The Urban World, 9 th Ed.

The Urban World, 9th Ed. J. John Palen

Chapter 9: Diversity: Women, Ethnics, and African Americans • Introduction • Women in Metropolitan Life • White Ethnic Groups • First-Wave Immigrants • African Americans • Urban Segregation Patterns • 21st-Century Diversity • Summary

Introduction • Our focus is on women in metro areas, ethnics, and African Americans whose futures are bound to the urban scene • Women, ethnics, and African Americans have all, until very recently, been dismissed as unimportant or marginal to the mainstream of urban America • Although women are a demographic majority, their historically marginal status is a measure of social position and life chances, not numbers

Women in Metropolitan Life • Female Domesticity • The 19th-century ideology of female domesticity suggested that nature itself determined that the home was the “woman’s sphere,” and that women were particularly physically, morally, and spiritually equipped to nurture • Physical spaces inside upper-class and middle-class homes came to be identified by gender

Gendered Organization of Residential Space • The early 20th-century progressive-era household ideology was not one of separateness, but of shared domesticity • Husbands, wives, and children shared common time and space • Feminist Housing Preferences • Early 20th-century feminists saw suburban homes as producing patriarch-designed drudgery and isolation • Feminists advocated forming collective organizations and making responsibilities for domestic housework, laundry, and cooking communal responsibilities

Cohousing and Downsizing • Contemporary communities that share common facilities and where residents seek to know one another and cooperate communally are known as cohousing • Others are downsizing their housing to minimalist levels to reduce their carbon footprint • Current Housing Choices • The era in which women remained isolated in suburban homes, without access to cars, culture, or community, is a cliché of decades past • For over two decades women have preferred single-family suburban homes • Gender differences in housing preferences represent an earlier era

Gendered Public Spaces • There was little research on women in public space before the 1970s because they were less publicly visible • In contemporary urban areas men and women are still sometimes spatially segregated in ways that reduce women’s access to information, knowledge, and power • Workplace Changes • A picture of slow but clear progress to work equality with men • A major constraint is that married women in the workforce also still carry the major responsibility for home and child care • Women are increasingly visible in the public realm

White Ethnic Groups • Immigration • America has not always welcomed newcomers with open arms • The American immigration was the largest mass migration in the history of the world • The proportion of immigrants in the population today is twice as high as it was in 1970 • Today almost 1 in 10 United States residents is foreign born • During the last decade the foreign-born population grew by 27 percent

First-Wave Immigrants • Second-Wave Immigrants • Ran from roughly 1820-1880 • The Irish were the first large-scale group of migrants; followed closely by the Germans and somewhat later the Scandinavians • Third-Wave Immigrants • Took place between 1880 and the 1920s • Came from the southern and eastern Europe • To ethnocentric WASP Americans, the new immigrants were alien races about to overwhelm American institutions and cities • By the time the third-wave immigrants arrived, the frontier had closed and the best farmlands were taken

“Racial Inferiority” and Immigration • Before the 20th century, immigration restriction was based upon • The ethnocentric assumption of the superiority of American ways • The assumption that American industrial society represented a higher evolutionary form than the backward regions of Europe • Around the turn of the century, the argument of racial inferiority was added because it was thought that new immigrants were genetically inferior • At that time, race meant ethnicity or nationality rather than color • Not until 1968 were the “racial” immigration quotas eliminated

African Americans • Historical Patterns • The first blacks in the American colonies were not slaves but indentured servants, which rapidly evolved into perpetual servitude • In 1661 Virginia passed a law allowing perpetual slavery • Thomas Jefferson had referred to slavery as justice in conflict with avarice and oppression

Population Changes • At the time of the first census in 1790 blacks made up one-fifth of the total population • The black population was—until the 20th century—overwhelmingly rural and southern • Today, black migration is again taking place, but now it is to the metropolitan South from the urban North

Slavery in Cities • Plantation owners vigorously opposed the use of slaves in urban manufacturing • The system of slaves being “hired out” or hiring themselves to others and sharing the income with their owners meant that the urban slave was, in the words of the great black leader, Frederick Douglass, “almost a free citizen” • “Free Persons of Color” • On the eve of the Civil War, roughly one or eight blacks was a “free Negro” • The descendants of free persons of color dominated leadership roles in the black urban community

Jim Crow Laws • Jim Crow laws were largely a product of the years between 1890 and 1910 • Segregation meant that in urban places where one’s social position wasn’t known to all in the community, physical distance could be used to signify social distance • “separate by equal” was not finally eliminated until 1954 • “The Great Migration” • Major black immigration from the rural South to the urban North occurred from World War I to the 1960s • Between 1910 and 1960 somewhat under 5 million blacks left the South

Moving South • Today, African Americans’ migration is in the opposite direction, our of northern central cities and toward the South • Since 1990 roughly a million blacks have moved south • The same economic conditions of better jobs and living conditions that attract whites to the sunbelt also attract blacks • Since the 1980s it is young, college-educated blacks who are the most likely to move south

Urban Segregation Patterns • Extent of Segregation • Recent research shows that the old “color line” that separated blacks from whites is shifting to one that also separates blacks from Hispanics and all other non-blacks • Today the highest contemporary segregation levels are not found in the South but in the North • The central cities and the older suburbs surrounding older northern industrial cities have shown little change and remain highly segregated

Housing Discrimination • Until the 1968 Fair Housing Act the federal government directly encouraged racially restrictive neighborhoods • Protective or restrictive covenants prevented the sale of a property to the listed restricted racial and/or ethnic groups • Redline neighborhoods were thought to be undergoing or about to undergo racial change • Reverse redlining, in the first decade of the 21st century, had financial institutions targeting poor financially unsophisticated populations with home loans that were all but certain to fail

21st-Century Diversity • The Economically Successful • The numbers of middle-class and affluent blacks are increasing, while at the same time those at the bottom are slipping ever further behind • Links and Jack and Jill are comprised of a small elite group of blacks • Black median family income levels still remain below white median white family income levels • Currently black women are twice as likely to have a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree as black males

The Disadvantaged • Poor blacks have not benefited from the educational and employment opportunities of affirmative action • Two-thirds of black families headed by divorced or never-married women are now below the poverty level • Once an area collapses economically, joblessness follows, and social collapse follows • Massive joblessness weakens the perception that there is a relationship between going to school and getting a job

The Urban World, 9 th Ed.