Gender and Urban Development in "The City of Big Shoulders," 1871-1933

Maureen A. Flanagan. Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1877-1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. xiv + 319 pp. Figures, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00

On October 8 and 9, 1871, a fire that had started at a barn, belonging to Patrick and Catherine O'Leary near their home on 137 DeKoven Street, ravaged an area of Chicago four miles in length and three-quarters of a mile in width, encompassing much of the commercial heart of the city and the residential North Division. The fire caused the death of three hundred Chicagoans, destroyed the homes of nearly a third of the city's population, and resulted in property damages approximating two hundred million dollars. ¹

Apocalyptic fears that the fire had wreaked havoc both on the built environment and on the city's social fabric were widespread in the aftermath of the blaze. Yet amid the ruins, predictions of the inevitability of the city's rebuilding and expansion emerged. Making room for the rebuilding of substantial portions of the city, the fire came to be seen as a blessing that had come in a terrible disguise. Chicagoans spoke about the fire both in terms of grave dangers and tremendous opportunities for the city and its people. Boosters, city planners, architects, philanthropists, urban developers and their visions, have figured prominently in these narratives. ² In her book, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of The Good City, 1871-1933, Maureen Flanagan suggests that the 1871 fire inaugurated a new era in struggles over municipal politics. She maintains that gendered notions of the city and of the purposes of urban development stood at the center of such debates.

Whereas male political and business elites perceived the occasion as an opportunity for economic growth and development, Flanagan argues that Chicago women advanced a "vision of the city that promoted a concept of urban life and good government rooted in social justice, social welfare, and responsiveness to the everyday needs of all the city's residents" (p. 5). These women had a "gendered vision of the city . . . with an underlying premise of the correct nature and purpose of municipal government that often contradicted and sometimes profoundly threatened the male vision of the profitable cit564y in which the purpose of government was to foster and protect male economic desires" (p. 195).

Flanagan's book intervenes in debates over the nature of urban development and women's contribution to it. Historians have shown that women formulated political alternatives and created social spaces outside the realms of men. Recent studies on women, politics and its urban contexts, such as Sarah Deutsch's Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (2000); Gayle Gullett's Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880-1911 (2000); Sandra Harsaager's Organized Womanhood: Cultural Politics in the Pacific Northwest (1997); Judith McArthur's Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women's Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918 (1998); Anne Meis Knupfer's Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women's Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (1996); and Priscilla Murolo's The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girl's Clubs, 1884-1928 (1997) have demonstrated how urban women of different class, race, and ethnic backgrounds have created social and political outlets of their own. Such spaces enabled women to articulate their ideas and visions of a better society. Yet, Flanagan points out that "how urban women and their organizations were contesting for political power in the city and seeking to reshape both the city and its government" has not been sufficiently investigated (p. 5).

Building on the work of scholars, such as Paula Baker, William Chafe, and Sarah Evans in particular, who have argued that Progressive-era women created...