Abstract
The prominent British journalist William T. Stead’s chief claim to fame today is that he went down to a watery grave on the Titanic on April 15, 1912. At his death, however, Stead had accumulated a long record as a friend of American reform, which is why he was crossing the Atlantic ocean on that fateful occasion. Among the things he admired about Americans was the role of American women in exporting a moral reform culture to Britain and its empire. He briefly described this process in his well-known The Americanisation of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century in 1902 as “by no means one of the least contributions which America has made to the betterment of the world.”1 Stead befriended American woman reformers because he saw them as bearers of what he regarded as progressive change in education, cleaning “vice” out of cities, and promoting better citizenship. They would be leaders of the world and would influence Britain as well.2 American women reformers returned the compliment. They viewed Stead as a great crusader for raising respect for women and combating the vice of prostitution, a campaign that made him a major figure in trans-Atlantic reform circles in the 1890s.3
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Notes
William T. Stead, The Americanisation of the World, or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century (London: Review of Reviews Office, 1902), reprinted as The Americanization of the World, or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century, Garland ed. with a new introduction by Sandi E. Cooper (New York: Garland, 1972), 104.
Joseph O. Baylen, “Stead, William Thomas (1849–1912),” in Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., May 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36258 (accessed 26 June 2007);
Frederic Whyte, The Life of W.T. Stead, 2 vols. (London: Cape, 1925).
William T. Stead, If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Live in the Service of All Who Suffer (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894). See Chapter 2, 23–64.
Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987).
See David Morgan, “Woman Suffrage in Britain and America in the early twentieth century,” in Britain and America: Studies in Comparative History, 1760–1970, ed. David Englander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 223–41, for an assessment within the tradition of comparative analysis.
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 19;
Richard Heathcote Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914: A Study of the United States in World History (reprint of 1940 edition; New York: Octagon Books, 1968).
Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (1982), 113–32.
Maureen Montgomery, “Gilded Prostitution”: Money, Migration and Marriage, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
See Barbara Strachey, Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980).
On Somerset, see Olwen Claire Niessen, Aristocracy, Temperance and Social Reform: The Life of Lady Henry Somerset (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).
See, for example, Mary Leitch and Margaret Leitch, “Opium in Ceylon,” Lend a Hand, 12 (1894), 49–54;
Mary Leitch and Margaret Leitch, “Progress in Ceylon,” Missionary Review, 10 (April 1897), 256–60.
Sandra Stanley Holton, “Segregation, Racism and White Women Reformers: A Transnational Analysis, 1840–1912,” Women’s History Review 10 (March 2001), 5–26;
Caroline L. Karcher, “Ida B. Wells and Her Allies against Lynching: A Transnational Perspective,” Comparative American Studies 3 (2005), 131–51.
Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 240–41.
Chicago Daily Tribune, December 13, 1895, 7; The Nursing Record and HospitalWorld, June 15, 1895, pp. 428–29; Florence Balgarnie, A Plea for the Appointment of Police Matrons at Police Stations (London: British Women’s Temperance Association, 1894); Lilian Lewis Shiman, “Balgarnie, Florence (1856–1928),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/55095 (accessed 25 June 2007).
Boston Daily Globe, October 12, 1901; “Women’s Duty,” Boston Daily Globe, October 14, 1895; Boston Daily Globe, May 9, 1893; Atlanta Constitution, October 21, 1895, 1; New York Times, November 5, 1893, 13; Philippa Levine, “Chant, Laura Ormiston (1848–1923),” in Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49196 (accessed 11 Oct. 2007).
The History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Ida Husted Harper, vol. 6 (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), 378; Christine Bolt, The Women’s Movements in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 202. Anna Howard Shaw urged the American suffragists to adopt the militant British tactics. According to the New York Times, this showed the effects of the London meeting of the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance on the American delegates; New York Times, June 15, 1909, 8.
Sidney R. Bland, “Lucy Burns,” in Notable American Women: The Modern Period: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green with Ilene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 124.
Janice Law Trecker’s introduction to Doris Stevens, Jailed for Freedom (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), xvii.
June Hannam, “Snowden, Ethel (1881–1951),” in Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., Oct 2006, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/48517 (accessed 25 June 2007).
Stevens, Jailed for Freedom, xvii. See also Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994), 1112–1136.
Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Tyrrell, Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire, 232; New York Times, June 13, 1902, 2; Union Signal & World’s White Ribbon (Chicago), October 16, 1902, 3, and December 22, 1910, 8; Nellie Alma Martel, The Woman’s Vote in Australia: What is Has Already Accomplished (London: Woman’s Press, c. 1908), 11.
Edith Hurwitz, “The International Sisterhood,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 334.
Caroline Chapman Catt, The World Movement for Woman Suffrage, 1904 to 1911 (London: International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance, 1911), 7.
See, for example, Frederick A. McKenzie, The American Invaders (reprint of 1902 edition; New York: Arno Press, 1976).
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© 2008 David W. Gutzke
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Tyrrell, I. (2008). Transatlantic Progressivism in Women’s Temperance and Suffrage. In: Gutzke, D.W. (eds) Britain and Transnational Progressivism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614970_6
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