During the height of the Americanization era, the General Federation of Women's Clubs launched a campaign to raise standards of citizenry via the "Ninety Days of Opportunity" initiative and Primer for English Instruction. Members solicited immigrant women by offering English-language instruction classes, home visits, and support during naturalization. Strikingly, there is little evidence of how immigrant women responded to Americanization programs or experienced clubwomen's educational efforts. However, by juxtaposing two different sets of archival data, this study listens for intersections of differences and commonalities between the two groups of women to create the beginnings of a cross-cultural dialogue.

This article reexamines the treatment of gender and feminism in technical, business, and workplace writing studies—areas in which the three of us teach. Surprisingly, the published discourse of our field seems to implicitly minimize the gendered nature of business and technical writing workplaces and classrooms. To understand this apparent lack of focus, we review five technical and business communication academic journals and build on previous quantitative evaluations done by Isabelle Thompson in 1999 and by Isabelle Thompson Elizabeth Overman Smith in 2006. We also review nine popular textbooks using a content analysis method based on Thompson’s work. Finally, we discuss current research in feminist pedagogies vis-à-vis these results and our own experiences in the professional writing classroom.

Faced with the need to educate women collectively about politics and government, Jane Croly established the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in 1890. Based on archival documents from the GFWC, this article seeks to address the following research questions: What do the patriotic pageants sponsored by the GFWC illustrate about civic education in the Americanization era? What can we learn about civic education and the use of particular rhetorical forms from twentieth-century pageants and organizations such as the GFWC? By exploring the organization’s contribution to civic education alongside other pageants in the same era, it is possible to better contextualize the competing histories of civic education for ourselves and our students. This article also focuses on the patriotic pageants that club women used to develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had contradictory results. The GFWC both supported and resisted whiteness as the position of authority in its promotion of pageants. Embracing the contradictions of pageants and their role in civic education in the Americanization era allows for a more nuanced and accurate picture of the history of civic education.