Like many other northern clergymen after the Civil War, A. D. Mayo became interested in the role that education could play in rebuilding southern society. From 1880 to 1900 he traveled from Virginia to Texas as an educational missionary advocating the "new education" theories of the 1840s and 1850s. In time he came to be considered one of the most perceptive observers of southern education during the period from the end of Reconstruction to the rise of the Redeemer governments in the 1890s.

Mayo was convinced that the changes in southern society that Reconstruction had failed to bring about could be realized under a sound educational system. Learning, he believed, should be based on individual needs rather than on rote memorization of facts, and teachers should be recruited from those trained in the civilizing values. In Southern Women, Mayo set forth at length the ideas that southern white women were the ideal ones to transmit learning to the young blacks. Stressing the greatly expanding role of these women because of the war, Mayo saw them as a kind of elite trained in the ideals and culture of the Old South, but receptive to the values of the New South.

In their introduction Dan Carter and Amy Friedlander place Mayo in the context of nineteenth-century intellectual and social currents and provide an interesting perspective on his often surprisingly contemporary-sounding ideas on education.