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

Abstract

In the 70 years between the Civil War and World War II, the 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, rich and poor, white and black, immigrant and native-born struggled to make a place for themselves in the city. Now, in this text, historian Sarah Deutsch tells this story, revealing how they changed not only the manners but also the physical layout of the modern city. Deutsch shows how the of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women, to a city where 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 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 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 and with men. The book analyzes women's role in shaping the modern city. It sheds light not only on urban history, but also on women's domestic lives, women's organizations, labour organizing, and city politics, and on the crucial connections between gender, space, and power.