Like many other northern clergymen after the Civil War, A. D. Mayo became interested in the role that education could play in rebuilding southern society. From 1880 to 1900 he traveled from Virginia to Texas as an educational missionary advocating the "new education" theories of the 1840s and 1850s. In time he came to be considered one of the most perceptive observers of southern education during the period from the end of Reconstruction to the rise of the Redeemer governments in the 1890s. Mayo was convinced that the changes in southern society that Reconstruction had failed to bring about could be realized under a sound educational system. Learning, he believed, should be based on individual needs rather than on rote memorization of facts, and teachers should be recruited from those trained in the civilizing values. In Southern Women, Mayo set forth at length the ideas that southern white women were the ideal ones to transmit learning to the young blacks. Stressing the greatly expanding role of these women because of the war, Mayo saw them as a kind of elite trained in the ideals and culture of the Old South, but receptive to the values of the New South. In their introduction Dan Carter and Amy Friedlander place Mayo in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual and social currents and provide an interesting perspective on his often surprisingly contemporary-sounding ideas on education.

The South was the last region of the country to accept education for women. This book presents a detailed account of the various levels of education accessible to both white and black women in the South and describes southern women's participation in the movement for women's education.

Alarmed at the growing poverty, illiteracy, class strife, and vulnerability of women after the upheavals of Reconstruction, female activists in Georgia advocated a fair and just system of education as a way of providing economic opportunity for women and the rural and urban poor. Their focus on educational reform transfigured private and public social relations in the New South, as Rebecca S. Montgomery details in this expansive study. The Politics of Education in the New South provides the most complete picture of women's role in expanding the democratic promise of education in the South and reveals how concern about their own status motivated these women to push for reform on behalf of others. Montgomery argues that women's prolonged campaign for educational improvements reflected their concern for distributing public resources more equitably. Middle-class white women in Georgia recognized the crippling effects of discrimination and state inaction, which they came to understand in terms of both gender and class. They subsequently pushed for admission of women to Georgia's state colleges and universities and for rural school improvement, home extension services, public kindergartens, child labor reforms, and the establishment of female-run boarding schools in the mountains of North Georgia. In the process, a distinct female political culture developed that directly opposed the individualism, corruption, and short-sightedness that plagued formal politics in the New South.