| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Maureen A. Flanagan. Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 319. $35.00.
Maureen A. Flanagan argues that, for six decades, activist women of Chicago consistently advanced ideas for their city's development that differed radically from plans pushed by Chicago's men. Properly wary of writing in generalizations about "women," Flanagan limits her thesis instead to "activist women," whom she defines as active members, often leaders, of women's organizations. She insists that, despite differences of race, class, and ethnicity, the bonds of womanhood generally triumphed, meaning that women activists frequently shared a common female vision of what their city should be. Women's goals for Chicago went largely unrealized, she says, because Chicago men dismissed them out of hand. Even during the heyday of the Progressive era, men of Progressive bent, often seen as women's "natural allies," failed to share the female vision for the City Livable, according to Flanagan. Holding out for the City Profitable instead, masculine individualism carried the day.	1
Flanagan begins with the unremarkable response of a few women's groups to the Chicago fire. She intuits a causal relationship between the women's frustrating post-fire experiences and the proliferation of women's organizations. Each subsequent chapter depicts activist women growing bolder in their efforts to confront municipal problems. Female teachers' blatantly unfair treatment particularly energized activist women, who reacted against ideology that held women teachers unfit to influence financial or administrative policies that routinely underpaid them. Activists joined teachers in a campaign to place women on school boards and enact needed school reforms, but although ninety-eight percent of the teachers were women, this proposal ran headlong into "men's hostility and determination to retain control over the schools" (p. 63). Skirmishes over public schools predictably led women into other avenues of urban reform.	. . .

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