Originally my interest in Alabama women of the Progressive period centered on the suffrage drive. Scholars have investigated and written extensively on the national movement, but little has been written on the South and even less on the Alabama movement. As a result the existing knowledge is skewed toward national figures and northeastern activism. I felt that new information from Alabama and the South would complement our understanding of the overall movement.
As my research progressed, I became aware that virtually all suffrage histories treat the drive as an institutional reform entirely within the context of political history. My aim became to write a comprehensive history of the suffrage drive in Alabama that would reflect women's lives and the larger society in which they lived. I wanted, in short, to write the history of the suffrage movement within a feminist framework.
Moreover, as I investigated the activities of Alabama women, I became increasingly aware that suffrage was only one among many issues that interested the women of the state. They were also concerned with the abolition of child labor, the problems of poverty in an industrial community, the creation of reform schools for juvenile offenders, the . . .
