Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin - Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentuckys Moonlight Schools: Fighting for Literacy in America

Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentuckys Moonlight Schools

Fighting for Literacy
in America

YVONNE HONEYCUTT BALDWIN

Publication of this volume was made possible in part by
a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright 2006 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre
College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,
The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,
Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,
Morehead State University, Murray State University,
Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,
University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,
and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 405084008
www.kentuckypress.com

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Photographs courtesy of University of Kentucky Special Collections and Archives.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baldwin, Yvonne Honeycutt, 1947
Cora Wilson Stewart and Kentuckys moonlight schools : fighting for
literacy in America / Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2378-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8131-2378-X (alk. paper)
1. Stewart, Cora Wilson, 18751958. 2. EducatorsKentuckyBiography.
3. LiteracyKentuckyHistory20th century. 4. Adult educationKentuckyHistory20th century. I. Title.
LA2317.S826B35 2006
370.92dc22 2005030638

This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

For my mother, Maudie Holloway Honeycutt,
a woman of courage, wisdom, and determination.
Words are not enough.

This book analyzes the life and work of Cora Wilson Stewart, a Progressive Era reformer who sought to eliminate adult illiteracy in a single generation, a goal she believed would also improve the quality of life in rural America. It illustrates both the strengths and the limitations of a grassroots movement, examines the politicization of the literacy crusade, and suggests that womens activism and the woman vote had important effects on male political culture. Prior to suffrage, Stewarts appeals for government aid evoked chivalrous attempts to support the reform agenda, generally with rhetoric and token legislation; however, after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, male politicians granted Stewart only limited and conditional participation in politics and used both legislative maneuvering and access to the public purse to guard their own favored position in the polity.

This study attempts to capture the enigmatic southern progressive and feminist whose historic persona lingers in the shadows of relatively narrow analyses that judge her work based on the numbers of illiterates taught or the degree to which her crusade actually reduced illiteracy.

Part of Stewarts importance as a historical figure lies in her attempt, like many progressives and most progressive women educators, to humanize the functions of developing education and social welfare bureaucracies even as they sought to strengthen them. Like many others set to this task, she failed, at least in the short run. Nevertheless, many of the critical elements of her philosophy and approach are embedded in current literacy and adult education policy and practice, which suggests that her vision for a literate public was insightful and even prophetic. However, her insistence on voluntary service and reliance on the each one teach one method not only gave legislators at all levels a convenient excuse to underfund the literacy initiative but also allowed educators who sought to limit teaching to credentialed and university-trained professionals to cast her as an antiprogressive holdover from a bygone day, a tactic they frequently used against women educators who rejected the corporate model of bureaucratization and centralization. Stewart as a historical figure, then, has suffered in a gendered double bind of time and circumstance, caught in her own life between tradition and modernism in a transitional age, and, in historical analysis, trapped by her legend and her failure to achieve her stated goal.

My conclusions are informed by interpretations that place Kentucky in the South and acknowledge its mountain counties as part of the social and physical construct known as Appalachia. I see Stewart as a southern reformer who embraced class-based ideals of uplift and progress that accepted, to some degree, the hierarchy of race and culture. What she did not accept was their permanence or inevitability. She believed in self-improvement as a means of eliminating such hierarchies, and she used education and the profession of teaching to blur those lines in her own life and to empower those who learned to read and write in her Moonlight Schools for adult illiterates.

I have taken a thematic approach in dealing with Stewarts networking, her attempts to secure state and federal support for adult literacy through legislation and appropriations, and her efforts to reshape and redirect the work of state and national education bureaucracies through campaigns at the local, state, national, and international level. I have, however, used the chronology of her life and work to organize these themes.

Whenever possible, I have used the language of the literacy movement itself. I chose to do this because it illustrates the rhetoric of faith, uplift, and progress that characterized much of Progressive Era reform, and because such rhetoric proved essential in garnering public and private support for multidimensional initiatives like the illiteracy crusade. The language of the time also gives voice to the movements spirit and intent. Just as important, the original language enhances the understanding of public discourse in both politics and the education profession. Because I used oral histories to examine the legacy and memories of Cora Wilson Stewart, it seemed appropriate to treat her diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and even the newspaper clippings and magazine articles that she kept as a form of oral history or memoir. This approach connects the reader more intimately with Stewart and her times and provides a deeper understanding of how Kentuckians and Americans nearly a century ago attempted to deal with a social problem that continues to defy solution in our own time.

Cora Wilson was born in 1875 in rural eastern Kentucky. The daughter of a schoolteacher and a physician, she grew up in fairly modest circumstances. In an era when education and economic or social status largely defined what a woman could and could not do, Cora attended normal school rather than a finishing school, and instead of completing a university degree, she took a job in a one-room school. Dictated by economic necessity and the realities of her life and family circumstances, these decisions later may have limited her ability to bring about change within her chosen profession, but they shaped Coras choice of her lifes work and guided her vision of the role of education in society.