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

Tracing the multiple contexts through which African American women endured and subverted racialized poverty in postwar Philadelphia, Lisa Levenstein examines their efforts to create more responsive social welfare policies throughout the city's public institutions. She dismisses the "underclass" thesis, which diminishes African Americans' complex socioeconomic responses to the changing postwar urban paradigm, by framing working-class African American women as proactive agents, who pursued government assistance to support themselves and their families amid structural (namely deindustrialization and racial discrimination) and personal impediments consuming their lives. Levenstein chronicles African American women's daily struggles and their evolving relationships with various welfare and government agencies, initially focusing on their contentious encounters with state-administered welfare and judicial programs and then shifting her attention to their campaigns for greater access to better housing, healthcare, and educational facilities. Quietly engaged in key struggles with public institutions in the 1950s and 1960s, African American women mobilized not only to enhance their communal and familial conditions, but also to reshape the very foundations of institutional power and entitlements throughout Philadelphia's public entities.

As working-class African American women fled the South's segregationist regime and ventured north in search of dignified employment opportunities in the 1940s and 1950s, they confronted myriad discriminatory patterns not only in Philadelphia's labor market, but also within its government-sponsored welfare programs. Levenstein notes that women questioned and challenged the restraints imposed on them by the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) program, which assisted working-class women only after they had reached the nadir of their economic existence. Moreover, the ADC refused to support women who cohabitated with men, embracing the position that "women who lived with men should give up welfare and get married" (33). Combating the ADC's conservative handling of welfare assistance, African American women and mothers sought to overcome the program's institutional hurdles through various strategies to secure additional welfare funding, even as many worked domestic jobs and lived with male partners. Levenstein points out multiple scenarios in which women fought for increased financial aid from the ADC, as well as the careful balancing act they engaged in to remain on its institutional rolls: "Some viewed domestic work as particularly demeaning and saw little benefit in leaving ADC for jobs that yielded comparable or even lower income. Others insisted on obtaining more money than either welfare or low-wage jobs provided and earned income secretly . . . while receiving ADC" (32).

African American women faced similar encumbrances within Philadelphia's judicial apparatus. The Philadelphia Municipal Court curbed women's access to increased financial support and trivialized domestic violence in African American households. Although women depended on the municipal court's assistance to sustain their families in the 1950s, Pennsylvania welfare officials instituted measures to prevent perceived abuses of the legal structure's benefits. Levenstein also finds that municipal judges dissuaded women from seeking legal recourse in domestic disputes and urged them to resolve their marital differences through other remedies, like domestic counseling. African American women responded to these gendered and state-driven impositions by choosing to press "charges only [when] they believed that legal authorities' strong support for male breadwinning would work in their favor" (86). In redefining the terms upon which the Philadelphia Municipal Court accommodated their needs, women safeguarded their privacy from further government intrusion while securing much-needed financial and protective assurances from state-administered welfare entities.

Levenstein further contends that African American women confronted widespread class, gender, and racial barriers in Philadelphia's public housing system. They responded to this challenge by forging grassroots initiatives to combat entrenched discriminatory patterns. Following World War II, the NAACP and white liberal reformers compelled the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) to desegregate public housing sites, creating new opportunities for black families to secure residential toeholds. The NAACP and PHA envisioned public housing along class and gender lines...