Sex and the Superblock: Visions of Family Life in Postwar New York City Public Housing

My paper examines the gender politics of public housing in postwar New York City. As the New York City Housing Authority rapidly expanded in the years after World War II in order to address a citywide housing shortage, the agency exhibited a gendered ideal for the family within its housing developments. Engaging with research on women’s grassroots resistance to racism, classism, and sexism within public housing as well as with policy histories of urban renewal and postwar metropolitan change, my paper will address how public housing projects in New York were themselves evidence of a postwar gendered ideology that idealized the white, nuclear family. Despite the widespread notion that women’s ‘containment’ to the domestic sphere was an exclusively suburban phenomenon, the governing bodies of inner cities, too, attempted to foster such conventional gender relations. The sources I have consulted for this project come from the New York City Housing Authority itself—using their propagandistic annual reports, tenant selection guides, and internal memos I trace the formation of a welfare state ideology that categorically marginalized single mothers and so-called ‘problem families’ within public housing. Throughout, I attempt to use the spaces and places of public housing themselves as evidence: how did public housing playgrounds, stairwells, and apartments themselves speak to this gendered ideology? How did space itself attempt to enforce a particular family-work structure? I will also consider how the Housing Authority’s attempt to manifest a particular society through architecture, design, and management failed in the face of tenants’ organizing and resistance.