Customer Reviews

City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Chritine Stansell has captured and vividly illuminated the lives of working women of the Industrial Revolution in NYC. I have studied this book for two classes and am sorry that I had not come across it sooner. If you are interested in the youth culture and the ways that a culture of single women emerged, this is a great book. If you are interested in the ways that working women handled themselves against the burden of the middle class genteel precepts, read this book. If you want a factual yet compelling picture of a history of women that is free from bias, check this out! City of Women details the lives of these women in a way that empowers and reveals truths that have long been hidden from America's full historical picture.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, women began to experience their first taste of autonomy. Although women were finding a role in the American workplace and society there were not many options for them. As part of the struggle to escape poverty in New York City, prostitution became an increasingly viable choice for girls with out other alternatives. Historian Christine Stansell states, "It was both an economic and a social option, a means of self-support and a way to bargain with men in a situation where a living wage was hard to come by, and holding one's own in heterosexual relations was difficult." This book deals with women in the factories as well as the working girls. Easy to read and very informative.

Written during a time of rapid expansion in the study of women's history, "City of Women" maintains a focus on women that is both rewarding and problematic. While her portryal gives voice to a group of women who before had none, it also creates a dichotomy that labels virtually every man mentioned in her book as pernicious and/or sinister, and her women as the constant victims of their hegemony and terror. As a result, we are left with an incomplete portrait of New York working-class society. Proto-feminists are rewarded while those women who cause no problems are largely ignored. It is here that Stansell particularly differs from Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, who championed the cause of the ordinary Puritan woman in "Good Wives." Stansell's conflict theory leads the reader with no comprehension of ordinary interaction between the sexes; only rape, murder, and other heinous crimes. In the end, neither her women or her men are redeemed.

Nonetheless "City of Women" is a must-read for gender historians, and should be read carefully, with its flaws taken into account and understood partly as product of the politics of its time.

(Edit: I meant to rate this book four stars, but was unable to change my rating after the fact...fie on you, Amazon!)

An important exploration of working-class women's positions in the urban landscape of the nineteenth century, in particular as it related to revolutionary and post-revolutionary ideals of republicanism. Stansell seeks to correct earlier histories, which cast female workers as "either feminine versions of working-class men or working-class versions of middle-class women," as victims who occasionally and inexplicably revolted, but were mostly passive.

Initially, the American ideology of republicanism was built upon independence; those that were dependent -- including women -- could thus not be complete citizens. Yet popular republicanism did create an imagery of motherhood, incorporating virtuous mothers educating their sons in republican values. Ultimately this imagery did not destabilize the patriarchy, but even at its prime it competed directly with working-class female imagery. While upper-class women were moral guardians, working women -- "refusing" to conform to bourgeois female notions of virtue -- were defeminized, and contributed directly to the creation of the "tenement classes," a source of both moral and physical contagion.

Laboring women had little distinction between the public and private spheres, unlike either laboring men or bourgeois women. "Their domestic lives spread out to the hallways of their tenements, to adjoining apartments and to the streets below. Household work involved them constantly with the milieu outside their own four walls ... It was in the urban neighborhoods, not the home, that the identity of working-class wives and mothers was rooted."

While a useful social history of white women and the class tensions that existed in New York, Stansell silences religious and ethnic tensions (black women are almost nonexistent in her book) and uses New York as an emblem of "industrialization" in a traditionally linear theory of progression toward "modernity." Nonetheless, an important work in U.S. urban history.

Best way to buy college textbooks! This vendors product was right on the money and I can't believe I haven't been buying my books like this all along.

Ok, this was assigned reading for a class, one of a dozen books to read for a history class. Of that dozen, this was the most difficult boring read in the bunch. The subject is very interetsing, the writing was very poor. I mentioned the poor writing to the professor who said not everyone wrote like Barbara T.
How true. Unfortunately, I could not find another book on the subject that was embracing of the area of woman's life in the period between the end of the revolution and the begining of the civil war.
I found no mention of the chatel placement of women in divorce or the legal rights of women, especially as toward their ownership of property. I think this was a big lack, as it explained many of the problems the author wrote about in the book.

Not reccomended for use as a text in classes. Reccomended for reading in bed.