Urban history can be merged with other history subfields to create intriguing amalgamations that work well as the subject for college classes. In this article, the author explores the intellectual journey that led her to combine urban history and women’s history, both in her own research and in her college classroom. The intricacies of the class “Gender and the City,” are explored, including reading assignments, a courses exercise in mental mapping, and class participation in a community oral history project. Oral history proves to be an extremely malleable assignment, even when rigorously following the Oral History Association guidelines, and the methodology befits many kinds of urban history courses.
I pursued a PhD in American history, 1865-present, and also completed all the course work for a second PhD in American studies. As a student, I taught my own courses in the American studies, history, education, and College of Arts and Sciences general education programs.
2.
Tim Lacy, "A Million Little Historical Societies," Perspectives on History, http://www.historians.org/ Perspectives/issues/2008/0801/0801vie1.cfm (accessed February 7, 2008).
3.
Lisa Krissoff Boehm, syllabus, "Gender and the City," Worcester State College, spring 2004.
4.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (New York: Norton, 1992).
5.
Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Bantam, 1900/1992).
6.
Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Maureen Flanagan, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
7.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books , 1994), 3, 135.
8.
Kissing Jessica Stein, directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld (Century City, CA: Fox Searchlight, 2001).
9.
See Pierrette Hondageu-Sotelo, Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 120.
10.
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
11.
Much more has to be done on the growing area of home health care. See the upcoming work Caring for America: How Home Health Workers Became the New Face of Labor by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, to be published by Oxford University Press.
12.
See the Worcester Women’s History Project Web site, www.wwhp.org.
13.
See Oral History Association, "Evaluation Guidelines," http://www.oralhistory.org/. Also see "Oral History Excluded from IRB Review," http://alpha.dickinson.edu/oha/org_irb.html; and "Threat Seen to Oral History," www.insidehighered.com (accessed January 3, 2008). For an up-to-date discussion, see Zachary M. Schrag’s blog, http://www.institutionalreviewblog.com/. Oral history differs from journalism in several key respects. One, oral historians try not to lead the narrator or ask them to reveal more than they are comfortable with discussing. The object is for narrator and interviewer to create the document together, each exerting a "shared authority" over the work. Even when provocative questions are asked and answered, narrators can remove their statements from the transcript at any time. In journalism, notes from an interview may be discarded, and the story is the true product of the interview. In oral history, the recording and the transcript are considered the projects of the interview. Oral histories rarely serve as sources of valuable "sound bites" and are better understood when viewed in their entirety.
14.
Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan’sRecording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Walnut Creek, CA : AltaMira, 2005).
15.
Mary Blewett, The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910- 1960 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990); Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (New York: Penguin, 1988). Also see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Studs Turkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Avon, 1970); and Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Making a Way Out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).
16.
See Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
