A dozen threads of US history cross here, and Spain keeps them competently aligned. I'd enjoy a book of more reckless assertions as to what caused what, but this careful one would have to be written anyway.
Threads: the Woman Question; good government; architecture; volunteerism, especially the US strain; racism, ditto; immigration; urbanization; de-urbanization; religion; urban planning. Dear me, that's only ten threads, but the Woman Question here is wound up of at least three.
The city saved women while women saved the city. In the late nineteenth century, US habits were fracturing. More and more women had jobs and educations; work flooding into the city off the farm; the cities were jammed with immigrants. The world barely knew how to build for such dense crowds of people. City governments were weak or laissez-faire or outright corrupt; they weren't always trying to build physical infrastructure, let alone the social service network that would keep immigrants and refugees from remaining an immiserated class. Some of the movement was of black citizens, out of the rural South, and the immiserated classes were played against each other.
These fractures aligned and into them women drove a lever that shifted the whole mass. Many respectable young women had to support themselves, and arrangements for their living in the city had to be made. Also, women were going to work, including well-off women who did not work for pay: as wrote,
women who wanted to escape the "immense imprisonment of life which was stifling them" (p. 187).
Some of them avoided direct competition with men by doing the work men left undone. Finally, in a brilliant ideological feint, they combined these two things by phrasing the whole project of making cities livable as housekeeping and mothering. Many a leaflet accepted, sweetly, that women had their proper sphere; but made clear that the sphere was considerably larger than one family home. The home could not be kept safe and clean until the city was safe and clean.
If that argument didn't take, there were theological ones:
Settlement workers... were among the first to identify it [urban poverty] as a systemic problem rather than a personal failing. ...the Social Gospel defined poverty as a public issue warranting institutional reform... Thus the Social Gospel strongly justified women's work outside the home. (p. 63)
The YMCA, the Salvation Army, and the NAACP all grew in this era and worked on these problems. The YMCA of course built huge, complicated domiciles in the cities, which were homes to many poorish working women and must have been fascinating work for the women running them. I love the floorplans; the Cleveland YMCA headquarters had an interior gymnasium with a running track, as well as a library, classrooms for millinery and bookkeeping and more, and of course bedrooms offices dining-hall and chapel.
And in other places there were precedents; the last clean, well-drained Cities Beautiful had been Roman. I hadn't previously thought about the logical association of classical style with public, everyday, mens sana in corpore sano construction, but I should have, even if they didn't combine baths and libraries:
New York City's [public] baths were huge, with one hundred showers (and fewer tubs). They were modeled on Roman public baths with classical pilasters, columns, arches, and cornices. (p. 132)
The settlement houses didn't survive in their own names, largely because so many of their functions were absorbed into city government (and subsequently run by professionalized men). The settlements were houses for college women living in some of the tougher poor neighborhoods, with the intent of improving the lot of the neighborhoods by living among them and sharing knowledge, rather than going among them and granting bounty. (Certainly some of this knowledge was useful-connection knowledge, e.g. how to shame the city into collecting street trash.) The most famous of these was Hull House; ' Twenty Years at Hull House is at Project Gutenberg. Hull House itself is mostly gone. Spain has some rather trenchant comments on how many of these practical donation-funded buildings were destroyed as unimportant, despite having been 'firsts' of many kinds - often the first public libraries or baths, for instance, only later supplanted by Carnegie or city edifices that spent some of their money on famous architects. She calls the humbler works 'vernacular architecture', referring to 's 'vernacular space', always shared.
The women's clubs are less famous now, but I think they were more accepted then. A hundred years ago many nice respectable quiet wives and mothers were also clubwomen, that is, member's of women's clubs, and some of them may have played bridge all day but some of them built refuges for unwed mothers. Spain's book doesn't talk about them much; it seems to me that they intentionally fluttered under the radar and looked harmless at all times. Seattlites might remember that the Harvard Exit movie house is in a building originally built for a women's club; surviving members are occasionally interviewed, and they usually come off as not feminists but precursors of feminists.
Clubwomen might have been more likely to talk about the City Beautiful than to agitate for labor rights, for instance, but in doing so they served as infiltrators rather than shock troops. It wasn't all cornices; that City needed to start with paving the streets. (Somewhere in here is a contemporaneous remark assuming that the mess of overhead wires will, of course, be buried as city development catches up with technological change. Oops; we haven't gotten there yet.) Urban planning became a feminine concern because the lack of air and water was unclean and unhealthy, the lack of schools unfitting, the lack of playgrounds unwise. No-one needed playgrounds when rich children lived in parks and farms and poor ones worked; city parks and playgrounds had to be retrofitted into corners. They were ambitiously designed, with sandboxes and educational vegetable gardens. They were also segregated by race and often by gender, and not separate-but-equal.
The failure of these various movements to attack racism is depressing. The Salvation Army might have done the most of the white-founded groups; it was originally English. Various branches of groups that theoretically worked for all poor people refused to work for blacks, and the ideology of sweet womanhood didn't stretch to cover it. The schools and colleges built by black women are all the more heroic, and there were decent exceptions, but it's a repeated failure of principle elsewhere. There's an awfully familiar ring to some of it, the seemingly irreducible residuum of underpaid, necessary, labor in the reproduction of labor. , who was not willing to save only the 'talented tenth',
advocated the unionization of domestics because "the women voters will be keen to see that laws are passed that will give eight hours a day to women in other industries, but they will oppose any movement that will, in the end, prevent them from keeping their cooks and house servants in the kitchen twelve or fifteen hours a day." (p. 164)
On the other hand, the Social Gospel was reliably willing to stand up with organized labor and worker's rights, as they were then being developed; and there were scientists and utopians reducing the required effort. Some had read , and were probably planning neighborhood cafeterias (how old is deli?); others built the Rumford Kitchen with the science of Home Ec.
The June 2005 Heifer International newsletter, World Ark, that arrived as I was reading this has a review of How to Change the World, by , which is apparently about the rise of nonprofit entrepreneurial
"citizen sector" and the tremendous growth of nonprofits that are tackling social problems that government or business have failed to solve or even address. (p. 25)
After a volume on the comprehensive invention of social-goods institutions a hundred years ago, this didn't sound all that new, but the big change is that the ideology then was female Virtue, Religion, and Cleanliness; and now the ideology is Entrepreneurship. The substances overlap constantly, since they're attacking similar problems, but the metaphors are tremendously different. It's probable that there are insoluble contradictions in the new hopeful ideology, too, but I expect there's a generation of work to be extracted from it first.
ISBN: 0816635315
So wrote clew in Cities. , History (19th c.). , History (20th c.).