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

Sarah Deutsch (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195057058 | ISBN-13: 978-0195057058 | Publication Date: June 29, 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Women and the City: Gender, Power, and Space in Boston, 1870-1940, Sarah Deutsch examines the relationship between the city's evolving structure and the choices and strategies of various groups of women. Her study follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons as they struggled to shape the city to meet their respective needs. In succeeding, they redefined the moral geography of the city, and broadened Deutsch's own opportunities many decades later.

Deutsch orders her study topically. The first four chapters examine the politics of everyday life, showing how the daily lives and domestic spaces of women were intimately connected to the sorts of claims they made in and on public arenas. Her final three chapters follow women as they organize and institutionalize their efforts, demonstrating the complex ways in which the relationship between women and the public terrain is specific to class, ethnicity, and historical moment. As the book makes clear, space "does not have independent agency." Its meaning and power are determined by how groups of people organize their social, political, and economic interactions. For the women of Boston, the ability to lay claim to certain types of space and the power to shape place were crucial to meeting their basic needs.

A promising young historian from the University of Arizona, Deutsch breaks new ground in her analysis of women's role in shaping the modern city. Her thoroughly researched study makes frequent reference to individual biography, while illustrating a firm understanding of Boston history. Although her enthusiasm for detail and third-person narrative often obscures her larger claims, Women and the City clearly illustrates the ability of women to negotiate the urban terrain on their own terms. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack

From Publishers Weekly

Until now, the history of cities has largely focused on the ways in which men have influenced the urban environment. When women are mentioned--usually as menial workers or prostitutes--they are usually rendered as exerting little or no influence on the physical cityscape. In this important and absorbing study, Deutsch, an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona, shows the myriad ways women of all classes, ethnicities and social positions radically transformed Boston from a city that regulated and curtailed women's lives to one where they enjoyed not only more freedom but some power as well. Drawing on a wide range of sources--public and private employment data, settlement house and church registries, reform and labor movement files and building and tax records--Deutsch demonstrates how organizing, gaining access to education and working in alternative and mainstream political venues led Boston women to create community networks, safe streets and public venues to advance female independence. She also documents a number of women-led strikes--from Irish telephone operators seeking higher wages to Jewish women demanding lower prices for kosher meat--and chronicles the efforts of women like Edith Gurrier and her lover, Edith Brown, who created a worker-run pottery collective that trained working-class women in both industry and business. As comprehensive as it is engrossing, Deutsch's work is a vital contribution to both women's history and urban studies. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (June 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195057058
• ISBN-13: 978-0195057058
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #877,011 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great women's history, January 12, 2005

By 

Carter Jefferson (Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women and the City: Gender, Power, and Space in Boston, 1870-1940 (Hardcover)

Not only the legal status but the personal outlooks of women changed immeasurably
in the period this book covers; the subtitle speaks of space and power, but Deutsch
has also given us a fine overview of intellectual change: what women thought, and
why they thought in those ways, during an era of astonishing industrial and social
development. Through her research, we can see why the women of Henry James
were not the same as those of F. Scott Fitzgerald--and they were very different.

We are used to sympathizing with the plight of working class women, and giving
great credit to the founders of the settlement houses and political groups that helped
them, but until now I had never realized how class differences affected attitudes, and
how perfectly reasonable women of either set found great difficulty in
understanding how those of the other thought and felt. This book has helped me get
a better understanding of both groups.

In recent months I've been reading heavily in Boston history and in women's history
of this period. This book is far and away the best thing I've found. Having done
historical research using primary sources, I can tell you this author has done an
immense amount of work, and it has paid off. She uses not only the minutes of
meetings and legal reports, but personal letters and contemporary novels to tell the
story. She writes clearly, and the book is well organized. If you want a real feel for
the lives of women during a period of tremendous change, this book is the best place
I know to get it. Deutsch straightens out a lot of misconceptions, and helps to clarify
an extremely complex period.

5.0 out of 5 stars Adds depth to the history of a great city, May 8, 2007

By 

Jane W. Elioseff (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (Paperback)

Hard to know where to start praising this wonderful book. Chapter after chapter, Sarah Deutsch tosses off insights like a dog shaking water off its back. For historians coming up behind her, there is a thesis idea on virtually every page. In a section entitled "Protegees, Politics, and Class (1909-1931)," Deutsch identifies political partisanship and patronage networks as the kind of disruptive or countervailing forces that now, as then, may skew news reporting and divide individuals who might otherwise work together for a social good. An example: "When the headlines blared, 'Women Republicans Opposed [the appointment of] Miss Meehan,' women Republicans insisted that the issue, instead, was nonpartisanship. Meehan's was not the only patronage case being disputed after a decade of Republican hegemony so strong that the party's members had forgotten it was a party and not a nonpartisan organization. The women (and the fewer men) involved in the dispute deployed the language of expertise, political hackery, and gender to make their case. Meehan's supporters spoke, in addition, the language of class and party." Women and the City also has an excellent index.