4 - Gendering the Streets: Men, Women, and Public Space

Summary

Previous chapters have considered the transformative effect of personal circumstances, networks and interests on perceptions and experiences of the city. This chapter considers how far gender may have coloured perceptions of urban space in Norwich. In particular, it asks the question – was the city a different place for men and for women? There has been a great deal of literature that has addressed the notion of ‘gendered’ space.A popular focus of this recent work has been to compare the lived experiences of city men and women with dominant socio-cultural narratives concerning gender roles and appropriate spheres of movement. Much of this recent work builds on the sophisticated critiques of the ‘separate spheres’ model that emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, which argued that concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space were more fluid and infinitely more complex than had once been thought.As Laura Gowing has explained, there are many ‘problematic elisions of meaning in the model of separate spheres … One of these is the confusion between public or private issues and events and public and private spaces.’Michael McKeon also proposes that

In ‘traditional’ cultures, the differential relationship between public and private modes of experience is conceived as a distinction that does not admit of separation. In ‘modernity’ the public and the private are separated out from each other, a condition that both sustains the sense of traditional distinction and, axiomatically, reconstitutes the public and private as categories that are susceptible to separation.

Most recently, the influence of interdisciplinary studies and the ‘spatial turn’ of social historians’ methodological approaches has led to further explorations of the relationship between people, place, and ideology.This chapter builds from this, by exploring the reception of women in Norwich’s public areas, especially its streets, markets, and alehouses. Specifically, it aims to question the elision of masculine identity with public or semi-public places, by arguing – in line with McKeon’s claim above – that for contemporaries, distinctions between ‘public’ or ‘private’ space were blurred, thus it is hard to equate gender-specific labels to places and spaces. Indeed, the tendency of academic dialogues to frame gender within a dichotomous model has obscured the manifold ways in which early-modern people internalised, expressed and generated normative gendered codes and negotiated the various concepts of public and private that were available.