Vision looms large in Maureen Flanagan's Seeing with their Hearts. The full title makes reference to it twice, and it provides the framework for each of the book's three parts. Between 1871 and 1933, Chicago's activist women crafted, expanded, and campaigned for their "vision of the good city." Their goals however, while different from that of male leaders, were those of substance not sentiment. The author describes a trajectory of women's involvement in the process of city-building that began with their voluntary work for the survivors of Chicago's Great Fire, continued through several Progressive Era reforms, and concluded in the post-suffrage decade. In the process, women developed a "culture of political activism" distinctly different from that of their male peers and "reconceptualized" city government's role "as directly providing for the welfare of its people" (59). Readers of U.S. women's political history will find familiar events and actors in this work. Yet, the book holds a broader significance for urban, political, and gender historians—to incorporate the intellectual and political work of women into the larger debates in urban history.

     Flanagan provides several examples of the cross-generational growth in women's political consciousness. Following the Chicago fire, women collaborated with the Chicago Relief and Aid Society until disagreements arose over the male-led Society's philosophy of worthiness. They found the Society's rules too pecuniary and disadvantageous to many women and children. Important female leaders, many of whom were married to Society leaders, left to start their own, independent, relief organizations. In the 1880s and 1890s, the Illinois Women's Alliance and the Chicago Women's Trade Union League accomplished cross-class coalitions unimagined in comparable organizations of men of the time. While far from perfect, they brought about improvements in labor laws, factory ordinances, school finances, and public health from which a wide swath of Chicagoans benefited. In the 1900s, proposals for public investment in housing frequently prioritized private property and assisted businesses to build homes. Alternatively, women reformers argued that rather than squeezing profits for builders out of labor, better wages for workers would allow them to secure better housing. Similarly, city governments could set priorities to raise standards of living even if that meant regulating private property rather than assisting business in the building of homes (93).