Hope and Danger in the New South City

Using newspapers, municipal documents, government investigations, organizational records, oral histories and photographs, this text relates the experience of working-class women, across lines of race, to the process of urban development in Atlanta, US, between 1890 and 1940.

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For Atlanta, the early decades of the twentieth century brought chaotic economic and demographic growth. Women - black and white - emerged as a visible new component of the city's population. As maids and cooks, secretaries and factory workers, these women served the "better classes" in their homes and businesses. They were enthusiastic patrons of the city's new commercial amusements and the mothers of Atlanta's burgeoning working classes. In response to women's growing public presence, as Georgina Hickey reveals, Atlanta's boosters, politicians, and reformers created a set of images that attempted to define the lives and contributions of working women. Through these images, city residents expressed ambivalence toward Atlanta's growth, which, although welcome, also threatened the established racial and gender hierarchies of the city.
Using period newspapers, municipal documents, government investigations, organizational records, oral histories, and photographic evidence, Hope and Danger in the New South City relates the experience of working-class women across lines of race - as sources of labor, community members, activists, pleasure seckers, and consumers of social services - to the process of urban development. Linking major events of the era - including a race riot, a tuberculosis scare, a sensationalized murder trial, and the founding of the first citywide charity organization - to the public dialogue about working women, Hickey devotes chapters to such topics as work, leisure, social welfare, public health, and politics and law. By looking anew at the iconography and public discourse of a city, Hickey pushes us to understand urban development outside of strictly economic realms. We see in new ways how issues of respectability, morality, and social order are bound up with what it means to live in, and be part of, a particular city.