Feminist City. Leslie Kern

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СКАЧАТЬ the Industrial Revolution, European cities grew quickly and brought a chaotic mix of social classes and immigrants to the streets. The Victorian social norms of the time included strict boundaries between classes and a firm etiquette designed to protect the purity of high status white women. This etiquette was fractured by the increased urban contact between women and men, and between women and the city’s great seething masses. “The gentleman and, worse still, the gentlewoman were forced to rub shoulders with the lower orders and be buffeted and pushed with little ceremony or deference,” writes cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson.¹ The “contested terrain” of Victorian London had opened space for women to “claim themselves as part of a public,” especially with respect to debates about safety and sexual violence, explains historian Judith Walkowitz.² However, this chaotic transition time meant it was increasingly difficult to discern status and a lady on the streets was at risk of the ultimate insult: being mistaken for a “public woman.”

      This threat to the supposedly natural distinctions of rank and the shakiness of barriers of respectability meant that for many commentators of the time, urban life itself was a threat to civilization. “The condition of women,” explains Wilson, “became the touchstone for judgments on city life.”³ Women’s gradually expanding freedoms were thus met with moral panic over everything from sex work to bicycles. The countryside along with the newly expanding suburbs would provide a suitable retreat for the middle and upper classes and most importantly, safety and continued respectability for women.

      While some women needed to be protected from the city’s messy disorder, other women were in need of control, re-education, and perhaps even banishment. Growing attention to city life made the conditions of the working class more visible and increasingly unacceptable to the middle class. Who better to blame than women, who had come to cities to find work in factories and domestic service, thus turning the family “upside down,” according to Engels. Women’s participation in paid labour meant some small amount of independence and of course less time for domestic responsibilities within their own homes. Poor women were cast as domestic failures whose inability to keep clean homes was to blame for the “demoralization” of the working class. This demoralization expressed itself through vice and other kinds of problematic private and public behaviours. All of this was viewed as a deeply unnatural state of affairs.

      Of course, the greatest social evil was that of prostitution, which had the potential to destroy the family, shake the foundations of society, and spread disease. In the pre-germ theory understanding of the time, disease was believed to be spread by an airborne miasma carried by noxious sewer odours. The concept of a moral miasma emerged as well: the idea that one could be infected by depravity via sheer proximity to those who carried it. Writers of the time were scandalized by the common presence of “streetwalkers” who openly plied their trade, tempting good men into a world of vice. Women were also “constantly exposed to temptation, and, once ‘fallen’, a woman was doomed, many reformers believed, to a life of increasing degradation and an early and tragic death.”⁴

      The solution proposed by many, including Charles Dickens, was for fallen women to emigrate to the colonies where they might marry one of many surplus settler men and be restored to respectability. Out here, the need to protect white women settlers from the menace of the “native” provided one rationale for the containment and elimination of Indigenous populations from urbanizing areas. Popular novels of the day depicted sensational stories of kidnap, torture, rape, and forced marriage of white women by marauding, vengeful “savages.” These new fortified settler cities would mark the transition from frontier to civilization and the purity and safety of white women would complete the metamorphosis.

      On the flip side, Indigenous women were seen as threats to this urban transformation. Their bodies carried the capacity to reproduce the “savagery” that colonizers sought to contain. They also held important positions of cultural, political, and economic power in their communities. Stripping Indigenous women of this power by imposing European patriarchal family and governance systems while simultaneously dehumanizing Indigenous women as primitive and promiscuous laid the groundwork for the legal and geographic processes of dispossession and displacement.⁵ Thus, the degradation and stigmatization of Indigenous women were part of the urbanization process. Given the extraordinary rates of violence against Indigenous women and girls today in settler colonial cities, it’s clear that these attitudes and practices have had lasting, devastating legacies.

      Fast forward to today: efforts to control women’s bodies to advance certain kinds of city improvement agendas are far from over. In very recent history we’ve seen the forced or coerced sterilization of women of colour and Indigenous women who receive social assistance or are seen as dependent on the state in some way. The racist stereotype of the Black “welfare queen” was circulated as part of the narrative of failing cities in the 1970s and 1980s. This has been connected to moral panics over teen pregnancy with their assumptions that teen moms will join the rolls of said welfare queens and produce criminally-disposed children. Contemporary movements to abolish sex work have been re-labelled as anti-trafficking campaigns with trafficking cast as a new form of sexualized urban threat. Unfortunately, sex workers who aren’t trafficked are accorded little respect or agency under this new agenda.⁶ Anti-obesity campaigns target women as individuals and as mothers, with their bodies and their children’s bodies viewed as symptoms of modern urban issues such as car dependency and fast food.

      In short, women’s bodies are still often seen as the source or sign of urban problems. Even young white women having babies have been villainized as the culprits of gentrification, while proponents of gentrification blame single mothers of colour and immigrant women for reproducing urban criminality and slowing down urban “revitalization.” There seems to be no end to the ways in which women can be linked to urban social concerns.

      While I concede that some of the more exaggerated Victorian’s fears about purity and cleanliness have lessened, women still experience the city through a set of barriers–physical, social, economic, and symbolic–that shape their daily lives in ways that are deeply (although not only) gendered. Many of these barriers are invisible to men, because their own set of experiences means they rarely encounter them. This means that the primary decision-makers in cities, who are still mostly men, are making choices about everything from urban economic policy to housing design, school placement to bus seating, policing to snow removal with no knowledge, let alone concern for, how these decisions affect women. The city has been set up to support and facilitate the traditional gender roles of men and with men’s experiences as the “norm,” with little regard for how the city throws up roadblocks for women and ignores their day-to-day experience of city life. This is what I mean by the “city of men.”

WHO WRITES THE CITY?

      In the midst of working on this book, I was uncharacteristically excited to receive my glossy University of Toronto alumni magazine because this time the cover story was The Cities We Need.⁷ The current president of U of T is an urban geographer, so I had high hopes. Inside were four articles about urban “needs:” afford-ability, accessibility, sustainability, and more fun. Great topics. But each article was written by a middle-aged white man. Most of the experts cited by the authors were men, including the ubiquitous Richard Florida, whose outsized influence on urban policy around the world through his (self-confessed) deeply-flawed creative class paradigm might in fact be to blame for many of the current affordability problems plaguing cities like Vancouver, Toronto, and San Francisco. I’d like to say I was surprised or disappointed, but resigned is probably the best word. As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed cleverly points out, “Citationality is another form of academic relationality. White men is reproduced as a citational relational. White men cite other white men: it is what they have always done … White men as a well-trodden path; the more we tread that way the more we go that way.”⁸ Urban scholarship and planning has been “going that way” for a good long while.

      I’m СКАЧАТЬ