| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality. By Rhonda Y. Williams. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xiv, 306 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-19515890-3.)
In The Politics of Public Housing Rhonda Y. Williams takes a refreshingly new look at the contentious subject of public housing. Williams focuses on tenant lives rather than on architecture or misguided public policy. While acknowledging the impoverishment and marginalization of black women during World War II and postwar Baltimore, her study illuminates how over time public housing fit comfortably into the strategy of black and some white women for surviving the harsh reality of hyper-segregation and deindustrialization and the accompanying frequent dissolution of family life.	1
Williams, therefore, observes public housing from both a race and a gender perspective and examines the experience in the context of black women's struggle not only for basic shelter and respectability but also for empowerment. From this perspective public housing emerges, not as a physically sordid and socially isolated place of despair, but instead as a haven for black female activism.	. . .

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