Working Women and San Francisco’s Urban Development

Thomas O'Donnell
History
UC Davis

This project examines the ways in which beliefs about sexuality and the proper roles of women influenced San Francisco’s municipal policies and its growth from a boom town into a modern American metropolis. Following the devastating earthquake and fire that leveled much of the city in 1906, many San Franciscans saw an opportunity to build one of the nation’s leading cities on the ashes of disorder that characterized Gold Rush San Francisco. As the city’s economy shifted to commerce and banking, consumer spending, and tourism, a desire developed to assert control over the city’s inhabitants in ways historian Barbara Berglund describes as “hierarchy-building.” Historians have written very little about the ways in which working women fought back, utilized their economic power, or conformed to those hierarchies being built as The city’s economic and political institutions developed over this crucial thirty-year period.