everyday life, the statements “the city is not for women” and “a woman’s place is in the city” are both true. As Elizabeth Wilson attests, women have long flocked to city life despite its hostilities. She suggests that “there has perhaps been an overemphasis on the confinement of Victorian womanhood to the private sphere,” noting that even in this era of strict gender norms, some women were able to explore the city and take on new roles as public figures.16 Dangers be damned. The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities.
Less tangible, but no less important, are the psychic qualities of the city: anonymity, energy, spontaneity, unpredictability, and yes, even danger. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, heroine Lucy Snowe travels alone to London and as she dares “the perils of crossings” she experiences “perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure.”17 I’m not trying to say that women like being fearful, but that some of the pleasure of city life relies on its inherent unknowability and on one’s courage in braving that unknowability. In fact, unpredictability and disorder can come to represent the “authentically urban” to women who reject safe suburban conformity and repetitive rural rhythms.18 Of course, finding urban disorder exciting is a little easier if you have the means to retreat when you want to. In any case, fear of crime has not kept women from cities. However, it’s one of many factors that shape women’s urban lives in particular ways.
This book takes on women’s questions about the city, looking at the good and the bad, the fun and the frightening, in order to shake up what we think we know about the cities around us. To see the social relations of the city—across gender, race, sexuality, ability, and more—with fresh eyes. To spark discussion about other, less visible kinds of urban experiences. To open space for thinking creatively about what might generate a feminist city. To bring feminist geography into conversation with the everyday nitty gritty of trying to survive and thrive, struggle and succeed, in the city.
I was on my way to one of the big annual geography conferences in Chicago in 2004 when I read that long-time anti-feminist Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente had also “discovered” feminist geography.19 Since hating men and knowing your national capitals are clearly two totally different fields, who could believe that feminist geography was a legitimate subject? Wente used her incredulity to illustrate to her followers her regularly-recycled claim that the humanities and social sciences were worthless enterprises full of made-up disciplines and fake academics.
What the willfully ignorant Wente had no desire to understand was that geography adds a fascinating dimension to feminist analysis. Of course, you have to be willing to get beyond your middle school perception of geography: it’s not about colouring in maps or memorizing continents. Geography is about the human relationship to our environment, both human-built and natural. A geographic perspective on gender offers a way of understanding how sexism functions on the ground. Women’s second-class status is enforced not just through the metaphorical notion of “separate spheres,” but through an actual, material geography of exclusion. Male power and privilege are upheld by keeping women’s movements limited and their ability to access different spaces constrained. As feminist geographer Jane Darke says in one of my favourite quotes: “Any settlement is an inscription in space of the social relations in the society that built it…. Our cities are patriarchy written in stone, brick, glass and concrete.”20
Patriarchy written in stone. This simple statement of the fact that built environments reflect the societies that construct them might seem obvious. In a world where everything from medication to crash test dummies, bullet-proof vests to kitchen counters, smartphones to office temperatures, are designed, tested, and set to standards determined by men’s bodies and needs, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.21 The director of urban design for Toronto, Lorna Day, recently found that the city’s guidelines for wind effects assumed a “standard person” whose height, weight, and surface area corresponded to an adult male.22 You’d never think that gender bias influences the height and position of skyscrapers or the development of a wind tunnel, but there you have it.
What sometimes seems even less obvious is the inverse: that once built, our cities continue to shape and influence social relations, power, inequality, and so on. Stone, brick, glass, and concrete don’t have agency, do they? They aren’t consciously trying to uphold the patriarchy, are they? No, but their form helps shape the range of possibilities for individuals and groups. Their form helps keep some things seeming normal and right, and others “out of place” and wrong. In short, physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change.
The gendered symbolism of the urban built environment is one reminder of who built the city. Feminist architect Dolores Hayden’s explosively titled 1977 article “Skyscraper Seduction, Skyscraper Rape” rips into the male power and procreative fantasies embodied by the development of ever-taller urban structures. Echoing the usual male monuments to military might, the skyscraper is a monument to male corporate economic power. Hayden argues that the office tower is one more addition “to the procession of phallic monuments in history—including poles, obelisks, spires, columns and watchtowers,” as architects used the language of base, shaft, and tip and rendered upward-thrusting buildings ejaculating light into the night sky via spotlights.23 The phallic fantasy of the skyscraper, suggests Hayden, hides the reality of the violence of capitalism, made manifest in the deaths of construction workers, bankruptcies, and the hazards of fire, terrorism, and structural collapse. As feminist geographer Liz Bondi puts it, it’s not really about the symbolism of the phallus so much as its verticality is an icon of power via the “masculine character of capital.”24
The language of architecture draws on the idea that gender is a binary opposition, with different forms and features described as masculine or feminine. Bondi suggests that these codings of the built environment “interpret gender difference as ‘natural’ and thereby universalize and legitimize a particular version of gender differentiation.”25 Beyond specific architectural features, gender norms are further encoded through the separation of spaces of work and home, public and private. The continued underrepresentation of women in architectural and planning professions means that women’s experiences of and in these places are likely to be overlooked or based on outdated stereotypes. However, as Bondi notes, simply “adding” women to the profession or considering their experiences is inadequate on two fronts. Since women’s experiences are shaped by a patriarchal society, smoothing the rough edges of that experience via urban design doesn’t inherently challenge patriarchy itself. And second, assuming unity among women fails to account for other salient markers of social difference.
Historically, feminist geography—like academic feminism more widely—was concerned with “adding women” to a male-dominated discipline. The title of Janice Monk and Susan Hanson’s classic intervention from 1982 speaks loudly about the field’s biases: “On not excluding half of the human in human geography.”26 But the additive approach to addressing exclusion has always lacked transformative power.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Black and women of colour feminists like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and the women of the Combahee River Collective were challenging the mainstream women’s movement to come to terms with the different forms of oppression faced by women outside the white, heterosexual middle class. Their work led to the development of what we now call intersectional feminist theory, based on the term coined by Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 and further developed
