What Was The Progressive Era

The progressive era is a period of reform and a time in which America defined who they were, and it played a huge part in shaping America. People from all sorts of different social, and racial groups took a stand for what kind of reforms they believed in, and once their following grew big enough, they were able to be heard. All the historians that I read on each have their own perspective of what they believed to have dominated the progressive era, big business, feminist movement, urban working class, and middle class, all of which are represented. But they each have one thing in common, they all used some sort of technique to get into the heads of the people to pass reforms which will better themselves and American citizens . An example
“If America’s greatness was related to individual achievement, what would happen as freedom and social mobility were more an more circumscribed by giant corporations with their impersonal and machine like qualities?” (Pg. 230, Grob and Billias). This question and many other questions similar to it led many Americans to support reforms that would “restore dignity to the individual and give meaning to life”. He then goes on to talk about the progressive movement and how it created reforms such as the regulation of public utilities, the curtailment of corporate power, the Americanization of the immigrant, the amelioration of the lot of the urban poor, the regulation of child and women labor, as well as many others. And many of the historians who were writing about these reforms thought that the reformers were challenging the dominant position of the business and privileged classes, they believed that “the reformers goals had been to restore government to the people, and to abolish special privilege and ensure equal opportunity for all”(Pg. 231, Grob and Billias). These reforms were intended to help the lower and middle class Americans, but it did always turn out that
Women for example were not given the same right to practice the same occupation as a man for sometime, and when they did change it, women were not paid the same as men for doing the same exact job. According to Scott women believed that “ignorance leads to vice, vice leads to poverty.” They also firmly thought that “..education is key..”(Pg. 11, Scott). They knew that a good education was the only way for most children to break the poverty of their families, and with that they built schools for the poor, they for all. Scott provides a list of movements that were dominated by women like the temperance movement, moral reform, education, women working, anti slavery, and health. Women became “instructors of whole townships in the methods of government business.”(Pg. 12, Scott). Women used persistence and hard work to get what they wanted and soon attacked other problems that were growing rapidly in the city like “potholes and filth fillin up in the streets, the inadequate disposal of garbage, the unsanitary condition of the elevated trains, corruption in the police department, and the inadequacy of the public schools.”(Pg, 13, Scott). Women seem to have created reforms that are still around in today's society, so