• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7357 0

would remain unaligned. Indeed some feminists resorted to anti-immigrant rationales, hoping to win over wealthy men and women. Stanton and Susan B. Anthony toured the summertime spas at Saratoga and Ballston, arguing that female suffrage would bolster Anglo-Saxon civilization and win passage of temperance laws. Stanton complained to the state legislature that the current suffrage arrangements exalted “the ignorant and vulgar above the educated and refined—the alien and the ditch-digger above the authors and poets of the day.” But legislators held the line. The inferiority of women (and the necessity of maintaining their public subordination) was one thing on which men of different classes could agree.

Progress came only when feminists trimmed their demands to seek, as the New York Times delicately put it, the “legal protection and fair play to which women are justly entitled” while abandoning “the claims to a share of political power which the extreme advocates of Women’s Rights are fond of advancing.” Finally, in May 1860, the legislature accepted a bill drafted by Susan B. Anthony that permitted a wife to own property acquired by “trade, business, labor, or services,” to be the joint guardian of her children, and to bring legal actions in her own name (and to be sued as well). Every provision of this act had been a specific goal of the women’s movement.

At the Tenth National Women’s Rights Convention, held on May 10 and 11, 1860, at New York’s new Cooper Institute (with historian Mary Louise Booth serving as secretary), feminists were jubilant about this triumph. They would soon find that its effects were limited, as judges undid in the courts gains won in the public arena. Feme covert was buried deep within the Anglo-American legal tradition and would prove hard to root out.

46

Louis Napoleon and Fernando Wood

After the defeat of the workers’ uprising in June 1848, a frightened French bourgeoisie and peasantry elected Louis Napoleon to the presidency, then acquiesced when he overthrew the newly established republic and declared himself head of a Second Empire. As Napoleon III he swiftly established an authoritarian state and then, power secured, commenced the reconstruction of Paris.

In June 1853 the emperor handed a map of the capital to Baron Georges Eugene Haussmann, his newly appointed prefect of the Department of the Seine. On it he had sketched a network of wide, straight boulevards he wanted Haussmann to ram through the old city center. His goals were threefold: to unblock clotted medieval capillaries that were obstructing the circulation of commodities; to shift the city’s primary link to the outside world, from the Seine River to railheads converging on Paris from the countryside; and to forestall future construction of barricades and allow the emperor to mow down his enemies with artillery.

Haussmann duly plowed Napoleonic avenues straight from the new train stations to the commercial center, treating Paris as an engineering obstacle. The process deindustrialized much of the inner city and forced many working people to the periphery. As one class went out, another came in. The bourgeoisie roosted along the new boulevards in grand new apartment houses—modeled on the palais of urban aristocrats—whose heights and facades were reassuringly regulated by the state.

The state also undertook massive infrastructure projects: it built Les Halles and other giant markets, dug an enormous maze of underground galleries with space for sewers, water lines, and gas pipes; and made the Bois de Boulogne—with its curving roads, lakes, and bridle and pedestrian paths (some staked out by the emperor himself)—the new standard for metropolitan parks. Indeed command of the authoritarian state was crucial to every aspect of this urban renewal enterprise, from overbearing small property owners who resisted improvements, to mobilizing a scheme of debt financing, to promoting better housing for working people in an attempt to win their support.

The Parisian model would be copied repeatedly in the ensuing decades, not only