Ardent feminist, energetic civil rights advocate, and uncompromising peace activist; legal expert, political advisor, public speaker, and self-made journalist: Belle Case La Follette (1859–1931) of Wisconsin has long deserved her own biography. With Nancy C. Unger's sympathetic, well-written, and engaging Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer, she has finally been granted one.

Despite her shy and self-effacing nature, and notwithstanding that she was the wife of towering progressive politician Robert Marion La Follette (1855–1925), Belle La Follette successfully carved out a niche for herself as a feminist reformer. Her role as legal and political advisor to her husband and sons has long been recognized. Indeed, Unger detailed those traits in Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer.Footnote ¹ Thus far, however, other vital sides of Belle La Follette have not been illuminated in similar depth: her feminism, her civil rights advocacy, and her peace activism. Here Unger makes her major contribution, in the process finding “a far more complicated and independent Belle La Follette” than the one she portrayed in Fighting Bob La Follette (5).

The complexities surrounding Belle La Follette arise from her hard-fought and never easily won battle to balance her multipronged political activism on the one hand with marriage and motherhood on the other. This struggle left her “simultaneously old-fashioned and forward thinking” (158). As Unger points out, it also led to “many enormous gaps between what Belle La Follette preached and what she practiced, especially concerning her vaunted role as wife and mother” (6). Furthermore, the struggle arguably resulted in her approaching reform from a gendered perspective. This became clear when upon the establishment of La Follette's Magazine in 1909 she turned that journal's “Home and Education” section into her personal political pulpit. In public speeches her gendered approach was equally marked, with La Follette at one point describing government “as a practical home problem”—a statement that to some New Women of the 1920s may have come across as “hopelessly old fashioned if not downright sexist” (146).

La Follette's contributions to American feminism were significant. Joining the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1910, she originally preferred the traditional methods of Carrie Chapman Catt to Alice Paul's more radical tactics, even as she disapproved of Catt's racially tinged chauvinism. Even though La Follette's Magazine became the prime venue for her crusade for women's suffrage, La Follette also went on lengthy speaking tours. Growing more self-assured and assertive, her admiration for Paul's tactics increased; later, it is true, she would decry what she viewed as Paul's single-minded focus on passage of an equal rights amendment to the Constitution. In championing women's rights, La Follette battled against what Unger calls “the growing consensus that women could have equal rights or protective legislation, but not both” (144). Nevertheless, in Unger's view La Follette's “early arguments, which claimed the right to vote as merely the extension of woman's prescribed sphere, were gradually joined to a defense of woman's natural rights as an equal to man” (84).

Unger's discussion of La Follette's fight against racial segregation inside the civil service during Woodrow Wilson's presidency is equally important. Even though the La Follettes had little to gain electorally from fighting for civil rights in Washington, D.C., Belle La Follette nevertheless entered the battle. Once again, she made gendered political appeals in the columns of La Follette's Magazine. Moreover, she joined the NAACP and also participated in petition drives and gave speeches. Complicating her image as a champion of racial equality was the fact that she and her husband occasionally employed racist language at home. This adds an appropriate ironic twist to the title of Chapter Four, based as it is on civil rights activist and educator Nannie Helen Burroughs' well-meant praise for Belle La Follette: “The Successor to Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

An especially interesting finding by Unger is that in her role as peace activist after World War I, Belle La Follette not only quarreled with her husband over foreign policy but was the more radical and uncompromising of the two. In fact, they disagreed publicly over the Army Reorganization Act of 1920 that made the National Guard a part of the U.S. army and enabled its deployment overseas in time of war (137). Her radicalism even blinded her somewhat to the excesses of Soviet communism; here, it should be noted, Unger departs slightly from her portrayal of Belle La Follette in Fighting Bob La Follette.

Despite the many fine nuances that Unger adds to her empathetic and compelling biography of Belle La Follette, her work also contains some weaknesses. As she points out, the book is organized thematically rather than strictly chronologically. This, Unger concedes, “leads to some overlap between certain chapters” (7). More importantly, however, most of Unger's new major findings relate to the years from the launch of La Follette's Magazine in 1909 until Belle La Follette's death in 1931. The early phase of her life is covered more superficially. Indeed, the observant reader will notice that several quotes and passages relating to that phase have been picked from Fighting Bob La Follette. The main problem is, however, that the relatively weak chronological framework leaves the reader guessing as to when exactly Belle La Follette underwent that process of radicalization that by the 1920s apparently had left her more militant than her husband (129, 137–38, 143, 146). Even though she showed grit, of course, in becoming the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1885, was she really already an “ardent feminist” by 1882 (30)? Of course, her growing admiration for Alice Paul's tactics would seem to indicate a process of radicalization along the way.

Unger's discussion of the Wisconsin Idea is not impressive (60–61). Even though the historiography on this topic is rich, in grappling with it Unger only quotes Frederic C. Howe's 1912 classic, Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy; and a 1925 article by French Stroker (85, note 3). It may be unfair to complain that only few of Robert M. La Follette's male political allies made it into Unger's book, but if nothing else it is annoying that such well-known Wisconsin historical figures as Edward G. Ryan, Robert G. Siebecker, John M. Nelson, and Frederic C. Howe all are misspelled (29, 59, 85, 148, 200–1). More important, the limited discussion of Wisconsin progressivism makes it difficult for the reader to gauge the exact range of issues on which Belle La Follette was more radical than her husband. The book contains a few inaccuracies. If it may seem odd to claim that Edward A. Ross was “an early advocate of Madison Grant's race suicide doctrine,” when in fact Ross coined the phrase; it is simply incorrect to assert—on the basis of David W. Southern's The Progressive Era and Race: Reaction and Reform, 1900–1917 Footnote ² , in which no such claim is made—that Theodore Roosevelt “heartily endorsed Madison Grant's 1916 bestseller, The Passing of a [sic] Great Race” (92). To be sure, they did both worry about “race suicide.” The Atlanta race riot, by the way, did not take place in 1907 but in 1906 (91, 195).

These relatively minor quibbles should not detract from the fact that Unger has written a fine little book—complete with a package of nine historical documents—that adds more flesh and psyche to an important feminist reformer whose accomplishments are indeed worth remembering.