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Nature, the City, and the Family Circle: Domesticity and the Urban Home in Henry George's Thought1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2014
Abstract
This essay provides a reexamination of Henry George by focusing on how ideas about gender and nature informed one of the key objectives of the George movement: the transformation of the Gilded Age city into a metropolis of working-class suburbs tied together by single-tax funded public transportation. George was hardly a conservationist, and his understanding of nature was very different from those urban elites who sought to preserve nature. He simply did not accept the conservationist notion of depleted resources, which was inconsistent with his natural law belief in a boundless nature, a point that in turn grew out of the producerist emphasis of his political economy. Yet, George appreciated the need for a nonproductive relationship with nature, and he and his followers articulated this in terms of developing a healthier and more moral domestic environment. He applied such thinking to his political efforts in New York City during the mid-1880s, condemning the moral as well as the physical consequences of overcrowding that he blamed on land speculation. George enthusiastically embraced emerging transportation technologies as facilitators of mass residential decentralization. In so doing, he articulated a vision of a thoroughly reconfigured city that integrated nature into family life by enabling the development of a more spread-out metropolis.
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- Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2014
Footnotes
1
I am grateful for the generous readings that various drafts of this article received from Mark Eifler, Rick Jobs, Richard Schneirov, Jeff Sklansky, and Lisa Szefel. In addition, I want to thank Cay Hehner of the Henry George School of Social Science for the interest that he demonstrated in this project.
References
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