Review: A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950, by Marta Gutman

Abstract

Marta Gutman A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, 454 pp., 130 b/w illus. $45 (cloth), ISBN 9780226311289 Apart from its origins during the California Gold Rush, Oakland was similar to other small American cities during the mid-nineteenth century. In step with the rest of the nation, California was becoming industrialized and urbanized. The state's progress relied heavily on immigrant labor, but white Protestants resented the presence of the Chinese, Irish Catholics, and African Americans who built the infrastructure needed for growth. Immigrants and blacks lived in the worst parts of the cities they helped create, and their children suffered the consequences. Municipal governments had neither the inclination nor the budgets to fund the necessary services, so women volunteers filled the void. In A City for Children , Marta Gutman explores how charitable institutions housed in repurposed buildings attempted to replace “damaged” childhoods with “good” ones. She documents in meticulous detail the buildings and spaces that the women of Oakland created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to take care of kids. Children of working mothers needed places to learn and play, and children who had lost one or both parents needed shelter. Working through voluntary associations, middle-class Protestant and Catholic women transformed existing buildings into nurseries and kindergartens, orphan asylums, schools, playgrounds, and a settlement house. These institutions constituted the “charitable landscapes” (note the plural) mentioned in the subtitle. A map on page 26 locating sixteen such places in Oakland around 1910 is one of 130 illustrations of children, buildings, and floor plans that enrich the book. Gutman relies on archived oral histories, fieldwork, and personal interviews to reveal …