A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (review)

Think about how much skill it takes to survive poverty. Poor people have the same needs as everyone else for shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and legal representation. But they don't have the money to buy them. Instead, they have to learn a complicated map of where help is located. The map, and the sources of assistance it locates, differs across time with shifts in demography, institutions, and urban form. In early twentieth century cities it was quite different from the map at the century's end when the balance between public and private had tilted in the direction of public provision. In 2000, the state, in theory at least, offered an array of benefits undreamed of in 1900 or 1910. These benefits, however, like the looser structure of charity in earlier times, often remained hedged with conditions and permeated with disdain for the people who used them. Negotiating through the late twentieth century's bureaucratic maze and extracting the benefits to which one was supposedly entitled required tough-minded persistence. How African American women in Philadelphia learned and navigated the city's institutional map between the end of World War II and the early 1960's is the subject of Lisa Levenstein's remarkable book, A Movement Without Marches.

Most histories of public policies and institutions – indeed, most contemporary social science – focus narrowly, if deeply, on singular topics such as schools, courts, housing, welfare, or hospitals. As excellent and important as many of these studies are, they truncate lived experience by missing the map with which people navigate in their day-to-day lives and not tracing the complex and multiple refractions of institutional encounters in individual lives. This constricted vision is what Levenstein eschews as she walks readers through the institutional world of poor African American women.

Levenstein decisively rejects theories that root poverty in culture, learned dependency, or loose morals. Her subjects are smart, savvy, determined women trapped in poverty on account of racism, gender roles, segregation, low quality educations, and the lack of remunerative work. One of Levenstein's key insights is that poverty is multidimensional - a point that cannot be emphasized too strongly. Poverty for her is also racialized and gendered. For a host of familiar reasons, African-Americans have found themselves disproportionately poor. But the reasons for and the experience of poverty among African-Americans have differed in part by gender.

Historians conventionally root militancy among African American women in the 1960s, notably in the National Welfare Rights Movement. Levenstein shows convincingly that the story begins two decades earlier as African American women challenged public institutions, sometimes winning concessions, sometimes losing, but, in the process, building a sense of entitlement or, what other writers might call a distinctive conception of social citizenship. "Struggling with various combinations of low wages, poor health, joblessness, inadequate housing, and domestic violence," in the 1950s and early 1960s many women "joined a 'movement without marches': the assertive pursuit of resources from public institutions initiated by low-income African-American women.… [who] asserted a deeply rooted set of ideas about the responsibility of the state to provide them with basic resources and protections. The cumulative effect of their interactions with these institutions transformed the culture and political economy of modern urban life, altering the landscape of cities and the configuration of state policies and modern racial politics." (4)

The core of A Movement Without Marches consists of five chapter-length case studies: ADC, the municipal court, public housing, public education, and Philadelphia General Hospital. "Of all the public institutions in postwar Philadelphia," Levenstien observes, "PGH commanded the most widespread public respect and support for the services that it provided to the poor." (158-9) The chapters share a common structure. They begin with a detailed institutional portrait that stresses the pervasive racial and gender bias in how institutions worked. The remaining sections focus on the interactions...