Women and the city: gender, space, and power in Boston, 1870-1940

Abstract

Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940, York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000. In Women and the City, Sarah Deutsch demonstrates once and for all the agency of women in an urban landscape. By digging into a wide variety of sources, ranging from individual women's personal papers and records of women's organizations to novels and newspaper accounts, Deutsch peoples the city of Boston from 1870 to 1940 with women actively seeking control over their own spaces. The author was diligent in her efforts to tell the story from the points of view of women in different social and economic classes and ethnic groups. Although she describes activities and events when the interests of these various women intersected, she did not neglect their individual stories. Deutsch's excavations turn the traditional male-oriented view of Boston on its head. Women occupy the streets; run social agencies; demand equal rights, higher pay, and access to public office; work in a variety of industries; run dressmaking and milliners shops, boarding houses, and kitchen barrooms; rent art and music studios, and live on their own outside of traditional families. Although Deutsch does not equate space with power, she surely demonstrates that women's needs and demands were included in the economic and social equation that led to shifts in Boston's power structure. In some cases women contested their shared space. Young working-class women demanded their own spaces early on. They preferred factory and shop work to live-in domestic service. Their goal was to live on their own and they preferred boarding houses and inexpensive public restaurants to working girls homes run by women's organizations. Middle class and elite women with maternalist goals were more concerned about the moral than the physical safety of young women and believed that domestic service provided a safe space for young women (They also needed servants). On the other hand, middleclass women who were social service investigators found that more unwed mothers came from domestic service than from industrial work, but neglected to take the next step of looking at the exploitation of servants as a cause. At the turn of the twentieth century, a new group of women, called the New Woman, chose a different kind of space. They were single self-supporting women who lived in pairs or groups, sometimes in settlement houses, and worked as teachers or pioneered in such new professions open to women as librarianship and social work. Among the new women were also petty entrepreneurs. In 1900, Deutsch points out that women headed more than half of the lodging and boarding houses and almost all of the millinery and dressmaking shops. These businesses were risky, many short-lived, but they represented women's efforts to secure space in the urban landscape. The author delves in detail into the work of activist women who created women's organizations with goals of changing the city. Among them were the Women's Educational and Industrial Union and Denison House, a settlement house. …