The Dignity of Resistance: Women Residents' Activism in Chicago Public Housing (Environment and Behavior)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 12/7/2006
EAN 9780521596862, ISBN10: 0521596866
Paperback, 410 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.6 cm
Language: English
The Dignity of Resistance chronicles the four decade history of Chicago's Wentworth Gardens public housing residents' grassroots activism. This comprehensive case study explores why and how these African-American women creatively and effectively engaged in organizing efforts to resist increasing government disinvestment in public housing and the threat of demolition. Roberta M. Feldman and Susan Stall, utilizing a multi-disciplinary lens, explore the complexity and resourcefulness of Wentworth women's grassroots, organizing the ways in which their identities as poor African-American women and mothers both circumscribe their lives and shape their resistance. Through the inspirational voices of the activists, Feldman and Stall challenge portrayals of public housing residents as passive, alienated victims of despair. We learn instead how women residents collectively have built a cohesive, vital community, cultivated outside technical assistance, organizational and institutional supports, and have attracted funding - all to support the local facilities, services and programs necessary for the everyday needs for survival, and ultimately to save their home from demolition.
Foreword Sheila Radford-Hill
Preface and acknowledgments
Part I. Introduction
1. Struggle for homeplace
Part II. Wentworth Gardens' Historic Context
2. US public housing policies
Wentworth Gardens' historic backdrop
3. Memory of a better past, reality of the present
the impetus for resident activism
Part III. Everyday Resistance in the Expanded Private Sphere
4. The community household
the foundation of everyday resistance
5. The local advisory council (LAC)
a site of women-centered organizing
6. Women-centered leadership
a case study
7. The appropriation of homeplace
organizing for the spatial resources to sustain everyday life
Part IV. Transgressive Resistance in the Public Sphere
8. The White Sox Battle
protest and betrayal
9. Linking legal action and economic development
tensions and strains
10. Becoming resident managers
a bureaucratic quagmire
Part V. Conclusions
11. Resistance in context
Epilogue
Appendices
References
Index.