Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2007, History

This dissertation explores roots of the current urban crisis in the United States. Most scholarly explanations associate the problem, particularly of high levels of African-American poverty, with deindustrialization, which has stripped cities of the factory jobs that once sustained working-class communities. My account deviates from the standard tale of black male unemployment by focusing on shifting patterns of African-American women's labor—both paid and unpaid. Using Baltimore as a case study, it argues that public rather than industrial-sector employment served as the foundation of Baltimore's post-World War II African-American middle and working classes. Women outpaced men in winning government jobs. Concentrated in social welfare agencies, they used their new influence over public policy to improve the city's delivery of public services. Black women's efforts to build an infrastructure for sustainable community development put them at odds in municipal policy-making battles with city officials and business leaders intent upon revitalizing Baltimore through investment in a tourism industry. The social services workers scored some important victories, helping to alleviate poverty by shifting to the government some of the responsibility for health, child, and elder care women earlier provided in the private sphere. The conservative ascendancy of the 1970s and 1980s, reversed many of the gains African-American public-sector workers had won. Intent upon resuscitating the United States' status in the global economy, American presidents, influenced by conservative economists and their elite backers, made macroeconomic and urban policy decisions that justified extensive public-sector retrenchment and cuts or changes to social programs. Public-sector workers and their unions, most notably the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), fought with limited success to prevent the transformation of American public policy. Neoliberal policies ero (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kevin Boyle (Advisor) Subjects: History, United States