On Women and the City

This is a great study where space and gender intersect really well. Deutsch argues here that women and men experienced urban space differently, and often just as much on the basis of class as gender. For instance, middle-class men could walk around working-class neighborhoods without experiencing a loss of status, but middle-class women could not do the same without being put into a lesser position. Women’s experience of urban space, moreover, was based around community organizations, children, the church, and the home (the German Kinder, Küche, Kirche seems apt here).

However, women did not simply acquiesce to urban space that was largely developed by men. By the 1890s, women were doing a great deal to shape the space they inhabited and were willing to push the boundaries of spaces in which they could be admitted (especially working-class women). When women were granted the right to vote in 1920, they had a much harder time becoming involved in city government than state or federal government because it was a space so definitively defined as male, but they continued pushing forward to achieve wider acceptance.

Yet, women were far more divided than they were united. As a schismatic city, women were perhaps more heavily divided into the classifications of Yankee/Irish and middle-class/working-class than men were. While middle-class Yankee women with progressive attitudes frequently sought to aid working-class women, both Irish and Yank, they were often faced with skepticism. This lack of unity made it harder for women, as a group, to manipulate urban space and was a tension that would re-appear throughout the 70-year period that Deutsch studies here. Really interesting stuff.