"Deutsch shows how the women of Boston turned the city from a place with no respectable public space for women to a city where women sat on the City Council and met their beaux on the street corners. The book follows the efforts of working-class, middle-class, and elite matrons, working girls and "new women" as they struggled to shape the city in their own interests.

And in fact they succeeded, rearranging and redefining the moral geography of the city and in so doing broadening the scope of their own opportunities. But Deutsch reveals that not all women shared equally in this new access to public space, and even those who did walk the streets with relative impunity and protested their wrongs in public did so only through strategic and limited alliances with other women and with men."--BOOK JACKET.