A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman (review)

In June 1872, thirty women—mostly wealthy, white, Protestant, and married—signed on to the newly incorporated Ladies Relief Society in Oakland, California. The women, most of whose husbands had arrived in the west during the Gold Rush, determined to build a “new asylum” to care for the city’s impoverished women and children, a building that would “marry splendid design with feminized civic purpose” (79). Though linked by marriage to some of the wealthiest men in the city, the women were hobbled by their gender. They quickly realized they could not raise enough money to erect a building and so rented a farmhouse on the edge of the city. They renamed the building and repurposed it, transforming the neo-Georgian house into an orphanage designed to “socialize inmates” through a process called “home training” (85). In practice, this meant work in gardens, orchards, and kitchens for much of the day with just two hours each day for lessons and religious training. At age twelve, the children were expelled, expected to fend for themselves in the ruthless labor market of the fast-growing western city.

For the scores of children who were crowded fifteen per room into dormitory-style bedrooms, the Children’s Home was a cold and uncomfortable place. But for the women who managed it, the house was “an emancipatory site,” a place that provided an entry to the masculine public sphere for women whose lives were “confined by gendered social conventions.” Charity work gave wealthy white women a sense of civic purpose, a collective identity that bridged the male world of politics and women’s domestic sphere, and that cemented bonds of class, race, and religious communities. The Children’s Home was just one of many edifices built or renovated by charity reformers in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Oakland. It was a “node” in what Gutman calls a new “charitable landscape for children” (87).

A City for Children is a history of children’s charities told through the lens of architecture and the built environment. Gutman powerfully demonstrates that elite women and their voluntary organizations were crucial to the construction of the modern American city; the asylums, orphanages, hospitals, and old age homes built and managed by women’s charities proved visible markers of civic culture on the urban landscape. These organizations, as Gutman adeptly demonstrates, also helped to produce and reinforce social divisions between immigrant and native-born, African American and white, Catholic and Protestant children, and to create racially segregated urban spaces. Charity work may have trained children to work; it also educated them in anti-Asian bigotry and the racial and class hierarchies that dominated American society.

Some elite Oakland women sought to use charitable institutions to overcome racial divisions. A settlement house opened in the 1890s and, just as the Supreme Court declared racial segregation constitutional in their 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, a small group of Oakland women sought to integrate west Oakland children. The effort divided the elite philanthropic women, forcing the integrationists to establish a separate organization, the New Century Club, which campaigned for parks and playgrounds in Oakland Point and sponsored educational programs for black and white neighborhood children “in a feminized, home-like setting—and run by exemplary women” (209). But, as Gutman emphasizes, integration only went so far. No women’s club, not even New Century, welcomed Asian immigrants, except as servants.

Still, the New Century Club, meeting in the New Century Recreational Center in West Oakland, remained a visible form in the charitable landscape for more than half a century. The building was bulldozed in 1960 under a federal urban renewal program, erasing from the landscape—but not from community memory—a monument to the cross-class work of elite white women and to the increasingly organized, multiethnic community.

Gutman is an architect and a historian, and her book has all the strengths—and...