Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives by Natalie A. Naylor

Abstract

Book Reviews 125 and direct action tactics from Italy to the United States, to their children, who would embrace labor reformism. The Red Scare profoundly changed the Italian American experience as many learned to cling to white racial privilege and the entitlement it carried as a means to gain economic stability and legitimacy as Americans. This evolution is a particularly interesting narrative in understanding the rise of American conservatism and raises a couple of compelling questions: Where did this radical spirit go with the rise of the Cold War? Did the grandchildren of these immigrants join the New Left later in the century? But these are not questions Guglielmo attempts to address rather she highlights the role Italian women had in American radical labor activism. She argues that the value of this history comes not only from understanding immigrant women’s radicalism but that cross-racial, class, and ethnic organizing was once a virtue among American workers and the recent abandonment of it has doomed the entire American working class. Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives. By Natalie A. Naylor. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2012, 192 pages, $19.99 Paper. Reviewed by Christine Neejer, Michigan State University Women in Long Island’s Past: A History of Eminent Ladies and Everyday Lives could have easily been a dry account of elite women’s activities. Natalie A. Naylor avoids such a pitfall and instead assembles an engaging collection of biographies that encourage us to rethink Long Island women’s connections to local and national historical narratives. Naylor positions women at the center of her local framework, allowing readers to see significant historical events, such as the American War for Independence and the fight for women’s suffrage, through the perspective of Long Island women. Naylor also uses her work to challenge male-normative practices of local history. She argues that historians of Long Island have downplayed or ignored women, assuming men’s experiences alone tell the region’s story. Naylor does not aim to discount the significance of men’s experiences, but 126 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY rather encourage readers to rethink what counts as significant and to recognize the value in studying the ordinary. Naylor uses a variety of sources, including newspapers and local histories , to engage in two projects. First, she brings the stories of famous women into the history of Long Island. She devotes chapters on the First Ladies, wealthy philanthropists, and business innovators who had ties to the area or used their influence to improve it. Naylor pays particular attention to the arts, highlighting women novelists, painters, and architects who were influenced by and worked on Long Island. Secondly, she unearths the lives of women who never achieved fame or significant attention from historians. Naylor’s work shines in this respect. She uses the lives of everyday women to illustrate how Long Island women were not resigned to the domestic sphere but actively engaged in community life throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They established schools, administered medical care, coordinated women’s clubs and activist campaigns, and hosted meaningful community events among many other activities. The book makes a particularly striking historiographical addition to the study of women in science and technology. Naylor discusses lesser known women such as Elizabeth Shoemaker, the first in a line of Long Island women who served as lighthouse keepers starting in the 1820s, and Joan Druett, one of many nineteenth-century ‘sister sailors’ who assisted in navigation and medical care on whaling and merchant ships. One of the most striking historiographical additions of the book is Naylor’s discussion of Long Island women’s role in the history of flight. With few mountains or trees, the Hempstead Plains were an ideal training ground for this new technology. Naylor explores the history of Long Island women pilots in depth, including Harriet Quimby, who in 1911 became the first woman to earn a pilot’s license and Amelia Earhart’s famous Ninety-Nines organization . Naylor expands this analysis to World War II with her engaging discussion of women such as Jackie Cochran, one of 1,100 women who served as test pilots. Naylor represents a...