Book Review

Citizenship, Gender, and Urban Space in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Kriste Lindenmeyer
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Daphne Spain. How Women Saved the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. xi + 311 pp. Preface, maps, illustrations, notes, appendices, and index.  $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8166-3531-5.

Sarah Deutsch. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ix + 387 pp. Introduction, map, illustrations, notes, and index, $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-505705-8.

Gilded Age and Progressive Era historiography has long included works focused on the development of urban structures, economics, and politics, areas in which women were notably active. However, as Elisabeth Perry noted in her SHGAPE Presidential Address, and published in this issue, the historiography of the Progressive Era does not adequately reflect the important contributions made over the last twenty years by historians of women and gender. Perry suggests four strategies for changing this circumstance: a closer examination of the "meaning and consequences" of the woman suffrage movement, greater attention to moral reform efforts undertaken by women and their male allies, "a broadening of the term politics," and, "a more flexible periodization" for the Progressive Era.	1
The three books reviewed in this essay offer important new contexts for re-conceptualizing Progressive Era historiography consistent with Elisabeth Perry's recommendations. The authors incorporate broad definitions of politics encompassing a variety of reform efforts. Each also includes a "long view" of progressivism beginning in the late 1870s that stretched well into the 1930s.	2
Gayle Gullett details the successful fight for female suffrage in California from 1880-1911. She also suggests that the movement's success led to an unintentional post-victory legacy limiting women's political power. Daphne Spain cleverly uncovers the "places" women used to transform America's changing urban landscape through volunteer work in "redemptive" organizations. Sarah Deutsch draws a sophisticated picture of women's status in urban America by noting the physical, economic, and political "spaces" they occupied and sought to manipulate in Boston from 1870-1940. Each author's work reflects the influence of Robert Wiebe's classic Search for Order and other standards. But most important, Gullett, Spain, and Deutsch expand the understanding of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by outlining the inevitable struggles for  power and space that took place between and among men and women in this seminal period.1	. . .