Abstract
In the wake of natural disaster, people roll up their sleeves to work for recovery. Women of the Storm (WOS) documents the civic work of a women’s organization based in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf Coast in 2005. Written in an engaging and humanistic narrative, Emmanuel David documents this group of elite women’s gendered political recovery work in the U.S. South. Given the historical amnesia for women’s political organizing, this well-documented ethnographic work spotlights the emergence and development of the WOS and their everyday civic organizing.
WOS’s story unfolds in chronological order, beginning with a life history of the organization’s impressive founder, Anne Milling, and the formation of the group’s executive committee. In the first three chapters on how the group emerged, the author highlights the raced, classed, and gendered standards of inclusion and exclusion core WOS members practiced as they sought to create a “diverse” organization while working from a privileged position in post-disaster New Orleans. Chapters four through six focus on WOS’s first major accomplishment in the national political arena: a donor-sponsored trip to Washington, DC, to personally invite Congress members to tour post-Katrina New Orleans. The remaining chapters describe the organization’s follow-up work, additional congressional visits, and accomplishments in an unfavorable political environment.
David’s narrative is based on participant observation of the WOS beginning shortly after the group’s first trip to Washington, interviews with more than 40 WOS members, and documentary evidence from the everyday work and publicity of the women’s organization. These process-oriented methods appropriately position the author to challenge conventional notions of WOS’s homogeneity while being critical of group members’ efforts to develop a diverse organization in service of the group’s political strategy. Moreover, the extensive context the author integrates from archival sources makes this work a critical analysis of elite feminized organizing in the raced geography of post-Katrina New Orleans.
There are several contributions of Women of the Storm as a work of public sociology and as literature on gender and social movements. Documenting WOS’s efforts to lobby and shape the national political discourse in the wake of a domestic natural disaster is not only a matter of making the “invisible careers” of women civic organizers visible; this book shapes—or more precisely, corrects—the historical record. As an intersectional project, this book problematizes diversity as a process in elite civic organizing. Finally, Women of the Storm explores a feminized civic organizing where politeness and “the details” are valued in the political process. While WOS members are quoted saying that their work is “nonpolitical and nonpartisan” at several points in the narrative, it is clear that the blue-tarp umbrellas, disaster visit invitations printed on heavy cardstock, and polite interactions of WOS members are politically deliberate.
A challenge of deep microhistorical work is extending the theoretical advancements beyond the case at hand. Indeed, while the author applies an impressive range of concepts from literature on gender, work, and social movements (to name a few: invisible careers, bridgework, framing, gendered work, moral identities, noblesse oblige), the extension of these concepts is often left unwritten. For instance, what it means for the WOS press conference at the levee breach to be a “gendered event” is not specified. Developing the theoretical connections the author makes in Women of the Storm will certainly be a fruitful next step in this exciting work.
A well-written and informative read, Women of the Storm is an accessible historical and intersectional narrative of an organization of elite Louisianan women who rolled up their sleeves and lobbied Congress in the wake of a natural disaster. Civic activists and scholars of gender and social movements alike will find this text to be a valuable addition to their reading lists.