The Progressive Era Context
Zitkála-Šá’s public career unfolded against the backdrop of the Progressive Era — the period roughly from 1890 to 1920 in which reform movements of various kinds were reshaping American political and social life.
The Progressive Era produced significant changes in American governance and society: the regulation of trusts and monopolies, the expansion of democratic political mechanisms (direct elections of senators, the initiative and referendum), the advancement of women’s suffrage, the development of social welfare programs in urban areas, and the growth of journalism as a mechanism for exposing corruption and social problems.
The muckraking journalism of the Progressive Era — the investigative reporting that exposed the conditions of meatpacking plants, the corruption of urban political machines, the exploitation of industrial workers — provided both a model and a context for Zitkála-Šá’s own investigative work on Oklahoma. She was applying the same methods and the same moral framework to a specific set of conditions affecting Native people.
The Progressive Era’s concern with social welfare and the exploitation of vulnerable populations provided a language and a political framework within which some of her advocacy could be articulated in terms that mainstream audiences could engage with. She was not simply arguing for Native rights in the abstract — she was arguing that specific institutions were failing specific people in specific ways that could be documented and reformed. This was the language of Progressive Era reform.
The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which worked with her on the Oklahoma investigation, was itself a Progressive Era institution — a network of women’s civic organizations that engaged with social reform across a range of issues. The collaboration reflected the overlapping concerns of the women’s reform movement and the Native rights movement in this period.