Answer:
African Americans had initially been hopeful during Reconstruction after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law and the rights of citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted black male suffrage. African Americans were elected to local, state, and even national offices, and Congress passed civil rights legislation. However, the hopes of Reconstruction were dashed by horrific waves of violence against African Americans, the economic struggles of sharecropping (which, in some ways, resembled the conditions of slavery), the denial of equal civil rights including voting rights, and enforced segregation of the races. At the turn of the century, the new progressive reform movement heralded many changes, but whether African Americans would benefit from progressivism remained to be seen.
In the summer of 1896, teacher and journalist Sarah Dudley Pettey brimmed with enthusiasm as she sat down to write a newspaper column entitled “The Up-To-Date Woman.” Pettey saw opportunities for women all around her, even though she came from a small southern town in North Carolina. “Because the woman of today is progressive, some would laugh, her to scorn; others would call her masculine, but it is not true she is only up-to-date,” Pettey argued. She thought women could meet any challenge: “The up-to-date woman claims the ability and only asks . . . for the opportunity of clearly demonstrating her merits. . . . she is qualified to legislate and arbitrate with statesmen.” Pettey believed nothing could stop women from moving forward “side by side” with men. The year 1895 heralded “the advent of the new woman.” She joined a growing national movement for women’s suffrage that blossomed in the Progressive Era of the next 20 years. That movement culminated in the 1920 ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving all women across America suffrage.
However, if progressivism at the turn of the twentieth century proved Pettey’s predictions about the up-to-date woman, it also ultimately excluded her from their ranks because she was a southern African American woman. In 1896, her faith in progress was absolute and included a bright future for black Americans. In fact, she linked womanhood and race to prove her point: “Some would say that woman is good in her place. This reminds me of what some white people say of the Negro; that ‘He is good in his place.'” African American progress since emancipation in 1865 progressed “onward and upward,” Pettey observed.
Explanation:
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