Book Review

Canada and the United States

Roger Williams, in an account of the Narragansett Indians published in 1636, reported that in Narragansett society, "The women bring in all the increase of the field, etc. the Husband only fisheth, hunteth, etc." That women's labor creates wealth was news to this scholarly Englishman, and Elizabeth York Enstam finds that it is still news to some today. Her work, addressed primarily to urban historians, sets out to demonstrate how women contributed to the development of American urban society using Dallas, Texas as a case study. The case-study approach, with its rhetoric of replicability, holds some traps. Dallas is sometimes described as typical of other cities and participating in national trends (p. 64), but at other times Enstam suggests that Dallas was not typical. This is a minor and seemingly unavoidable dilemma of community studies.

1

Enstam's book belongs to that group of works by practitioners of women's history who have labored over the last decades to identify female contributions that went unrecognized by contemporaries and subsequently by historians as well. Enstam painstakingly documents women's work in the frontier households of the 1840s and 1850s, the paid workforce of the "young commercial city" of the late nineteenth century, and the service and manufacturing economy of the early twentieth century. In the process, she uncovers the activities of women's clubs and reform organizations, finding a rich associational history of women's voluntary organizations at the turn of the century that performed another kind of "work": that of community-building. Along the way, there are some interesting portraits of individual women whose careers shaped Dallas history, such as Carrie Marcus Neiman, co-founder of the firm Neiman-Marcus, and journalist Isadore Callaway ("Pauline Periwinkle").

. . .