Visibility, politics, and urban development: Working-class women in early twentieth century Atlanta.

Abstract

Turn-of-the-century Atlanta was a city characterized by rapid economic, geographical, and demographic growth. Symbolic of this period of extreme change, working-class women, both white and African-American, became highly visible on the urban landscape as both city residents and the subjects of moral panics. The significance of these heated debates concerned not only women but also the fate of the city itself. This dissertation seeks to trace and explain the heightened visibility of working-class women in Atlanta during the first two decades of the twentieth century and place this phenomenon in context with the social history of these women. Because working-class women were moving into the newest areas of the city, not just geographical but also social and economic, these women's lives and the debates surrounding them provide a window into the contested process of urban development. Women, far from passive observers of this process, inserted themselves into the cultural debates over their status during this period and agitated for rights, resources, and improved conditions. Between the turn of the century and the early 1920s, efforts of middle-class reformers, police, municipal government, and organized labor were directed at regulating and incorporating women into stable relationships in the city. The social welfare network of Atlanta carefully constructed women as dependents by reinforcing proscribed gender roles. Sex segregation of the workforce in the city and policing of public amusements further incorporated working women into a stable social order. The association of poor and working women with disease during this period restricted women's actions and justified public intervention into their lives. In the realm of formal politics, middle-class residents alternately used working-class women to mark the political playing field or round out the constituency for political reform. Working-class women themselves, however, enacted most of their political goals through individual petitions to the local government and court system. Beginning in the 1920s, however, working-class women were gradually replaced by unemployed men as the focus of the city's attention. This process then accelerated and solidified in the 1930s with the effects of economic depression as this new group came to better represent the racial, political, and economic tensions of these later decades.