ABSTRACT
It would be naive to claim that The Philadelphia Negro was neglected solely because its author was black. Similarly, in this chapter, which is concerned with urban geographies produced by women in the School of Social Service Administration in the University of Chicago, I do not argue that gender alone accounts for their eclipse.1 Rather, I will suggest that gender, politics and epistemology combined to marginalize women who were doing significant research on the city, specifically in Chicago between about 1910 and 1930. The time and place are important because there was a particular conjunction of politics, social relations and locale with which the writing of a group of female academics can be associated. The context has to be specified to make sense of their analyses. I would contrast this approach to understanding a particular set of ideas with the usual presentations of that partial view of the city articulated by Park, Burgess and colleagues in the Chicago School of Sociology. Thus, in spatial science texts, like Haggett’s Locational Analysis in Human Geography,2 or in Schnore’s ‘On the spatial structure of cities in the two Americas’,3 Burgess’s socio-spatial model of the city is torn out of its Chicago context and discussed with little criticism, apart from some reservations about its spatial application in other unspecified locales.
