Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940

by Sarah Deutsch

In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the women of Boston changed the city dramatically. From anti-spitting campaigns and demands for police mothers to patrol local parks, to calls for a decent wage and living quarters, women rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in Women and the City historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story for the first time, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city.
Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests. And in fact they succeeded in breathtaking fashion, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city, and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public, did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men.
A penetrating new work by a brilliant young historian, Women and the City is the first book to analyze women's role in shaping the modern city. It casts new light not only on urban history, but also on women's domestic lives, women's organizations, labor organizing, and city politics, and on the crucial connections between gender, space, and power.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published June 29, 2000

Reviews

[May]

Sarah Deutsch's Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (2000) examines the relationship between the physical organization of the city and the choices and strategies of different groups of women (3) by looking at women's centrality in constructing city spaces (4). Using Boston as a case study that represents a typical American city during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Deutsch's seven chapters follow elite, middle-class, working-class, white, and black women as they shaped and re-envisioned public space for their own goals and desires. Beginning in the "politics of everyday life," she shows how working-class women navigated home and family in ways that contradicted middle-class and elite desires, how middle-class and elite reformers elevated the middle-class home and domestic service to preserve their power and status, how the working girl carved out their own urban geography of peer-oriented safety and spaces, and how female petty entrepreneurs created their own semi-public, blurring of private and public spaces of their home and work within the city's geography. These conflicting views all shaped Boston's geography and public space to allow women to contest the limits placed upon their movement. From everyday life, Deutsch moves into women's organizing and institutionalizing efforts through class-bridging women's organizations, labor union organizing, and municipal and party politics. Throughout, she emphasizes the alliances necessary for success -- across class, race, and gender -- and the pitfalls of certain alliances (with men, women had to abide by men's view of womanhood) and the abandoning of allies (particularly, elite and middle-class rejection of working-class women postsuffrage). When women were successful, as seen in the case of the 1919 telephone workers strike, they had joined hands across class, racial/ethnic group, and sex boundaries. From the 1870s until 1940, women of all backgrounds, in their own ways, fought to legitimize public space for women, and then fought to claim legitimate political power.

Deutsch does a fantastic job in her analysis of white women across the class lines, bolstered by the sources she is able to access. Her use of case studies of women and organizations is particularly helpful. She also does not ignore black women's efforts in either the private or public realm, although she is hindered by a lack of sources that make her inclusion of black women appear more as an afterthought than a central player on the scene. Nevertheless, Deutsch uncovers the gendered ideology of urban space and the urban sexual geography in Boston and the long, slow process of women's work and contestation.

[Amee · Rating 4 out of 5]

boston history!