During its initial run, a regular feature of the comic book Wonder Woman was an insert, “Wonder Woman of History,” that described the life and accomplishments of a notable woman. The “wonder woman” selected for the July 1952 issue was the settlement house pioneer and public housing advocate Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (1867–1951). While this selection might seem like an unusual choice today—after all, popular culture rarely singles out social reformers for praise—Betty Boyd Caroli’s biography of Simkhovitch suggests why she was entirely worthy of such acknowledgment.

Caroli, an emerita professor of history at the City University of New York, has produced a taut, chronological narrative of Simkhovitch’s journey from her upbringing in the relative serenity of Newton, Massachusetts, to the decades she spent in the crowded environs of New York City’s Greenwich Village. The descendant of New England forebears, Simkhovitch—as Caroli astutely points out—was prepared for, but by no means predestined to be, a reformer. Earning a bachelor’s degree in 1890 from Boston University certainly broadened her horizons, if only by exposing her to greater Boston. The Social Gospel movement, which stressed the Christian obligation to remedy social ills, also fostered her growing belief that she could not ignore the economic inequality that was seemingly everywhere. As her evolving views began to crystallize, she enrolled for a year of additional study in 1892 at the Harvard Annex (later renamed Radcliffe College). Her studies there helped shift her interests from classics to the social sciences, which in turn sparked a desire to study overseas. A grant from the Women’s Industrial and Educational Union permitted her to do so for more than a year in Germany.

Caroli offers a detailed discussion of Simkhovitch’s time at the University of Berlin, particularly the impact that economics professor Adolph Wagner had on her thinking. Wagner believed that the unprecedented urbanization caused by industrialization had created commensurate social problems that were equally unprecedented. Moreover, in Wagner’s opinion, only a certain amount of government involvement could solve those problems. Simkhovitch would reach similar conclusions, especially with regard to the free market’s failure to provide adequate and affordable housing for a significant percentage of individuals who sought shelter in America’s largest cities.

Upon returning to New York City, Simkhovitch became increasingly involved in settlement house work, ultimately founding one herself—Greenwich House—in 1902. Caroli devotes several chapters to this part of Simkhovitch’s professional activities, which lasted until her death. Her fine-grained analysis of Greenwich House is a valuable addition to existing scholarship and will likely appeal to both an academic and a general audience. In short, Caroli shows how Greenwich House (and settlement houses more generally) sought to ameliorate the hardships faced by newly arrived immigrants. Caroli highlights Simkhovitch’s successes—namely, fundraising, organizational skills, and research projects and reports—while not glossing over her blind spots. For instance, Greenwich House reflected the racial segregation endemic in the era’s other reform movements. Caroli does an excellent job of detailing how settlement houses operated on a daily basis, as well as underscoring characteristics that made Greenwich House less typical. For example, the settlement remained strictly secular, despite the religious orientation that other eleemosynary efforts embraced.

In two of the last chapters, Caroli charts Simkhovitch’s attempts to raise awareness about the need for greater state involvement in providing low-cost housing, as well as her efforts to bring about that involvement. For almost thirty years, Simkhovitch championed higher building standards and lower monthly rentals for urban housing. With like-minded reformers such as New York City’s mayor Fiorella La Guardia, she was a co-founder of the National Public Housing Conference (NPHC) in 1931, which became an effective lobbying group. While Simkhovitch was serving as NPHC’s first president, the organization succeeded in getting federal funds for housing programs included in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, funds that were utilized to establish the New York City Housing Authority, whose first five members included Simkhovitch. Under the continued leadership of Simkhovitch, the NPHC drafted early versions of legislation that became the Housing Act of 1937. Caroli comments that the act’s authorization of hundreds of millions of dollars for slum clearance and the construction of public housing would allow work to “begin on a level that even Simkhovitch approved” (185). True enough, but Caroli fails to mention the law’s “equivalent elimination” provision: The number of new housing units created by a project would have to be matched by the elimination of an approximately equal amount of slum housing. This conflation of slum clearance with the construction of new dwellings could and did have negative consequences (namely, no net gain in housing supply) that many reformers never fully reconciled with their longstanding support for increased state intervention.

This otherwise fine study would have benefited from a preface that could have addressed three aspects of the unfolding narrative. The first is relatively minor: Caroli refers to Simkhovitch as “Mary” and “Simkhovitch” throughout the book, which makes for some odd shifts in tone. If both appellations were necessary, Caroli should have noted the reasons for switching back and forth. Another issue is Caroli’s use of Simkhovitch’s two autobiographies (or memoirs) as evidentiary sources without providing a substantive discussion or critique of them. At the very least, Caroli should have noted from the outset the pros and cons of utilizing them to reconstruct various parts of Simkhovitch’s life. Finally, a prefatory explanation of key terms and concepts could have clarified their subsequent use in various contexts. In the book’s early chapters, for instance, Caroli uses “slum” and “slum dwellers” without indicating how contemporaries themselves defined those terms, either economically or normatively. Although Caroli eventually does explain such terms, her arguments would have been more coherent if she had done so sooner rather than later.

Minor issues aside, Caroli’s biography of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch is a notable accomplishment, one that highlights the important contributions of an often-forgotten reformer, an individual who was once justifiably deemed a modern wonder woman.