First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.

On November 21, 1903, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced that its north-south through trains would no longer enter Broad Street Station in downtown Philadelphia and would stop instead at West Philadelphia. Nor would the company sell tickets from that station to downtown. These schedule changes, which seemed minor to the company and were intended to reduce congestion in the central city, threatened downtown merchants and manufacturers who worried that buyers would shift to more accessible cities. Philadelphia had been sidetracked, the North American reported. The result was an eruption of boycotts, protests, and petitions that pitted nearly every local trade association against the railroad. Encouraged by the North American's editorials, partisan reporting, and stinging cartoons, the protesters forced the Pennsylvania to back down, and in March 1904, through trains returned to Broad Street. The newspaper cloaked this local business dispute in the language of antimonopoly, linking the fears of small businessmen to national anti-railroad concerns. The sidetrack episode also helped launch modern corporate public relations, as the Pennsylvania—stung by this threat to corporate autonomy—soon hired Ivy Lee as its first publicity agent.

J. Stitt Wilson, mayor of Berkeley from 1911 to 1913, supported women's suffrage because he believed it would lead to a revaluation of the feminine and maternal values of cooperation and care and, along with the labor movement, provide the basis for creation of a socialist society that would embody the true values of Christianity. A rare example of a male activist and intellectual for whom women's equality was fundamental to his beliefs rather than auxiliary to them, Wilson drew his views from a mixture of Social Gospel; the labor movement; feminism; and socialism, particularly the maternalist socialism developed in parts of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the settlement house movement. Perhaps his most intellectually creative moment came when he applied Henry George's analysis of urban land values to a socialist and feminist vision of the city as a “social mother.” His election and work as mayor illustrate the overlap between the urban socialist and progressive social reform programs, while his failure to win any further elections reflects the divisions between them over the nature of capitalism.

This article examines the World War I service of the University of Michigan historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934). Phillips worked first with black recruits as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and later as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer in Washington, DC. In these years, Phillips ranked as America's foremost authority on the antebellum South generally and of African American slavery in particular. In 1918 he published his landmark American Negro Slavery. While on leave from Ann Arbor, Phillips taught English and French, planned educational and recreational programs, and supervised the management and construction of buildings at Camp Gordon's segregated facilities. Phillips's daily interactions with black troops in the cantonment reaffirmed—at least as he saw it—his conclusions that North American slavery had been a relatively benign institution, his belief in the virtues of plantation paternalism and in the management of subject peoples by educated whites, and his attitude that contemporary race relations were generally harmonious. Phillips's observations of African American recruits validated his conviction that blacks benefited most from white-run, regimented organizations and strengthened his belief in economic assimilation and social segregation. His military intelligence work confirmed Phillips's overall commitment to conservative change, whether in foreign or race relations.