Georgina Hickey. Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940.

Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. 296 pp. $39.95.

Georgina Hickey has written an interesting and compelling book about working-class women and urban development in Atlanta from 1890 to 1940. She has woven a complex narrative of hope and danger in the city that was destined to be the beacon of the New South.

Hickey organizes the book in eight major chapters and a conclusion. The chapters are: "Rising, Ever Rising"; "Laboring Women, Real and Imagined"; "Public Space and Leisure Time"; "Class, Community, and Welfare"; "Physical and Moral Health"; "Political Alignments and Citizenship Rights"; "The Transitional Twenties"; and "The Forgotten Man. One can see from the outline of the chapters that Hickey is not especially concerned with race, the predominant concern of whites in the South of the period. One cannot escape the fact that black women were treated and seen differently than whites.

Atlanta had been crushed by General Sherman during his Atlanta Campaign in the Civil War, and the city was seeking to rise from the ashes of the fires that had destroyed both its past and its promise of a future. By 1890, it had nearly succeeded in some ways in putting the past behind but had not fully grasped the future. The Ku Klux Klan was rampant; blacks continued to pour into the city from the outlying rural areas; Northern whites came down to help set up schools and welfare agencies for the destitute African community; and white women were feeling their first signs of liberty. As Hickey tells it, "Irmalee Davis ignored her husband's complaints and frequented Atlanta's dance halls at all hours of the night. Hattie Harper publicly accused the city relief officer of demanding sexual favors and threatening to ruin her reputation. Flossie Nealy won fifty dollars from the city council for undisclosed damages." African American women would have met with untold difficulty trying to negotiate the pathway traveled by white women. It was a matter of race, not gender or sex.

It seems to me that the main problem with this very useful work is that it seeks to discover a cubby hole for race, to sneak it out of existence, or to minimize its impact on the role of working-class women in the Deep South of the period. As a child of the South who has long lived with tales of horror involving turn-of-the-century black life in Atlanta, I know that the hope of black women was often buried in the dangers of physical and psychological terror.

Yet I am heartened by the vivid way Hickey tells her stories. When the State of Georgia raised the legal age at which a girl could give sexual consent from ten to eighteen in 1918, it did not represent the cultural advance one would think. In fact, the law was passed to protect girls not so much from men as from themselves. The state did not want women getting venereal diseases. Women had been examined for venereal disease in the police station, but soon the city established a stockade where "lewd women" were held, treated, and tried. Women's presence in society was criminalized in order to control venereal disease.

Black women were marginalized as black people had been during the early part of the twentieth century. According to Hickey, these women were often seen trying to represent the interests of "their families and communities." This is a good point. Black women, even with the presence of the club societies, could not thrust themselves into the center of the rise of Atlanta. They were held back by both racism and patriarchy, although they fought to overcome both. White women found that the economic crisis of the 1930s created for them a similar marginalization, but without the racial component. They still had access to power wielded by white men if they cared to attain it. This was not the case with black women in Atlanta.

Georgina Hickey's work will go a long way toward opening up new channels for the discovery of women's voices. Using the urban development of a Southern city as a backdrop to the issues of class and gender, the author has done an exceptional job of providing the reader with new interpretations. What waits to be done is a full, analytical discussion of the roles black women played.

Molefi Kete Asante 

Temple University