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Introduction One of the most-traveled roads in post–World War II America was the highway leading out of the city. Courted by realtors and dowered by Uncle Sam, millions of white- and blue-collar families moved out of their city apartments and bought single-family houses in the suburbs. Individually, they hauled furnishings and keepsakes; collectively, they shifted money and political power. The transfer of those collective resources exacerbated long-standing disparities within American society. It created a prosperous, racially segregated suburban world that left the fiscally burdened cities and their growing populations of color to fend for themselves. It produced zoning patterns that separated residential from public space, reinforcing the notion of “separate spheres” for women and men. And it made the American dream of homeownership a reality for so many that it became the norm, the putative foundation of good citizenship. By thus widening the divides of class, race, and gender, the postwar suburban exodus redrew America’s social map. But not everyone took the road out. Against the backdrop of suburban expansion , New York City’s tenant movement emerged as the leading voice for an alternative vision of residence and citizenship. For decades the city’s tenants had rallied against evictions and rent hikes. Now they raised the stakes by challenging the postwar nation’s newly dominant ideals of ownership, segregation , and domesticity. They insisted that renters as well as owners had rights to a stable home. They proposed that racially diverse urban communities had a right to remain in place—a right that outweighed owners’ prerogative to hike rent, redevelop property, or exclude tenants of color. And they showed that women could participate fully in the political arenas where these issues were fought out. In all these ways New York tenants laid claim to what Marxists have called “the right to the city,” a kind of democratic say over the uses of capital to shape the urban environment and the lives of its inhabitants.1 New York’s leadership in this struggle owed not just to its size but to its remarkable rate of tenancy. Renters outnumbered owners in every borough in 1940; citywide, the rental rate surpassed 84 percent.2 New York City, in fact, comprised more rental households than most states did households of any type.3 Even compared to Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, New York was distinguished by a preponderance of tenancy.4 Thus the city became the national capital of tenants’ rights and a kind of laboratory for considering what American society might be like if homeownership did not prevail. The tenant story brings out several understudied strands of postwar American history. One entails women’s roles in the Old and New Lefts. Historians have now punctured the popular misconception that civil rights and other upheavals of the sixties and seventies “materialize[d] out of thin air” after two quietist decades.5 In fact, recent scholarship shows, those movements were nourished by quite a few activists of Popular Front vintage who had courageously kept organizing through the early Cold War. Veteran socialists, Communists , peace advocates, and civil-rights organizers have begun to receive recognition for their steadfast labor behind the scenes.6 Much of the early scholarship in this field, however, focused on men. That is changing, as new studies have brought to light networks of women who played vital roles within midcentury labor and black left movements.7 This book adds to those studies. It reveals a cohort of leftist women who came of age during World War II and carried on for decades in defense of ordinary people’s right to decent housing. These women, in turn, served as exemplars for younger activists who developed a feminist consciousness in the 1960s and after. A second thread running through postwar tenant history is an ideological one concerning communities and rights. In popular memory the demand for “community control” in the urban setting is associated with racial polarization, most memorably during the Ocean Hill–Brownsville school crisis of 1968.8 Certainlymanyblack andwhiteNewYorkerswhodemandedcommunitycontrolof schools, housing, and other resources during the 1960s did define community along racial lines. But a substantial number of New York tenants who fought to preserve their homes in heterogeneous neighborhoods developed a distinctive concept of “community rights” that was not racially drawn. Like the “beloved community” heralded by Martin Luther King Jr., the community of urban neighbors offered hope that traditional social fault lines could be bridged.9 2 Introduction [18.221.187.121] Project MUSE...

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