This biography recounts the life of a Southern citizen activist whose career of social advocacy extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil-rights movement. Born in 1879 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, into a German-Jewish family with antebellum southern roots, Weil was a cosmopolitan in a provincial society. Graduating from Smith College, she returned to Goldsboro and joined the Women's Club movement where as “Federation Gertie” she advocated for women's rights and against the exploitation of child and woman millworkers. As president of the state women's suffrage league, she fought but ultimately failed to win ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1920 she became founding president of the North Carolina League of Women Voters, using it as base for progressive social legislation. In the Depression years, she worked for labor rights and poverty relief. Weil was both a Southern Lady, holding traditional social values, and a New Woman, forging a public career in the civic marketplace. An observant Reform Jew, she inherited from her mother a commitment to Zionism. Active in organizations dedicated to world peace and internationalism, she abandoned her pacifism in World War II and worked to save her German family from the Holocaust. Her last crusade, prior to her death in 1971, was in support of black civil rights.
