Leonard Rogoff's portrait of the North Carolina reformer Gertrude Weil (1879–1971) emphasizes Weil's idealism and outsized contributions to social progress movements, a commitment all the more striking given Weil's near-lifelong residency in the same home in Goldsboro, North Carolina. In a career spanning many decades, Weil was a staunch activist on behalf of progressive social causes, from woman suffrage to civic improvement to, eventually, African American civil rights. She did this, as Rogoff notes, while leading her community, attending meetings of (for example) the local Girl Scouts, garden club, library board, and hospital board into her seventies and eighties.

Rogoff portrays Weil's commitment to social justice as an outgrowth of the Reform Judaism carried by her parents who, like many mid-nineteenth century German Jewish immigrants, found prosperity as merchants in the small-town South. Weil grew up in a wealthy family that was fully a part of white Southern society—including, as Rogoff frequently reminds readers, prevailing racial attitudes and prejudices—while remaining steeped in German culture. Rogoff also finds many parallels in Weil's career with that of other contemporary female activists such as Jane Addams. Weil led the Equal Suffrage Association of North Carolina's ultimately unsuccessful efforts to pass woman suffrage in the state and in the 1920s continued to push for ballot reform, child labor and other labor laws, and welfare programs.

Weil, like other Southern progressives of the era, maintained a stance of apparent contradiction, defending Southern traditions and elitism while also advocating for socially liberal causes. Not a champion of segregation, Weil emphasized charitable and educational uplift for African Americans. During these years she believed that society had been better off when the “educated, intelligent class” made decisions and advocated birth control and maternal welfare, in part to reduce the number of the “feeble-minded.”

Yet Weil's politics moved leftward as she aged. During the Depression, Weil headed a local chapter of the North Carolina Emergency Relief Organization and became an ardent champion of the reformist wing of the New Deal and watched with disappointment as its aims were mostly frustrated in the state. In the 1940s she took a leading role in organizations, such as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, with an avowed integrationist stand. Her belief in the need for gradual racial change turned into open support for integration and civil disobedience, and her support for such causes made her “a familiar figure in the African American community” by the time that conflicts over integration reached their peak in the 1950s and 1960s. A team of academic researchers found that Weil's influence helped play a decisive role in decreasing racial prejudice and tension in Goldsboro during the civil rights era compared with other Southern towns.

Weil participated in, or was on the board of, a dizzying array of progressive causes and social welfare efforts while remaining staunchly committed to the Jewish community in Goldsboro and around the world. She did so in the face of mounting prejudice against Jews in rural North Carolina, even earning the respect (as the “right sort” of Jew) from area Klansmen. Although Rogoff has done an admirable job of cataloguing Weil's myriad accomplishments and putting them into their larger historical context, moments like this help show the full dimensions of her unusual and remarkable life.