Christine Stansell City Of Women Summary

In City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789 – 1860, Christine Stansell describes and analyzes the lives of working-class women in late eighteenth century – early nineteenth century New York City.

Stansell begins the journey with the antebellum republic – a time when the economy began shifting away from the family and towards urban industrialization. The destabilization of wage labor created a new balance in women’s relations and conditions. Women began going outside the house in order to support their family. Contrary to this shift, women continued to operate within the patriarchal economy and remained dependent on men.

Between 1820-1850 Stansell shifts the narrative towards the tension rising between middle-class female reformers

and workingwomen. The cult of domesticity was both a concept heavily stressed by middle-class women and a notion completely at odds with the needs and realities of working women. These working women faced two insurmountable challenges making them unfit for republicanism: womanhood and poverty. Thus, in order to survive, working-class women bound together, sharing resources and childcare responsibilities.

The shift from home to the world of industrial work not only gave rise to increased numbers of women in the “legitimate” labor force composed of factories and shops, but also a surge of women in prostitution.

Stansell does this topic little justice as she brushes over the affects the “world’s oldest profession” had on New York City during the nineteenth century. Stansell briefly touches upon the topic while discussing the Bowery and the many guilty pleasures male patrons enjoyed. However, Stansell fails to dig deeper into the underworld and instead relegates her analysis to the already over studied and over analyzed female transition from housework to factory

work.

Although incomplete, Stansell’s analysis of the Bowery is not without merit. The transition from housework to factory wage labor created a nouveau population of young, single, semi-autonomous women. These attributes are embodied in what Stansell calls the “Bowery Girl.” Openly participating in working class leisure culture, the Bowery Girl represented the polar opposite of republicanism and middle class views of domesticity. Within the propertied classes, women saw themselves as the moral guardians of their families and nation. Thus, to women still afflicted with republican motherhood, the Bowery Girl was akin to the anti-Christ. Such a perception gave republican women a miscalculated sense of their worth in a society that still valued females very little. Laboring women toiled in the factory, while their middle-class hecklers drudged along at home. The cherished domesticity from which propertied women lived and preached thus did little to lift the oppressions of the female sex.

According to Stansell, the window of chance for women in the labor force opened in the 1830s and closed by 1850. During this time period men used women as argumentative vehicles to advance the male cause in the labor force, i.e. men used the inclusion of “lowly” women in the labor force to argue wage-earning men needed better wages and conditions in order to support their women so females could stay home and not invade the workforce.

At first glance, factory work seems to be the impetus that pushed women into the labor movement. However, Stansell argues this was hardly the case – that factory work actually posed a challenge for women’s integration into the market. Middle-class reformers increasingly viewed poverty as a scientific problem. According to reformers, the “tenement class” was poor not because of life circumstance but because they were mentally, emotionally, or physically defective. Thus, workingwomen were faced with a damned if you damned if you don’t situation. Poor women who entered the labor force were applauded for their contribution to fixing the poverty issue while at the same time condemned for disavowing republican virtue.

While Stansell does touch upon the fact antebellum laboring women were seen as unqualified for republican virtue, like the prostitution dilemma, she only glosses over the depth of the situation as it applies to current times.

Today’s women struggle with the same issues as women of the early republic: dependence on a male driven economy coupled with expectations to neither be too masculine nor too poor. In not weaving the narrative into present day women’s issues, Stansell lost a valuable opportunity to illustrate and analyze the how and why of history repeating itself. Stansell also misses an opportunity to dissect the intra-hostility among middle-class female reformers. For centuries, even the most progressive of women have been less focused on creating universal sisterhood and more focused on mounting divisions that allow one group to get ahead of another. Thus, perhaps womankind’s greatest downfall – the gender’s seeming inability to support each other in endeavors that elevate the sex in the economic and social worlds – has extensive roots in the industrial revolution. The opportunistic patriarchy took advantage of what should have been a woman’s movement and instead turned it into one more advancement scheme of the white propertied

male.

From 1790 through 1860, enormous economic and demographic changes rippled through New York City. Many of these changes were due to immigration spikes. Immigrants flooded into the city, bringing new traditions and values into employment, family, and gender structures. Without immigrants, there would essentially be no New York City. Stansell thus does an excellent job of describing antebellum New York City as a constantly shifting and changing immigrant metropole. This construction of the city is a valuable one as many historians at the time Stansell penned City of Women were still treating New York City as a city invaded by, rather than created by immigrants.

Overall, Stansell’s City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 is a strong work that examines the history of the early industrial revolution in New York City. Where Stansell’s work lacks in modern-day narrative weaving it for the most makes up in historical fact. Part of this absence in narrative can be blamed on Stansell’s attempt to tell too much history at once. Rather than micro-focus on specific events or groups of people, Stansell attempts to capture the entirety of the industrial revolution in one book. Thus, while Stansell captures the essence of the industrial revolution in antebellum New York City, she fails to capture its heart.