A Separate Sisterhood examines the personal lives and professional accomplishments of a group of wise and persistent women whose collective work in the early twentieth century crucially influenced educational reform in the New South. Working at the intersection of race, gender, and class, these women fought for educational improvement in a region of exceptional poverty, rural isolation, and racial prejudice. Their work, explored collectively for the first time in this groundbreaking text, demonstrates the roots of early advances in southern literacy education, vocational education, community outreach education, adult education, equal educational opportunity, curricular integrity, public support, and teacher pay equity.