Women and the City

Gender, Power, and Space in Boston, 1870-1940

Sarah Deutsch author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

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Women and the City cover

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 of Boston, 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 analyse 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.

"As comprehensive as it is engrossing, Deutsch's work is a vital contribution to both women's history and urban studies."--Publisher's Weekly "If space truly is the historian's final frontier, then Sarah Deutsch is a pioneer among pioneers. Bringing together insights from geography, cultural studies, and feminist theory, Women and the City is a bona fide masterpiece in urban history. Whether she is talking about the way sexuality is racialized, the critical role of domestic workers for white women's autonomy, or the problems of labor organizing across ethnic lines, Deutsch finds in the daily struggles over the urban terrain the myriad ways women reconceptualized the city."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class "Sarah Deutsch has written a wonderfully complex chronicle of Boston's diverse women. The beauty of this book is its combination of demonstrating women's agency in seizing and defining their own political and social space in Boston, and the deep racial and class divisions that made these women as often contestants as allies in defining this new space. A brilliantly researched and compelling description of the difference that difference makes."--William H. Chafe, author of Civilities and Civil Rights and Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism "Taking a bird's eye view of Boston, Sarah Deutsch newly discerns its moral, material and social geographies and with revisionist flair draws the lines of power and possibility visible in its residents' class positioning and gender attributes. Her vivid narrative of the jockeyings, frustrations, triumphs and compromises of three generations of women making Boston's history bring the human landscape of the city to life."--Nancy Cott, author of The Grounding of Modern Feminism and The Bonds of Womanhood: 'Woman's Sphere' in New England, 1780 1835 "A detailed history of how Boston women gained space and leadership in the public sphere between the Civil War and 1940...[T]races the development of women's clubs and associations, settlement houses, labor organizing, employment, and political activism."--Library Journal "[T]he epitome of inclusiveness...[A]n essential work."--CHOICE

ISBN: 9780195057058

Dimensions: 157mm x 236mm x 36mm

Weight: 737g

400 pages