Women Muckrakers & Reformers

Women played an integral role in the Progressive movement. Longstanding social traditions held that women were uniquely predisposed to maintain the moral center for their families. They were supposed to be purer, less vulnerable to temptation than men; especially since men were supposed to go to work in the vice-infested public sphere, while wives remained cloistered within the moral bastion of the home. Since women were also deemed responsible for raising children, they assumed the role of teachers and guardians of Christian virtues and values. Though these same religious teachings implied that women should be obedient wives and subservient individuals, ironically, they also provided a socially acceptable venue in which females could assume an active role in public life. That is, women could transgress traditional gender roles in the name of safeguarding other, more sacred traditions like Christian piety and social morality. In the long term, Progressive women were successful on several counts, but in their success lay unimagined troubles and complications

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