A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Lisa Levenstein, 2009)

Abstract

Tracing the multiple contexts through which African American women endured and subverted racialized poverty in postwar Philadelphia, Lisa Levenstein examines their efforts to create more responsive social welfare policies throughout the city's public institutions. She dismisses the "underclass" thesis, which diminishes African Americans' complex socioeconomic responses to the changing postwar urban paradigm, by framing working-class African American women as proactive agents, who pursued government assistance to support themselves and their families amid structural (namely deindustrialization and racial discrimination) and personal impediments consuming their lives. Levenstein chronicles African American women's daily struggles and their evolving relationships with various welfare and government agencies, initially focusing on their contentious encounters with state-administered welfare and judicial programs and then shifting her attention to their campaigns for greater access to better housing, healthcare, and educational facilities.