we’d found at a charity shop. It might as well have been a spaceship, that’s how out of place it was on our journey. That was the first and last time we used the pram. We learned that the only accessible way to navigate the city with a baby was with her in a carrier.
Once back in Toronto, Maddy was rapidly getting too big for the carrier. There was no way to avoid taking the stroller on the TTC. At the time, none of my local stations had elevators or even down escalators. Every time I wanted to go down the steps, I had to stand at the top and wait for someone to offer help. We’d awkwardly and somewhat unsafely lug the stroller, taking up way too much space and slowing everyone down. Once Maddy was big enough, I moved her into the most compact stroller possible, one light enough to hoist onto my hip. It wasn’t ideal, but better than the time a man insisted on helping me and ended up falling backwards down the steps. Luckily, he released his end of the stroller before he bumped down a dozen steps on his rear end. I was mortified, although he was ultimately unhurt. Young mother Malaysia Goodson wasn’t so lucky. She died after stumbling on the steps of a New York City subway station while carrying her daughter in a stroller. Although her death wasn’t a direct result of the fall, this dangerous moment highlights a “nightmare scenario” that parents risk everyday on inaccessible and crowded public transit systems.54
Architect and new mother Christine Murray asks “What would cities look like if they were designed by mothers?”55 Transit issues loom large in her discussion, as she recalls crying when her nearest Tube station was revamped without an elevator. She also laments the lack of space on buses for wheelchairs, connecting lack of accessibility for mothers to issues facing seniors and disabled people. Every aspect of public transit reminded me that I wasn’t the ideal imagined user. Stairs, revolving doors, turnstiles, no space for strollers, broken elevators and escalators, rude comments, glares: all of these told me that the city wasn’t designed with parents and children in mind. I sheepishly realized that until I faced these barriers, I’d rarely considered the experiences of disabled people or seniors who are even more poorly accommodated. It’s almost as though we’re all presumed to want or need no access to work, public space, or city services. Best to remain in our homes and institutions, where we belong.
The idea that the design, funding, and scheduling of mass transit systems are gender equality issues has seen little traction, despite transit being a major area of women’s urban activism. In 1976, women in the northern city of Whitehorse developed the Yukon’s first mass transit system (four minibuses) as a response to the lack of access to good paid employment that women faced in the cold, sprawling city.56 In 2019, young women from a slum resettlement colony in South Delhi recorded a rap song about their urban lives, tackling one of their biggest concerns: “the absence of a safe and affordable commute.”57 Mostly, those who run mass transit systems have shown a willful ignorance about women’s needs. When a pregnant commuter traveling to and from work in London in 2014 was forced to sit on the floor when passengers refused her a seat despite her direct request, she complained to the rail company. They suggested that if she felt unwell she could pull the emergency cord or simply avoid travel during rush hour.58
When we moved back to Toronto, high rents pushed me further out of the central city than I would have liked, but at least I had some access to shopping and services in my neighbourhood, right? True, but what I started to glean was that these conveniences stemmed partly from the fact that my neighbourhood was in the early stages of gentrification. Gentrification is basically the process whereby working class, lower income neighbourhoods get taken over by middle-class households and businesses. There are a lot of causes and forms of gentrification, but my neighbourhood—the Junction—was experiencing a kind of start-stop slow motion transition when I first moved there in early 2000. My local “amenities” included a Blockbuster Video and a No Frills grocery store. There were a few playgrounds but at least one was often filled with trash and needles. Still, I could walk to the main commercial strip for most of our basic needs, and things weren’t yet too expensive.
Early feminist writing on gentrification noted that a “back to the city” movement for middle-class families works like a geographic fix for the problems women face juggling work and home.59 As women entered the higher-paying professional workforce in ever-greater numbers, postponed the age of marriage and child-bearing, and even opted out of the heterosexual family altogether, they sought urban environments that could accommodate their needs and provide the necessary services. As feminist geographer Winifred Curran puts it, “women were not only potential beneficiaries of gentrification, but drivers of the process” as well.60 Theorists predicted that given these gendered trends in the workforce, family, and housing, major shifts in the land use patterns of cities would surely follow. However, no fundamental changes have occurred that actually alter the city in ways that serve women’s equality. Indeed, we could argue that many changes, including widespread gentrification, have made urban environments less resourceful for the majority of women.
Gentrifying neighbourhoods attract amenities that serve middle-class parents: clean parks, cafés, bookstores, places to buy fresh and wholesome food, etc. They’re often located near good transit routes and centred around good schools, especially in the U.K. and U.S. According to Curran,
Gentrification offered a market-oriented, individualized, privatized spatial solution to the problem of work-life balance. With urban planning failing to catch up to the lived experiences of urban dwellers, those who could afford to found more advantageous spaces in which to attempt the balance, “rediscovering” inner city neighbourhoods which offered easy access to downtown jobs and other amenities.61
But Curran goes on to note that even the class-based advantages brought by gentrification don’t fundamentally disrupt either the gendered division of domestic labour or the urban infrastructure designed to accommodate the movement and work patterns of men. She argues, and I agree: “the narrative of urban living for the affluent tends to minimize, or ignore altogether, the role of care and family in urban design.”62 The lack of play spaces, preschools, and sometimes even grocery stores in proximity to new urban housing developments such as condominiums suggests that planners and policy-makers are still not interested in providing workable/liveable spaces for families, even those who can afford to live in these shiny new urban habitats.63
Care work is still very much an afterthought in cities, and gentrification doesn’t suddenly make things easier, especially for the majority of women for whom the “amenities” of gentrification are out of reach. In my experience those amenities are a bit of a double-edged sword when coupled with the social trend that some have called the “gentrification of parenting.” This concept builds on the idea of “intensive mothering,” a term coined by sociologist Sharon Hays that she defines as “child centred, expert guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive, and financially expensive.”64 These accelerated expectations around the amount of dedicated, undivided attention parents are supposed to provide are unprecedented. As maternal scholars like Andrea O’Reilly argue, intensive mothering and a new “mystique of motherhood” emerged just in time to add fuel to the fiery backlash toward women’s increased social, sexual, and economic independence in the 1970s and 1980s.65
This intensification manifests in a variety of conspicuous consumption practices and aesthetics that some have called the “gentrification of parenting.” The norms and cultural signifiers of good parenting have been gentrified as they’re increasingly defined by the particular product brands, styles, and kinds of activities purchased and practiced by middle and upper class urban households. This plays out in the urban environment as middle-class parents demand and draw resources to their neighbourhoods and provide a market for upscale shopping and carefully curated child-centred activities. 66 The amount of time, money, and emotional labour required to do this parenting work is simply not available to most families and mothers in particular.
Reminiscing
