:Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880–1940

Abstract

This book challenges established paradigms in urban history, women's history, and western American history. Lee M. A. Simpson argues persuasively, if not always conclusively, that women were important participants in California's “growth machine,” a coalition of land-based business elites and local politicians working to increase property values through city development. Simpson's contributions are twofold. She shows that women played significant roles in the activities of the growth machine and that the work of that machine, “instead of harming the majority of the population … made possible a wide range of economic policies designed to enhance quality of life as well as overall wealth” (p. 2). Simpson begins by looking at women as property owners and business people in developing urban centers. From what Simpson calls an “apprenticeship” in property owning and managing, middle-class women moved increasingly into public affairs, blurring lines separating private from public spheres. They adopted a capitalistic frame of mind aimed at protecting property and increasing returns from their investments. Women's clubs, Simpson shows, were especially important in providing “a forum in which women could create a coalition designed to enhance the overall wealth of the city” (p. 40). Women also became involved in the work of chambers of commerce, either as members on their own or as members of women's auxiliaries. Simpson concludes that this engagement “suggests that in California men and women shared a vision of city growth that was designed to enhance business, social, recreational and spiritual opportunities” (p. 79). Club and chamber work in turn led women into urban politics and into deep involvement in various forms of urban planning, ranging from beautification projects to more comprehensive planning work and to nascent zoning efforts. Simpson presents convincing portraits of the important, often leading, roles women took in several cities, most notably Santa Barbara, in concerted efforts to stimulate urban growth. In the most original chapters of her study, Simpson offers a reappraisal of gender roles in planning. For California women, much more than urban housekeeping was at stake in improving their cities. Economic growth in a time of fierce intercity rivalry was the name of the game.