Interpretation of Labor, Women, and African America Progressives: How successful were they by 1920?

Women Progressives during the late nineteenth century were struggling to break out of their roles as domestic wives and create equality between men and women. Women were regarded as lesser than men, and stayed home to cook, clean, raise children, and take care of the domestic aspects of life, while men went out to work.  Women Progressives were mostly associated with the middle and upper classes because lower class women could not afford to leave the house and hire a domestic servant or they could not afford to miss work if they were employed. Women worked to demonstrate that they were fit for the public sphere and that they could succeed even in politics. Sanitary reform gave women an opportunity to link domestic life with public life in order to prove, without radicalism, that they can positively be involved in public affairs. Women also fought for the right to hold a respectable job without discrimination. Carolyn Strange demonstrates that “The "girl worker" had made her way into virtually every aspect of the economy. In several fields, notably the office and retail sectors, she had shoved aside male employees. Even professions such as medicine and law were no longer all-male employment preserves. Nonetheless, career women were still the rare exceptions.” Women were progressing into the workplace gradually proving that they were capable of doing work out side of the home. The fight for women’s suffrage also ignited throughout the United States and Canada. Patricia Roome explained, “The 1890s witnessed the consolidation of the women's movement and marked the birth of national women's organizations on a grand scale.” Though women were making great strides to attain equal rights, they were not successful in making the workplace non-discriminatory and in proving that they could contribute to the public sphere by 1920.

African American Progressives struggled to overcome racism in order to win civil liberties and end segregation throughout the United States and Canada. The struggles of African American Progressives established powerful civil rights movements, but by 1920, the Americas still did not support equality between blacks and whites. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey led blacks to fight for civil rights with the power of unification. Booker T. Washington advocated for blacks to gain a foundation of power economically, then social and political power would follow. Washington, being a political realist, opened the Tuskegee Institute to teach blacks important trade skills in order to ensure jobs and economic stability through employment. The Tuskegee Institute exemplified his theory that an economic foundation will lead to political and social equality. James W. St G. Walker demonstrates “Employment segregation was the most obvious feature of Canadian discrimination. Private employers would refuse to hire blacks for any but the most attractive jobs; even the federal government permitted racial restriction in its hiring and promotion practices.” Booker T. Washington wanted to reform the workplace so that blacks could be valued and even respected for their work. Marcus Garvey, leader of the Pan-African movement in the early twentieth century, advocated for racial separation without racial superiority. Garvey believed that African Americans could flourish with the establishment of an economic system, and this could have been accomplished without the competition of white commerce and industry. The low success rates of Garvey’s UNIA, though, decreased his credibility and his following as a Progressive leader. “Regardless of the fact that Marcus Garvey would eventually be brought down by a mixture of government forces and internal mismanagement of the UNIA, his ideas continued to have a powerful impact around the globe. In many ways Garvey was ahead of his time in terms of speaking for the discontent of Black people.” According to Mark Christian, though Garvey was unsuccessful in carrying out his idealist approach to ending race conflict, he preached important conceptual analysis of post-slavery black suffering. W.E.B. Du Bois also arrived at the conclusion that in order for the black population to thrive, it needed a strong economic foundation. “According to Du Bois, not only did the unconscious life of racism necessitate a plan for black economic strength, but economic issues also were partially responsible for bringing about unconscious racism in the first place.” Du Bois was a firm believer that blacks should be celebrated for cultural and intellectual merit as a whole, and many African American Progressives joined him to try to end unequal treatment of blacks. Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois did not have success in establishing their ideal forms of black unification to overcome racist attitudes towards blacks. Their leadership among the black reformers of the era is an indicator that the African American Progressives in Canada and the United States were not successful by 1920.

Throughout Canada and the United States, the Progressives were not successful in obtaining their goals by 1920. Labor unions, women reformists, and African American civil rights activists had just begun the struggle to obtain their goals. However, they did set a standard for minority groups to follow in gaining and protecting civil liberties, bringing change and equality to future generations.