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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2013
This essay, an expanded version of the presidential address presented to SHGAPE in April 2012, poses the essential question of whether the City can ever be a true site of democracy if women do not possess free, equal, and safe access to a city's public spaces. The essay compares the writings, proposals, and actions of men and women in the Anglo-Atlantic world early in the twentieth century to reveal the distinct gendered ideas behind various reform movements directed at improving the urban built environment. It uses theoretical frameworks provided by feminist historians and social scientists to demonstrate that from the Progressive Era to events of the contemporary Arab Spring, the city has not been a place of democratic equality for women. Fear of women's public presence, of the disorder of women, has motivated men to construct cities to reinforce their desires to embound women in the private domestic space and to punish women for transgressing the boundary between the public and the private.
1 In the original Italian, the verb used is ordinare (ordinò), which has several meanings, the most powerful of which is “to order.” I find it interesting that the English translation by William Weaver rendered it as “to arrange,” which is closer to the more neutral verb sistemare.
2 For a representative example from each city focusing on the built environment with a social perspective but insufficient focus on gender: Winter, James, London's Teeming Streets, 1830–1914 (London, 1993)Google Scholar; Bachin, Robin F., Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar; Daly, Mary E., Dublin, The Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860–1914 (Cork, Ireland, 1984)Google Scholar; and Solomon, Lawrence, Toronto Sprawls (Toronto, 2007)Google Scholar. Feminist social scientists have paid far more attention to how ideas about gender have shaped the built environment. For examples, Massey, Doreen, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994)Google Scholar; Jarvis, Helen, with Kantor, Paula and Cloke, Jonathan, Cities and Gender (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Bingaman, Amy, Sanders, Lise, and Zorach, Rebecca, eds., Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Spain, Daphne, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis, 2001)Google Scholar; Darling, Elizabeth and Whitworth, Lesley, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 (Aldershot, UK, 2007)Google Scholar; and Stratigakos, Despina, A Women's Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis, 2008)Google Scholar. For an understanding of how a vision of the city changes when it focuses on gender, Wilson, Elizabeth, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; one might contrast her approach with those of Dennis, Richard, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (Cambridge, UK, 2008)Google Scholar; and Pinder, David, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.
3 Connolly, James, An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (Ithaca, NY, 2010)Google Scholar, xi.
4 Keller, Lisa, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York, 2009)Google Scholar, esp. 6. Keller considers tension between government authorities and private citizens over the right to use public spaces a “defining aspect of democracy.”
5 Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 8.
6 Addams, Jane, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902; Urbana, 2002), 98–99.Google Scholar
7 Howe, Frederic, The City, the Hope of Democracy (New York, 1905)Google Scholar, ch. 10.
8 Ibid., quotation 283–86.
9 Howe, Frederic, The British City, the Beginnings of Democracy (New York, 1907), 206.Google Scholar
10 Ibid., 209–10.
11 Howard, , Garden Cities of To-morrow (London, 1902), 115.Google Scholar
12 For an analysis of Howard's ideas on the self-governing city, Fishman, Robert, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and LeCorbusier (New York, 1977), esp. 48–49.Google Scholar
13 Howe, The City, 168.
14 Olmsted, Frederick Law Jr., “Introductory Address on City Planning” in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion (Boston, 1910), 19.Google Scholar
15 For example, Chicago Plan Commission, “Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Meeting of the Executive Committee of the Chicago Plan Commission,” Jan. 24, 1913, in folder 1913–1914, Chicago Plan Commission Collection, Chicago History Museum.
16 Toronto Civic Guild, “Report of Plan Sub-Committee” (1909), “A Plan for Toronto” (1911), and “Town Planning and Civic Improvement,” Monthly Bulletin, Jan. 1913, 3, Urban Affairs Library, Toronto.
17 Patrick Abercrombie, Sidney Kelly, and Arthur Kelly, Dublin of the Future: The New Town Plan—Being the Scheme Awarded the First Prize in the International Competition [prepared 1914, awarded 1916] (Dublin, 1922), quotations 3, 39, and 41, copy in Dublin City Archives, Pearse Street Library, Dublin.
18 P.C. Cowan, “Report on Dublin Housing” (1918), 19 for quotation, pamphlets collection, National Library of Ireland.
19 Adams, Thomas, “Town Planning in Greater London; Being an Address Delivered at a Meeting of the Town Planning Institute, London, May 15th, 1914,” Town Planning Review 5 (July 1914): 93, 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The 1911 report recommended just short of 100 miles of new roads and 25.5 miles of improved and widened roads. London Times, Feb. 10, 1911.
20 Crow, Arthur, “Housing and Town Re-planning,” pamphlet reprinted from Architects’ Law Reports and Review 4 (1909)Google Scholar; and Crow “Town Planning in Relation to Old and Congested Areas with Special Reference to London,” paper presented to Town Planning Conference of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Oct. 1910, London Metropolitan Archives, quotation 6. The written version included a map of the route, a list of all roads to be widened and new ones built, especially through the East End.
21 On Wright, Fishman, , Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, 92–93Google Scholar, 107, 125.
22 Quotations: Wilson, The Sphinx in the City, 104; and Wilson, , “Culture and Gender Concerns in Spatial Development” in Women in the City: Housing, Services, and the Urban Environment, ed. OECD Group on Urban Affairs (Paris, 1995), 43.Google Scholar
23 Greed, Clara, Women and Planning: Creating Gendered Realities (London, 1994)Google Scholar, quotation 51. Fainstein, Susan S., “Feminism and Planning: Theoretical Issues” in Gender and Planning, ed. Fainstein, Susan S. and Servon, Lisa J. (New Brunswisk, NJ, 2005), 120–38Google Scholar. On Le Corbusier's obsession with perfecting the city by eradicating its disorderly female characteristics, Hooper, Barbara, “Urban Space, Modernity, and Masculinist Desire: The Utopian Longings of Le Corbusier” in Embodied Utopias, ed. Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach, 55–78.Google Scholar
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26 Wise, Sarah, The Blackest Street: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London, 2008)Google Scholar, 259. Also, Steffel, Vladimir, “The Boundary Street Estate: An Example of Urban Redevelopment by the London County Council, 1889–1914,” Town Planning Review 47 (Apr. 1976): 161–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Knight, Louise, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago, 2005), 398–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
28 Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 7.
29 Howe, The City, 228, 230.
30 Ibid., 292. For an analysis that sees a similar understanding of the “civic” ideal in the early planning movement, Peterson, Jon, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar. Howe's allusion to medieval towns accorded exactly with nascent town planners’ idea of recreating the medieval town through garden cities and suburbs. See Unwin, Raymond, Town Planning in Practice (London, 1909)Google Scholar.
31 For a more extensive discussion of these elements, see Haar, Sharon, “The Hull House Settlement and the Study of the City” in Embodied Utopias, ed. Bingaman, Sanders, and Zorach, 99–115 (quotations 109, 111).Google Scholar
32 Jarvis, Kantor, and Cloke, Cities and Gender, 130.
33 Follett, Mary Parker, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (1918; University Park, 1998), 192–93.Google Scholar
34 The concept of lived democracy comes from the best book that I have read about Follett. Unfortunately it has never been translated from the original Italian into English: Baritono, Raffaella, La Democrazia Vissuta: Individualismo e Pluralismo nel Pensiero di Mary Parker Follett [Lived Democracy: Individualism and Pluralism in the Thought of Mary Parker Follett] (Torino, 2001)Google Scholar.
35 Follett, The New State, 240.
36 Jarvis, Cities and Gender, 131.
37 For example, Octavia Hill, “Four Years Management of a London Court,” Macmillan's Magazine, July 1869, repr. in Hill, The Homes of the London Poor (London, 1875), 28, 35.Google Scholar
38 Anderson, Anne and Darling, Elizabeth, “The Hill Sisters: Cultural Philanthropy and the Embellishment of Lives in late-Nineteenth-Century England” in Women and the Making of Built Space, ed. Darling and Whitworth, 33–50Google Scholar. Another Hill-restored group of buildings, on Ranston Street in Paddington, fronted on the street for ease of access, but this type of building also kept the street open to women.
39 For example, Alexandra College Magazine, June 1903, June 1910, National Library of Ireland, Dublin.
40 Livesey, Ruth, “Women Rent Collectors and the Rewriting of Space, Class and Gender in East London, 1870–1900” in Women and the Making of Built Space, ed. Darling and Whitworth, 94.Google Scholar
41 Mrs. Florence Conan of the Alexandra Guild testifying before a Dublin Tenement Housing Inquiry, Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, Nov. 22, 1913.
42 Richard Dennis argues that slum clearance was a manifestation of male reformers’ refusal to admit the existence of the larger social problems. If areas were designated as slums, they could be redeveloped so that the housing problem could be seen as “simply a collection of problem areas, not a fault of the structures of housing provision as a whole, let along an inevitable consequence of the economic system.” Dennis, “Modern London” in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, ed. Daunton, Martin (Cambridge, 2000), 3:112–13.Google Scholar
43 Greed, Women and Planning, 89.
44 Jarvis, Cities and Gender, 133.
45 Nettleford, J.S. et al. Town Planning in Theory and Practice: A Report of a Conference Arranged by the Garden City Association, London (London, 1907), 27Google Scholar; Ford, George B., “The Relation of the ‘Social’ to the ‘Architectural’ in Housing and Town Planning” in Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion (Boston, 1910)Google Scholar, 81.
46 On Kelley and Simkovitch, Spain, How Women Saved the City, 71.
47 Raymond Unwin, “Cottage Plans and Common Sense,” Fabian Tract 109 (1902), in Fabian Tracts pamphlet collection, Manuscripts and Archives, London School of Economics. In designing the Hampstead Garden Suburb, Unwin also planned a boundary wall to close it off from the outside. See Unwin, Raymond, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs (London, 1909), 163, for an illustration.Google Scholar
48 Quoted in Dennis, Richard, “Interpreting the Apartment House: Modernity and Metropolitanism in Toronto, 1900–1930,” Journal of Historical Geography 20 (July 1994): 312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
49 O'Rourke, The Dublin Civic Survey Report (1925), 16, Dublin City Archives.