Book Review

Canada and the United States

Scholarship of the past three decades has made persuasive arguments about women's transformational roles in shaping American culture. Through their voluntary groups, early forays into professions, and sheer numbers in the industrial workplace beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, we now know that women of all socioeconomic backgrounds effected great change despite their political and economic marginaliztion. Sarah Deutsch breaks new ground by offering convincing evidence of how women shaped American life in a literally more concrete way: by actually changing the physical layout of the city (in this case, Boston) in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Deutsch offers compelling evidence that women were hardly passive victims of urbanization but rather were themselves active urban planners, as they opened voluntary organizations and businesses in the heart of the male-dominated city, started playgrounds and settlement houses, boldly strode across assumed gender lines into public spaces, and generally shaped much of Boston to fit their interests. "The increasing ability of women to negotiate the urban terrain on their own terms was not a mere by-product of some relentless process called 'modernization,'" Deutsch argues, but rather "resulted from the determination of individuals and organized groups to redesign the city for their own purposes" (p. 284).

1

Deutsch finds that Boston, in the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, offers an insightful laboratory for the study of women's activism, for it typified, among other factors, the "female majority, expanding boundaries, a relatively large female labor force, numerous female associations, ethnic and racial diversity, and political struggles between Yankee reformers and immigrant or ethnic political machines" (p. 4). Historians traditionally have not mined women's proactive roles in the bricks-and-mortar shaping of urban geography and Deutsch tackles a large subject. Her polished, well-crafted, impeccably documented study is built on countless examples of women's everyday lives, as she shows how women "reconceived" the city and "challenged the dominant idealized sexual division" (p. 4).

. . .