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Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940, New 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...