Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.