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Planning theory and women's role in the city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Helen Meller
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Extract

Feminist historians have expended a good deal of energy on delineating the cultural concept of the Two Spheres This curious cultural phenomenon emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution, and caused people to believe that the world was divided into two to match the two sexes. The male part was the world of public affairs, commerce, business and, of course, the defence of the realm. The female centred on the private domain: home, family and children. The problem that this imposed on women has never yet been successfully resolved: the sexual division of labour and the domestic location of women's work. In Britain in the nineteenth century, as the population moved into the cities and standards of living rose (if patchily), the physical form of the modern urban environment took shape in ways which perpetuated the continuance of the Two Spheres. This was particularly true for middle-class women, whose lives in suburban retreats had little physical connection with the rest of the city. Of all the pressures which dictated the form of nineteenth-century cities, there was not one related to finding new ways for women to live in modern cities outside a rigid interpretation of the Two Spheres.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 17 , May 1990 , pp. 85 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes

1 The major theme of Davidoff, L. and Hall, C., Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987)Google Scholar, is the ‘separation of the spheres’ and the interpretation of that concept. The ‘Two Spheres’ is also closely related to ideals of femininity, a theme dealt with in a number of recent studies: see, for example, Burstyn, J., Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (1980)Google Scholar; Delamount, S. and Duffin, L. (eds), The Nineteenth Century Woman: Her Cultural and Physical World (1978)Google Scholar; Dyhouse, C., Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (1981)Google Scholar; Lewis, J. (ed.), Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (1986)Google Scholar; Rowbotham, J., Good Girls make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (1989)Google Scholar; Vicinus, M. (ed.), Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age and A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1972 and 1977).Google Scholar

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19 Ibid., 2.

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