City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
by Christine Stansell
List Price:
Our Price: $20.99
You Save: $5.01 (19%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $1.50 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Christine StansellEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-09-01
ISBN: 0252014812
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Book Reviews of City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
Book Review: Working-class women upsetting notions of republicanism in early U.S. history
Summary: 5 Stars
(Edit: I meant to rate this book four stars, but was unable to change my rating after the fact...fie on you, Amazon!)
An important exploration of working-class women's positions in the urban landscape of the nineteenth century, in particular as it related to revolutionary and post-revolutionary ideals of republicanism. Stansell seeks to correct earlier histories, which cast female workers as "either feminine versions of working-class men or working-class versions of middle-class women," as victims who occasionally and inexplicably revolted, but were mostly passive.
Initially, the American ideology of republicanism was built upon independence; those that were dependent -- including women -- could thus not be complete citizens. Yet popular republicanism did create an imagery of motherhood, incorporating virtuous mothers educating their sons in republican values. Ultimately this imagery did not destabilize the patriarchy, but even at its prime it competed directly with working-class female imagery. While upper-class women were moral guardians, working women -- "refusing" to conform to bourgeois female notions of virtue -- were defeminized, and contributed directly to the creation of the "tenement classes," a source of both moral and physical contagion.
Laboring women had little distinction between the public and private spheres, unlike either laboring men or bourgeois women. "Their domestic lives spread out to the hallways of their tenements, to adjoining apartments and to the streets below. Household work involved them constantly with the milieu outside their own four walls ... It was in the urban neighborhoods, not the home, that the identity of working-class wives and mothers was rooted."
While a useful social history of white women and the class tensions that existed in New York, Stansell silences religious and ethnic tensions (black women are almost nonexistent in her book) and uses New York as an emblem of "industrialization" in a traditionally linear theory of progression toward "modernity." Nonetheless, an important work in U.S. urban history.
State & Local Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in State & Local Books
Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Storyby Timothy B. Tyson
Crown; Published: 2004-05-18; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $18.99
Price in other shops:
Downtown: My Manhattanby Pete Hamill
Little, Brown and Company; Published: 2004-12-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops:
Shallow Grave in Trinity Countyby Harry Farrell
St. Martin's Griffin; Published: 1999-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $42.89
Shadow of the Hunterby Richard K. Nelson
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 1983-04-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.99
Price in other shops:
Movie Anecdotesby Peter Hay
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1991-12-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.50
Price in other shops:
Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polkby William Dusinberre
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2007-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.00
Price in other shops:
Oh the Glory of It Allby Sean Wilsey
Penguin Audio; Published: 2005-05-19; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $7.99
Price in other shops:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Editionby Marc Reisner
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1993-01-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.95
Price in other shops:
Great Plainsby Ian Frazier
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1990-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.94
Price in other shops:
Disaster! The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906by Dan Kurzman
William Morrow & Company; Published: 2001-04; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $3.93
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Marketby Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press; Published: 2001-03-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $16.00
Price in other shops:
Evolution of American Urban Society, The (7th Edition)by Howard P. Chudacoff, Judith E. Smith, Peter C. Baldwin
Prentice Hall; Published: 2009-10-30; Paperback; Book
Best price: $62.54
Price in other shops:
Postindustrial Peasants: The Illusion of Middle-Class Prosperity (Contemporary Social Issues)by Kevin Leicht, Scott Fitzgerald
Worth Publishers; Published: 2006-08-18; Paperback; Book
Best price: $18.00
My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965 (Historical Studies of Urban America)by Becky M. Nicolaides
University Of Chicago Press; Published: 2002-05-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $25.34
Price in other shops:
Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Classby Jefferson R. Cowie
New Press, The; Published: 2010-09-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $17.53
Price in other shops:
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great Westby William Cronon
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 1992-05-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.96
Price in other shops:
Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History (Major Problems in American History Series)Wadsworth Publishing; Published: 2004-05-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $38.59
Price in other shops:
A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Vintage; Published: 1991-06-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.00
Price in other shops:
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940by George Chauncey
Basic Books; Published: 1995-05-19; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.99
Price in other shops:
A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837by Paul E. Johnson
Hill and Wang; Published: 2004-06-21; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops: