City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860

City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
by Christine Stansell

City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
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Book Summary Information

Author: Christine Stansell
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); 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.
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