As part of “Re-Placing Gilded Age and Progressive Era America,” a book project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), we are developing a short essay and selection of primary sources focused on Fannie Barrier Williams’ relationship to Brockport and Chicago.
In what biographer Wanda Hendricks calls Barrier Williams’ “cross-regional mobility,” we glimpse how experiences of place fundamentally shaped Fannie Barrier Williams’ understanding of inequality and oppression in American life during the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras (Wanda A. Hendricks, Fannie Barrier Williams: Crossing the Borders of Region and Race, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013, 3). Out of her transit between what she perceived as an idyllic childhood in Brockport and the challenges of social activism in Chicago, Barrier Williams began to imagine solidarities across the boundaries of race, gender, and class in the United States. Re-placed herself, she sought to replace the emerging regime of Jim Crow segregation, the lack of opportunities for women, and biases against the working-class with a more egalitarian and humane vision of American society.
