Describe the multiple groups and leaders that emerged in the fight for the Progressive agenda, including women’s rights, African
American rights, and workers’ rights. How were the philosophies, agendas, strategies, and approaches of these leaders and organizations similar and different? What made it difficult for all Progressive activists to present a united front?
In some cases, it was focused on those who suffered due to pervasive inequality, such as African Americans, other ethnic groups, and women. In others, the goal was to help those who ere in desperate need due to circumstance, such as poor immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who often suffered severe discrimination, the working poor, and those with ill health. Women were in the vanguard of social justice reform. Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Ellen Gates Starr, for example, led the settlement house movement of 1880s. Their work to provide social services, education, and health care to working-class women and their children was among the earliest Progressive grassroots efforts in the country. The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), formed in 1904, urged the passage of labor legislation to ban child labor in the industrial sector. The managers paid child workers noticeably less for their labor gave additional fuel to the NCLC’s efforts to radically curtail child labor. The committee employed photographer Lewis Hine to engage in a decade-long pictorial campaign to education Americans on the plight of children working in factories. Florence Kelley particularly opposed sweatshop labor and urged the passage of an eight-hour- workday law in order to specifically protect women in the workplace. Booker T. Washington proposed what came to be known as the Atlanta Compromise. Speaking to a racially mixed audience, Washington called upon African Americans to work diligently for their own uplift and prosperity rather than preoccupy themselves with political and civil rights. W. E. B. Du Bois emerged as prominent spokesperson for what would later be dubbed the Niagara Movement, which calls for African Americans to accommodate white racism and focus solely on self-improvement.
All of the leaders among these progressive groups had a very strong sense of purpose and determination. Two personal traits that are key if they were to break the current status quo of the societies they lived in.
<u>Similarities:</u>
The speech these groups used aimed to find common ground among the potential followers they were aiming to get.
<u>Differences:</u>
Their strategies were not always the same. Associations that demanded workers rights would engage in violent acts in a couple of occasions. This deferred from King's Civil Rights movement that offered a Gandhi--style peaceful approach while claiming their rights.
Although the 3 groups were demanding rights, they would not necessarily share the beliefs or goals of the others. For instance, associations that fought for workers rights would not necessarily support equal rights for African Americans or Women and vice-versa.
