Structuring Poverty in the Windy City: Autonomy, Virtue, and Isolation in Post Fire Chicago.

• Author: Lepley, John W.

Black, Joel E. Structuring Poverty in the Windy City: Autonomy, Virtue, and Isolation in Post Fire Chicago. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 259 pages. Paperback, $24.95.

In Structuring Poverty in the Windy City, Joel E. Black asks how reformers, social scientists, and journalists in Chicago established authority in the aftermath of the 1871 fire. The "Windy City" casts a large shadow in Gilded Age and Progressive Era historiography; to invoke Carl Sandburg, it is a "City of the Big Shoulders" within those fields. In that spirit, this monograph cuts across administrative, labor, legal, social, and urban history. Black, a lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida, adapted Structuring Poverty from his doctoral dissertation. It is a good, concise contribution to literature about Chicago from the Gilded Age to the New Deal.

The thesis of Structuring Poverty is that reformers, social scientists, and journalists organized their critiques of the poor around the "compulsions" autonomy, virtue, and isolation. Black develops this argument in five chapters of comparable length. The first two discuss the relationship of vagrancy law to the jobless and homeless. Overlapping ideas, institutions, and individuals tried to make sense of the poor who inhabited the city and defied expectations that white men ought to be autonomous and self-sufficient. For example, on the one hand, journalist Robert Hunter wrote a sympathetic treatment of Chicago slums that echoed Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives; on the other hand, the Court of Domestic Relations, established in 1911, became a regular venue for the administration of poverty and family life. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the 3,699 cases it handled in its second year involved desertion and abandonment issues. As Black notes, the Court applied social science methodologies to fulfill its mission. "Mothers and wives in the antechamber were invited to fill out questionnaires designed to help municipal court officials better understand the causes of domestic breakdown," he writes. (p. 40)

The third chapter, "Virtue: Trading in Sex and Wages," documents how the triumvirate of reformers, social scientists, and journalists negotiated their ideals of womanhood with the day-today realities of poor and working-class women. For instance, a 1910 study by the Chicago Vice Commission identified low wages as a cause of prostitution and discussed casual sex workers who supplemented...