Cora Wilson Stewart: A Woman on a Mission in the Early Twentieth Century

For another of my English classes this semester, I recently read a short story by Mary Wilkins Freeman called Old Woman Magoun which is about a particularly influential and strong willed elderly woman. After reading our recently assigned article, I have to say that while Cora Wilson Stewart might not have been as elderly as Old Woman Magoun, she certainly was as influential. This woman organized a late night schooling organization appropriately titled "Moonlight Schools" to increase the literacy in the state of Kentucky. What makes Cora Stewart so special is that she was a civilian woman responding to low levels of literacy in the military. Aiming to abolish illiteracy in her county, her program eventually helped 130,000 people become literate in Kentucky. Whatever gauge we use for what "literacy" is in this case, this is still an immensely impressive accomplishment for the time (before 1920).

Here is were it gets interesting for me, as a reader, "at Stewart'surging, several states in this period appointed illiteracy commissions and hired county agents to locate illiterates and or- ganize volunteer teacher corps." Essentially, Stewart led a witch-hunt for illiterates in the early 20th century. Except instead of being dragged out of your house and burnt at the stake, you were dragged out of your house and taught to read and write. Okay that's an exaggeration, and, as an English teacher, I don't want the process of learning to read and write to be compared to burning at the stake. But still, my jaw dropped when I read that sentence. It just goes to show the moral imperative that went behind being literate.

Could you imagine someone knocking on your door and giving you a reading and writing test? Apparently, Cora Stewart could as she thought it was her duty and the duty of every other literate person to help illiterates learn to read and write. For her time, Stewart was becoming a powerful woman in a world controlled by men. But just as Old Woman Magoun's authority is trumped, so too is Stewart's. "Despite her reputation as an effective orator and her personal friendship with Woodrow Wilson, Stewart failed to convince the federal government to legislate compulsory literacy instruction for inductees."

Looking back on Stewart (as a biased English teacher), I think her heart was really in the right place. But when I read that after World War I she said, "Next to the actual casualties, [illiteracy]was America's supreme tragedy," I think she might have been a little overzealous. Nonetheless, her zeal served to forward literacy as a moral imperative and not a economic imperative, which, as Deborah Brandt says, is a less desirable imperative for literacy.