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Appendix: Note on First-Person Sources This book draws on a wide array of traditional primary sources: newspapers, census records, government documents, annual reports of public institutions and private agencies , sociological studies, maps, interview transcripts, and manuscript collections from social service, housing, education, and civil rights organizations. Its inspiration comes from the sources that allow us to hear working-class African American women’s voices and provide a window into their daily lives. What follows is a discussion of my work with the sources that provided the richest first-person accounts: municipal court transcripts , oral history interviews, and social work studies of welfare recipients. In 1997, I took my first extended research trip to Philadelphia. My work began in the Philadelphia City Archives, which had preserved hundreds of boxes of transcripts and bills of indictment from the cases tried in the municipal court between 1838 and 1987. The collection took up nearly 20,000 cubic feet, and many of the twentieth-century cases had never been touched. The transcripts and bills of indictment were stored in chronological order, in boxes that held approximately fifty cases each. I cast a wide net and studied randomly selected boxes from every five years between 1917 and 1962. Nonsupport cases were not included in these records, but the boxes held many Fornication and Bastardy and Assault and Battery cases. I also read cases in which abused women were tried for spousal murder and cases in which neighborhood disputes led women to press assault charges against each other. I compiled a database in which I recorded and described nearly 300 cases involving women. Some cases did not have any reliable racial markers, making it di≈cult for me to ascertain with certainty whether the participants were African American or white. I read the transcripts mainly for evidence of how men and women presented themselves in court as they sought to convince judges to rule in their favor. I relied on the court’s Annual Reports for all statistical evidence, and I used a combination of Annual Reports, other court publications, oral history interviews, and social work studies to document how women interacted with legal authorities and forced changes in court policies. A few days after I started working with the legal sources, I learned that the Philadelphia City Archives had received a grant to conduct a sampling project for all its court records after 1940. The records took up a great deal of storage space and were so voluminous that it was di≈cult for researchers to use them e√ectively. By preserving a small sample of the records and creating a searchable database, the archivists hoped to reduce the bulk and make the records more accessible to the public. I urged the archivists to save all of the records, arguing that they were one of the few extant sources 194 Appendix in which we could hear the voices of working-class men and women. However, the decision had already been made, and the plans for the sampling project were underway. The archivists agreed to save the transcripts that I used in my work, but all other transcripts and bills of indictment after 1940 have been preserved selectively. Information on the sampling project and its methods can be found at: http://www.phila.gov/ phils/Docs/otherinfo/sampling/PhaseI.htm and http://www.phila.gov/phils/Docs/ otherinfo/sampling/PhaseII.htm. In 1998, after working intensively in the archives in the Philadelphia area, I began conducting tape-recorded oral history interviews. I found my interview subjects at senior citizen centers located throughout Philadelphia that other researchers had recommended to me. The sta√ of the centers introduced me to women who were participating in activities on the days of my visits. We asked the women if they wanted to take part in my project, and I scheduled interviews with those who agreed. I began each interview asking the women if they had always lived in Philadelphia and then tried to let each interview take its own shape. I had a list of topics that I tried to cover (i.e., childhood , family life, education, neighborhoods, employment), but I did not go through the list methodically, preferring to let the women dictate the direction of our conversations as much as possible. My interviews did not generate as much detailed information about public institutions as they might have if I had asked more targeted questions. But because I learned about women’s entire life histories, not just their...

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