Regionally distinct yet influenced by national trends, women's progressive culture in Texas offers a valuable opportunity to analyze the evolution of women's voluntary associations, their challenges to southern conventions of race and class, and their quest for social change and political power.<BR>Judith McArthur makes an important and accessible contribution to the study of women's activism by tracing in detail how general concerns of national progressive organizations - about pure food, prostitution, and education reform - shaped programs at state and local levels. Southern women differed from their northern counterparts by devising new approaches to settlement work and taking advantage of World War I to challenge southern gender and racial norms. McArthur offers a unique analysis of how women in Texas succeeded in securing partial voting rights before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.<BR>Throughout her study, McArthur provides valuable comparisons between North and South, among various southern states, and between black and white, male and female progressives.