Julia Lathrop was a woman who deeply understood both her era and the climate of society around her. She was cunning in her use of this knowledge to manipulate society into changing for the better and to spread her Progressive ideas amongst the masses. With her college education, still a rarity in her time, Julia Lathrop honed the fine art of persuasion and though she was fiercely determined with strongly-held beliefs she was considerate of others’ positions, ideals, and prejudices so that she might further advance her agenda. This paper will aim to show how Lathrop was successful in promoting the causes she cared deeply about and pursuing her goals by being both cautious in determined by pragmatically allying herself with her male peers to support legislation, networking with other women and women’s organizations, and rarely acknowledging or promoting her own accomplishments. One of Lathrop’s greatest achievements was the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act (Also known as the Maternity and Infancy Act) in 1921. As this was only shortly after women gained the right to vote, …show more content…
For example, during the smallpox epidemic of 1893 in Chicago, Lathrop and Florence Kelley went themselves “into the tenement apartments […] when garment manufacturers, fearing both lawsuits and the disease itself refused to destroy infected garments” and the two of them “burned the infected clothes in the streets” (33). However, when asked about the incident in 1930, Lathrop said that it shouldn’t be mentioned in her entry for the National Cyclopedia of American Biography because “while we were in the midst of an epidemic none of us suffered from it [at Hull House] nor did I”