| The earthquake struck at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, shaking San Francisco for more than a minute before it was followed by three days of continuous fires and hundreds of additional tremors. By April 21, 1906, the calamity brought an estimated {dollar}350,000,000 in losses after destroying over 28,000 structures in both business and residential districts. With a documented death toll of at least 3,000 and 250,000 displaced residents, the 1906 earthquake and fire was the greatest catastrophe in San Francisco's short history.; The 1906 catastrophe destroyed both public and private property in San Francisco, disrupting the private realm by literally pushing domestic life into public space. I argue that this distortion of urban space had enormous social consequences. The destruction of the built environment, which included commercial properties, civic structures, homes, and transportation networks, brought pre-disaster social arrangements to the forefront. The devastation of Chinatown and working-class neighborhoods, for example, not only exposed popular pre-disaster racist and class-based assumptions, but revealed how the construction of social identity was intimately connected to urban space. Ultimately, the loss of home, the physical and symbolic barrier between public and private life, heightened the role gender ideology played in reconstructing the post-disaster city. This study traces the themes of gender, progressive social work and politics, and the relationship between social identity and urban space to explore how a catastrophic event both reshapes and reinforces social life.; The 1906 catastrophe never created a tabula rasa for radical social change. Rather the destruction, disaster relief, and reconstruction remained firmly embedded in pre-disaster social meanings. In the period between the disaster and reconstruction, popular gender ideology stood in place of the city's missing buildings and homes. Although post-disaster necessity expanded the opportunities for women and Chinese residents to participate in public life, popular conceptions of gender and race did not undergo radical transformation after the disaster. Nonetheless, the politicized lexicon of domesticity embedded gender in civic plans for the modern metropolis that rose from San Francisco's ashes. |
