ABSTRACT
Richard T. Ely discusses the role of women in promoting either the governmental reforms or the municipal aesthetics. The suburbanites could work and get their income from the city, avoid the city's property taxes that paid for things like public schools and public baths for immigrants and other poor people, and devote the suburbs' property taxes exclusively to benefits for the relatively affluent and primarily white suburbanites. Legislation by the states allowed suburbs to become autonomous, municipal corporations with no responsibilities to the cities. Two types of municipal reform were emerging at the time of Ely's work. The first was to enable the citizenry to create and vote on legislative initiatives and various kinds of recall petitions and referenda. The other type of reform was establishment of autonomous commissions and municipal corporations that provided a wide range of engineering to improve the economic and social aspects of urban life and sometimes utilities such as electricity, water supply, and gas.
