Ithaca College

Beth Belanger, American Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, will present “‘A Perfect Nuisance’: Working-Class Women and Neighborhood Development in Civil War St. Louis” on Tuesday, April 19, at 6:00 p.m. in Textor 103

Belanger’s talk examines civilian complaints against confederate sympathizing women, provides an overlooked perspective on the spatial politics of St. Louis during the Civil War and the extent to which class, gender and geography shaped the production of neighborhood space.  Her methods blend the use of geographic information systems (GIS) with discourse analysis to show how working class women enlisted the powers of government to enforce their own views of their neighborhood, and how, in doing so, they buttressed their own claims of influence and legitimacy over those spaces.  At the heart of “A Perfect Nuisance” is the story of how one scholar used a collection of sources, sources which others had looked at through the lens of military history or dismissed as simply evidence of fights between women, to rethink how these documents speak to a distinctly working-class and gendered experience of the city.