Cora Wilson Stewart (1875–1958) dedicated her life to promoting adult literacy. In her home state of Kentucky, she began the Moonlight School movement of the early twentieth century with the goal of eradicating illiteracy in a single generation. From diaries, correspondences, administrative records, Stewart's own manuscripts, and a wealth of secondary sources, Yvonne Honeycutt Baldwin pieces together Stewart's life and her crusade against illiteracy. Although the book is presented as a chronological account of Stewart's role in the literacy movement, Baldwin intertwines with it broader themes of gender, politics, and education policy in the early twentieth century.

The book begins with a detailed look at the “making of a reformer,” focusing on the people and experiences that shaped Stewart's ideals and goals. Early in life, Stewart developed a strong belief that education was the key to economic mobility and participation in the benefits of modern life. In the second chapter, Baldwin recounts the birth of the Moonlight School movement. In the curriculum Stewart developed, after two six-week sessions of evening classes, participants would be able to sign documents, make basic mathematical calculations, write simple letters, and read a few verses of the bible. After several successful Moonlight School sessions, she embarked on a statewide promotional campaign in 1912. Ten counties immediately adopted Moonlight programs. Other counties, some in surrounding states, also began to examine the issue of illiteracy at her urging. Her experiences and the strong friendships and connections she had formed as a teacher and, later, county school superintendent proved indispensable in the burgeoning literacy campaign.

Stewart's struggles to obtain state funding for the Kentucky Illiteracy Commission (KIC), which she and other volunteers had worked to create in 1914, are described in the third chapter. These efforts, which were ultimately successful, resulted in the politicization of the literacy movement. Baldwin discusses Stewart's growing involvement in Democratic Party state politics in great detail.

The next two chapters recount the expansion of the literacy campaign to the national level. By 1919, only a few years into Stewart's Moonlight campaign, the federal government and 18 states had created illiteracy commissions that employed similar tactics (i.e., evening adult classes and public awareness campaigns). Patriotic sentiment furthered the literacy efforts in Kentucky and across the country when it was discovered that over one-fourth of the men called into military service in 1917 could neither read nor write.

As Baldwin documents in the remaining chapters, the inability to sustain volunteer efforts and continual fundraising, changing priorities in adult education (e.g., Americanization programs), and growing demands for professional, institutionalized education delivery would ultimately undermine the success of the grassroots literacy campaigns. Despite her “failure” to eliminate illiteracy in a single generation, Stewart's contributions to promoting literacy and adult education are undeniable. Ahead of her time in many ways, Stewart's recognition of the importance of parents' literacy in the educational progress of their children foreshadowed current literacy programs that emphasize literacy training for entire families.

The obstacles that female reformers such as Stewart faced, in a period when opportunities outside of domestic circles were severely limited for women, is one of the book's major themes. Baldwin emphasizes the challenges to women in finding “socially acceptable ways of interacting in the … patriarchal bureaucratic systems” of politics and reform (p. 10). In particular, the efforts of female reformers to expand the limited scope of issues deemed valid concerns for women, the necessity for women to obtain the approval and assistance of powerful male politicians, and their frustration at limited opportunities for holding political office even after the passage of the nineteenth amendment, are all topics Baldwin addresses through Stewart's experiences.

Another major theme is the opposition that reformers had to overcome in the form of stereotypes and prejudices. For example, although it was commonly believed that learning was nearly impossible for older persons, blacks, and Native Americans, some of the Moonlight Schools' most eager and successful students were members of these minorities and older whites, who were well into their eighties in some cases. Stewart, like others of her time, was able to use these counterexamples to argue for the extension of education reform to address the needs of individuals of all races and nationalities.

Although the book is filled with a number of other social themes, one final example is the changing nature of progressive activism during this era. Baldwin characterizes the progression of the literacy movement, like other reform efforts, from grassroots beginnings into more institutionalized social programs. Baldwin relates that reformers within both types of work viewed the other as a threat to their success.

Economic historians in search of a highly quantitative description of literacy and education trends in Kentucky (or the South) may be disappointed. Nonetheless, I recommend this thorough account of the development of the Moonlight Schools and the literacy movement to anyone interested in the history of literacy and education activism in the United States. Baldwin successfully traces the literacy movement through the broader context of American history and provides a new perspective on the social and political climate surrounding education reforms during the Progressive Era.