How Women Saved the City

The traditional view of ""women's work"" has placed it within the boundaries of the home, but in this important treatise, Spain argues that women have been transforming America's urban landscape for more than 100 years. A professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia, Spain focuses on the activities of women in urban spaces following the Civil War, when immigrant populations dramatically increased in the Northern states as Southern blacks fled the Reconstruction, and Europeans, Irish and Russians left their depressed economies. While men built skyscrapers and remolded the face of industrial commerce, it was the women who attended to the ""municipal housekeeping,"" making cities safe and welcoming for their inhabitants, she points out. Without such women as Jane AddamsDthe founding mother of social work, whose volunteer-staffed ""settlement house"" in one of Chicago's most impoverished neighborhoods helped give immigrants a fighting chanceDcities would have collapsed under their own chaotic growth, she posits. Focusing on the YWCA, the Salvation Army and several other organizations, Spain charts the rise of volunteer and settlement movements in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and New York as well as in smaller Midwestern cities. Though highly academic in tone, this exhaustively researched book is a must-read for those interested in women's studies and urban planning. 73 b&w photos; six maps. (Dec. 31)