During the depression of the 1890s, a young Iowa newspaperman, indignant over the excesses of the Gilded Age, led a group of midwesterners to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, where they established a model community based on the utopian ideals of Henry George. In Women of Fair Hope, Paul M. Gaston follows the dreams and achievements of three extraordinary women—an early feminist reformer, an educator, and a freed slave—whose individual desires to create a fairer, more equitable society led them to play important roles in the life of that community.

The charm of Women of Fair Hope resembles that of treasured stories … If, in writing of the lives of Nancy Lewis, Marie Howland, and Marietta Johnson, Gaston is recreating three lives and telling three touching stories, he is also very gently—almost too gently—saying something about the nature, limits, and interweaving of different women’s experiences in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Each of these women was extraordinary and significant, each a woman of courage, determination, imagination ... Gaston has offered his readers a small jewel.

—Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Georgia Historical Review

Gaston is a magnificent storyteller.

—Atlanta Constitution

About the Author/Editor

PAUL M. GASTON (1928-2019) was born and reared in Fairhope, Alabama, about which he has written two books. He is also the author of The New South Creed, winner of the Lillian Smith Award for distinguished writing about the South. He is a past president of the Southern Regional Council and has been a frequent visitor in South Africa, both before and after the fall of apartheid. He has received numerous honors for both his professional work and civil rights leadership, including the outstanding professor award from the Commonwealth of Virginia; bridge builder recognition from the city of Charlottesville; legendary civil rights activist from the NAACP; and community leader, from his alma mater, Swarthmore College.

Women of Fair Hope

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Women of Fair Hope

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