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Instead, women formed missionary societies to address all manner of local and international needs, from the support of job training in their communities to funding for African American missionaries to Africa. They worked on urban ills, established reading groups, and advocated for better living conditions. They also wrote for religious periodicals, promoting quite traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood, respectability, and racial uplift. Women also continued work among their less fortunate counterparts in the rural South, in what continued to be an uneasy alliance. Like male religious leaders, too, they protested the creeping effects of Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching.

Dr Lillian Herald South   Born:  January 31, 1879 Died:  September 13, 1966  A native of Warren County, KY, Lillian South exerted a powerful influence on Kentucky’s public health. She was born the daughter of a doctor, JF South and his wife Martha (nee Moore).  Lillian went to public school in Bowling Green and graduated with a BA degree from Potter College (at the present location of WKU) when she was only 18 years old.  She then traveled to Patterson, NJ, where she studied for two years for her RN degree in nursing. Having “aced” every course in nursing school, she decided to pursue a doctoral degree in medicine. After 5 years, she earned her MD degree  from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (1904). She returned to practice in Bowling Green, joining the successful practice of Dr J N McCormack and Dr A T McCormack. Two years later the three doctors established St Joseph Hospital in the South family home on (what is now) 12th Avenue. The home was re-built to accommodate 42 beds.  Just a few years later, in 1910, Dr South was appointed as state bacteriologist at the State Board of Health in Louisville, a position that she held for 40 years. In this capacity, she gained national recognition for her many years of research on hookworms, rabies, and leprosy in Kentucky. She is credited for virtually eradicating the once widely prevalent hookworm from the state, through public health campaigns to exterminate houseflies which are the vector. She also led the movement to ban the use of the public drinking cup.  Dr South was also very active in state and national organizations, and was the first woman to be elected vice president of the AMA (1914). She was an active member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Kentucky Medical Association, the Jefferson County Medical Society, and the Tri-County Medical Society.     [Note: the Warren County Medical Society was formerly called the Tri-County Medical Society].  She was president of the Association of Southern Medical Women, and councilor of the American Association of Medical Women.  Dr South traveled extensively to learn as much as she could about the science of medicine. She studied at Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, the Pasteur Lab in Paris, as well as the Madame Curie Radium Institute. She was a delegate to the International Hygiene Congress in Dresden, Germany, and to the Public Health Division of the League of Nations in Geneva, Switz.

Women'S Clubs are voluntary organizations that were originally formed by women who had been denied access to the major institutions of America's democratic civil society.

Working women formed working girls' clubs and small-town women formed civic improvement associations. In bigger cities, women organized citywide and neighborhood women's clubs and women's educational and industrial unions. Ethnic, church-based, African American, and settlement house women's clubs were founded across the country.

Although women continued to belong to literary, social, and charitable clubs, the majority of women's clubs organized after the Civil War had specific civic and political agendas. The specific purposes of each club differed according to the type of club and its stated purpose.