Tracing the multiple contexts through which African American women endured and subverted racialized poverty in postwar Philadelphia, Lisa Levenstein examines their efforts to create more responsive social welfare policies throughout the city's public institutions. She dismisses the “underclass” thesis, which diminishes African Americans' complex socioeconomic responses to the changing postwar urban paradigm, by framing working-class African American women as proactive agents, who pursued government assistance to support themselves and their families amid structural (namely deindustrialization and racial discrimination) and personal impediments consuming their lives. Levenstein chronicles African American women's daily struggles and their evolving relationships with various welfare and government agencies, initially focusing on their contentious encounters with state-administered welfare and judicial programs and then shifting her attention to their campaigns for greater access to better housing, healthcare, and educational facilities. Quietly engaged in key struggles with public institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, African American women mobilized not only to enhance their communal and familial conditions, but also to reshape the very foundations of institutional power and entitlements throughout Philadelphia's public entities.As working-class African American women fled the South's segregationist regime and ventured north in search of dignified employment opportunities in the 1940s and 1950s, they confronted myriad discriminatory patterns not only in Philadelphia's labor market, but also within its government-sponsored welfare programs. Levenstein notes that women questioned and challenged the restraints imposed on them by the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which assisted working-class women only after they had reached the nadir of their economic existence. Moreover, the ADC refused to support women who cohabitated with men, embracing the position that “women who lived with men should give up welfare and get married” (33). Combating the ADC's conservative handling of welfare assistance, African American women and mothers sought to overcome the program's institutional hurdles through various strategies to secure additional welfare funding, even as many worked domestic jobs and lived with male partners. Levenstein points out multiple scenarios in which women fought for increased financial aid from the ADC, as well as the careful balancing act they engaged in to remain on its institutional rolls: “Some viewed domestic work as particularly demeaning and saw little benefit in leaving ADC for jobs that yielded comparable or even lower income. Others insisted on obtaining more money than either welfare or low-wage jobs provided and earned income secretly … while receiving ADC” (32).African American women faced similar encumbrances within Philadelphia's judicial apparatus. The Philadelphia Municipal Court curbed women's access to increased financial support and trivialized domestic violence in African American households. Although women depended on the municipal court's assistance to sustain their families in the 1950s, Pennsylvania welfare officials instituted measures to prevent perceived abuses of the legal structure's benefits. Levenstein also finds that municipal judges dissuaded women from seeking legal recourse in domestic disputes and urged them to resolve their marital differences through other remedies, like domestic counseling. African American women responded to these gendered and state-driven impositions by choosing to press “charges only [when] they believed that legal authorities' strong support for male breadwinning would work in their favor” (86). In redefining the terms upon which the Philadelphia Municipal Court accommodated their needs, women safeguarded their privacy from further government intrusion while securing much-needed financial and protective assurances from state-administered welfare entities.Levenstein further contends that African American women confronted widespread class, gender, and racial barriers in Philadelphia's public housing system. They responded to this challenge by forging grassroots initiatives to combat entrenched discriminatory patterns. Following World War II, the NAACP and white liberal reformers compelled the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) to desegregate public housing sites, creating new opportunities for black families to secure residential toeholds. The NAACP and PHA envisioned public housing along class and gender lines, making appeals to two-parent African American households while restricting working-class, single mothers from the application process. Persistent efforts by working-class women eventually won them entry to public housing, however, and they fought to transform their living quarters into respectable domiciles reflective of their individual aesthetic tastes. Nonetheless, facing an ongoing backlash from middle-class whites who resented public housing projects in their communities, African American women still resided in predominantly impoverished and segregated neighborhoods and met resistance from housing officials about improving their facilities even as they asserted their rights in housing disputes.African American women, worried about pervasive discriminatory patterns and segregation measures in Philadelphia's public schools, also mounted campaigns against school administrators, officials, and white residents who deliberately subverted their children's educational aspirations. Disgusted by inadequate academic standards, the tracking system, and understaffed faculties, many women spoke with school administrators and teachers about their concerns. They addressed their children's academic development and even lobbied for school transfers, which ignited further racial schisms with middle-class whites, who removed their children to all-white schools or suburban school districts.To document African American women's socioeconomic milieu and their role in the struggle for civil rights in the “City of Brotherly Love” during the 1950s and 1960s, Levenstein employs government reports, African American and city newspapers, and oral histories. She also integrates compelling visual evidence and statistical tables into her analysis, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to explain African American women's everyday plights. In bringing together these materials, she unravels the multifaceted racial, judicial, and social dimensions of postwar African American migratory patterns while also examining postwar liberalism's strengths and limitations in response to the changing demographics of postwar Philadelphia. Moreover, Levenstein dissects the gendered meanings of these broader struggles within the African American community. Her incorporation of oral histories from women offers an invaluable lens for urban historians seeking to comprehend the complex interracial and intraracial tapestries through which African American women defined their lives.In giving a “voice” to the voiceless, Levenstein accentuates African American female agency and unveils the myriad strategies employed by working-class women to rearrange the terms upon which public institutions responded to their social and economic concerns. Although racial animosities pervaded the city, African American women could overcome the institutional and racial obstacles besieging them at every turn by crafting grassroots legal, domestic, and educational solutions to destabilize the structural boundaries keeping them marginalized. Levenstein's account affords urban scholars a better understanding of how African American women in Philadelphia altered their destinies amid unfolding racial turmoil in postwar America.