Customer Reviews

Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933

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In doing research for a paper concerning the relief efforts after the Chicago Fire of 1871, I was led to this book in the bibliography of another book. I was interested in discovering who helped those that were not particularly assisted by the Relief and Aid Society. This book has been very helpful in seeing the role of the women of the city in the relief effort toward those who fell through the bureaucratic cracks in the system established by the Relief and Aid society. While the Society had a particular and important agenda, the women saw the needs of those around them in a more personal light. This book shows how women created organizations to try to meet the needs they saw beyond what they could do individually. It shows the women of the time wanting to make a better city.

The book is written by Maureen A. Flanagan, the department chair and professor of history at Illinois Institute of Technology. She is a leading expert on Chicago history. The book was published by Princeton University Press in 2002, so it is relatively new. The Chicago Historical Society was used heavily for the research of primary sources. This has made the bibliography in the book a great help to me in finding primary sources for my own paper.

Seeing With Their Hearts is very readable. It covers the efforts of meeting the needs of the poor in Chicago in the late 19th into the early 20th century. It would be a useful read for anyone interested in Chicago history, particularly its social history, or the history of women.