1925 to 1933. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Socialists in Wisconsin experienced a "golden age" of political successes in the state legislature. Whereas the 1920s are commonly seen as a period of socialist decline, Wisconsin Socialists entered the decade with a renewed sense of optimism. Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party. Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition. Socialists were vital to progressive reform prior to World War I; however, the Socialist-Progressive alliance reached its full potential in the 1920s. From 1919–31, the Wisconsin legislature passed 295 Socialist-authored pieces of legislation ranging from labor demands, public utilities, and criminal justice reform. Many of the proposals resulted from negotiations between the Socialist and Progressive caucuses. The success of the Wisconsin Socialists—and their alliance with progressive Republicans—suggests that at least in some places the Progressive Era extended into the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postbellum rise of voluntary, federated associations set the stage for modern pressure politics in the American states, yet the connection between associations and lobbying in this era is grossly understudied. Relying on associations' own records and a new dataset of state lobbyists, we explore this relationship more deeply, documenting how federated associations gained membership, created political agendas, and lobbied state legislators for reform. To understand better the processes linking group strength with direct lobbying, we present descriptive case studies of the Grange (agriculture), the “Big Four” railroad brotherhoods (skilled labor), and the American Bankers' Association (finance). Our findings reveal how group strength, measured by association membership or local organizing, was not always related to the choice to lobby legislatures directly. These findings suggest pathways for future research comparing Progressive Era associations to one another, as well as showing how their actions parallel those of modern pressure groups. This analysis also paves the way for a more robust temporal understanding of lobbying in the American states.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman emphasised the connection between the rules governing the socio-economic institutions of her time and those of home economics. She called for radical transformations of the economy of the home as a way of promoting the "new woman" which would reduce social tensions and improve the economy. Gilman's most valuable contribution to economics was that she permanently made gender economics a decisive analytical framework for her successors to use in many of their own works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social work profession in the US developed alongside and within the professionalization of policing and corrections. Social workers are credited as some of the earliest policewomen, probation officers, and juvenile correctional facility superintendents. Still, our professional relationship to corrections in Progressive Era US history is underexplored and uninterrogated. How does this entangled history escape most narratives of professionalized social work in the US? This integrative literature review explores the stories social work scholars tell about social work's relationship(s) to corrections in the Progressive Era (1890–1930). Surveying 17 peer-reviewed social work articles, I identify themes of how social work remembers and obscures our Progressive Era relationship with corrections. Articles tell a story of delinquency, social control, and progress while obscuring the history of prisonwork, wardenship, and correctional leadership. Social work's professional memory of corrections in the early twentieth century has significant consequences for policy, research, and education today. Macro-level practitioners can learn from progressive reforms, engineered and implemented by early "reformers," that widened the net of carceral control. Further research is needed to explore social work's correctional history, prisonwork in particular. This may be taken up in the form of archival research and oral histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with the concepts of slow violence and landscapes of impunity, this article traces the United States' long history of state-sanctioned violence against Black women that affects both their physical and mental health. The extent of this abuse is revealed by examining the skeletal and archival remains of Black women who died during the Progressive Era in New York City. The same methods of marginalization and punishment have consistently been repeated and repurposed throughout the country's history. This violence is perpetrated not only by the state, but also by scientists who would argue for racial and gender inferiority, therefore bolstering false assumptions. Examining this history is a crucial step in denaturalizing structures that harm Black women's health and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the analysis of the prerequisites for the emergence, as well as the process of establishment of the interracial protest organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (abbreviated as NAACP) during the Progressive Era in the USA. The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a crisis of the ideology of accommodation, which prevailed in the African American community and in the interracial relations of the country at the end of the 19th century. The acceptance by the black population of the political and social order that prevailed in the South of the United States was seen by local authorities, as well as other supporters of white supremacy in other parts of the country, as an opportunity for a further active attack on the rights of African Americans with the connivance of the federal authorities in this process. The union of white liberal leaders and black activists, which resulted in the creation of the NAACP in 1908, allowed the African American protest movement to begin an active struggle against racist law in the United States. The NAACP program of action, aimed at protecting the civil rights of the black population guaranteed by the US Constitution, implied holding regular protests, rallies and pickets, lobbying for legislative initiatives in favor of the African American community, conducting active campaigning in periodicals, primarily through the main journal of the organization «The Crisis», as well as organizing trials to revise selected racist laws. During the 1910s the NAACP managed to turn into a serious force that managed to draw the attention of the American public to the problem of interracial relations in the USA. By 1920, African Americans, who made up the vast majority of the NAACP members, took a leading position in the organization’s leadership.

Many accounts, autobiographical and scholarly, emphasize how volunteers portrayed their work in the mission established for fishers by British physician Wilfred Grenfell in Newfoundland and Labrador: as escapist adventure. Scholars have not studied women physicians or their motivations to volunteer, however. This oversight derives from their small number combined with lack of knowledge about this mission's distinction from the foreign medical missions and domestic frontier missions that drew many women physicians to permanent positions. This study therefore discusses two American physicians, Alfreda B. Withington (1860-1951) and Emma E. Musson (1862-1913), who volunteered for summer service with this mission in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Through their publications, biographical sources, and clinical accounts, it reveals the appeal to them of such temporary, accessible volunteer service as a working vacation that rejuvenated. Importantly, it counters the skewed perspective of contemporary accounts in which the connection of Withington and Musson to an international celebrity, Wilfred Grenfell, overrode fuller considerations of their own lives, careers, and experiences. Finally, this examination suggests possible differences in their volunteerism between women physicians and their male counterparts: along with other women professionals, medical women often incorporated volunteer vacation experience into a continuum of similar endeavors in their careers., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)