aware of my body, and not in a good way. If the urbanite’s blasé attitude toward others is what allows each of us to maintain some sense of privacy in the crowd, its loss made me feel very public. I was embarrassed by my belly’s showy-ness, tackily thrusting my intimate biology into the civilized public sphere. I didn’t want to glow. I wanted to hide. I wasn’t trying to disguise my pregnancy, but I was overcome with an urge to modesty that no amount of feminist body positivity could shake. My friends loved to tease me about the number of crop tops in my wardrobe, but I could never bring myself to wear a shirt that exposed my belly even a little while pregnant. Was I trying to put a barrier between myself and the many strangers who felt comfortable commenting on or touching my body? Was it part of my perplexing embarrassment over being such an obviously biological animal? Had I unknowingly embraced the Cartesian mind-body split for so long that my body’s sudden assertiveness made me doubt everything I knew about myself?
Perhaps ironically, strangers’ fascination with my body didn’t translate into much of an uptick in urban courtesy. In fact, I sensed a constant, low-grade reminder that I was now different, Other, and out of place. This was most obvious to me on the Tube, where I was rarely offered a seat during my rush hour commute. Posh businessmen deliberately buried their faces in the broadsheets, pretending not to see me. One time I relinquished my seat to an even more pregnant woman before anyone took notice of either of us. Anna Quindlen tells an identical story about being pregnant in New York, offering her seat to a woman who “looked like she should have been on her way to the hospital.” “I love New York,” Quindlen writes, “but it’s a tough place to be pregnant…. There’s no privacy in New York; everyone is right up against everyone else and they all feel compelled to say what they think.”40 People who have been pregnant share these sorts of stories with a wry chuckle, like old war stories, as if they’re rights of passage when you’re pregnant in the city. As if it’s all to be expected for daring to leave your home with your messy, inconvenient body.
My efforts to reclaim the spirit of the flâneuse resumed after Maddy was born. Maddy would sleep for ages if she was strapped into a baby carrier, snug against my chest. I’d plot a route to a newly opened Starbucks with my trusted London A-Z map book and head out for a simple treat: a latté and fresh scenery. These breaks in the exhausting routine of feeding, rocking, bathing, and so on felt like a tiny bit of freedom. I almost remembered what it was to be a young person in the city before having a baby.
Sometimes these outings went well, sometimes not. My attempts to be the mommy flâneuse were continually interrupted by the messy biology of a newborn. Places that used to feel welcoming and comfortable now made me feel like an outsider, an alien with leaking breasts and a loud, smelly baby. It’s hard to play the detached observer when the fleshy, embodied acts of parenthood are on full display. I wanted to be indifferent about it all, believe me. While Maddy snoozed away I could almost pretend that I wasn’t seconds away from a wet disaster. When she woke, hungry or dirty, I scuttled off to the public washroom to ensure that no one had to bear witness to the natural realities of parenting.
I’d never realized how gutsy it was to do things like breastfeed in public. I knew intellectually that I was “allowed” to nurse my baby anywhere, but the thought made me cringe. The weird mix of reactions to my body that I’d experienced while pregnant taught me that I could never predict how I’d be made to feel. It was jarring to be revered and resented in equal measure. I was a divine figure in need of protection, but also out of place and taking up space in ways that make other people uncomfortable. The fact that news items about people being asked to leave public places while breastfeeding pop up on a regular basis—with breastfeeding explicitly protected by human rights laws in Canada—suggests that strong convictions about the proper place of breastfeeding parents remain in place.
When behaving correctly, keeping my inconvenient body contained, and parenting my baby in ways that satisfied dozens of strangers at once, I received smiles and assistance. The instant my presence became too big, too noisy, too embodied, I met angry glares, snide comments, and sometimes even physical aggression. There was the man who kept shoving me forward while in line at the grocery store. When I asked him to stop he told me to “get my damn stroller out of the way.” There was the woman on the incredibly crowded bus who called me a bad mother because Maddy accidentally stepped on her foot. There was the sales clerk in a Toronto department store who actually told me to wait while she finished serving a customer when I rushed up to the desk because Maddy had toddled off out of sight. Obviously she was found, but only thanks to another mom who rushed into action when she heard the panic in my voice.
This level of rudeness didn’t happen every day, but underlying all of this social hostility was the fact that the city itself, its very form and function, was set up to make my life shockingly difficult. I was accustomed to being aware of my environment in terms of safety, which had a lot more to do with who was in the environment, rather than the environment itself. Now, however, the city was out to get me. Barriers that my able-bodied, youthful self had never encountered were suddenly slamming into me at every turn. The freedom that the city had once represented seemed like a distant memory.
As I tried to navigate an unfamiliar set of everyday routines as a new mom, the city was a physical force I had to constantly struggle against. Wasn’t the city supposed to be the place where women could best juggle the demands of their double and triple days of social reproduction, paid work, school, and myriad other roles? Didn’t my PhD supervisor proclaim that a “woman’s place is in the city”?41 If that was true, why did every day feel like a fight against an enemy that was invisible yet all around me?
It’s true that I could walk to the grocery store, café, parks, and many other places I needed to access. I could take transit to school and the nearest subway stop was within walking distance. There were community centres and schools with programs for small children. Maddy’s day care was reasonably nearby. I could function without a car. Compared to the suburbs, this kind of urban density offered a lot more ways to manage parenting, grad school, and domestic responsibilities. In fact, what Gerda Wekerle (my supervisor) was responding to when she wrote “a woman’s place is in the city” in the 1980s was the nightmare of suburban living.
There is of course a long history of feminist critiques of the suburbs. Betty Friedan’s 1963 diagnosis of the “problem that has no name” included a scathing indictment of suburban life:
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’42
From The Stepford Wives to Desperate Housewives, Weeds to Mad Men, suburban life has generated endless stereotypes. The Valium-popping housewife, the overprotective mom, the housewife with a dark secret, etc. And there’s no small amount of things to critique in terms of lifestyle, gender roles, and racial and class inequality. But feminist geographers were also looking at the very material of the suburbs, their form, design, and architecture as foundational sources of the “problem that has no name.”
We take the suburbs largely for granted now as a kind of organic outgrowth of big cities and a result of a natural need for more space and bigger family homes. However, the suburbs are anything but natural. Suburban development fulfilled very specific social and economic agendas. From providing much-needed housing for returning soldiers and their growing families to giving a boost to the post-war manufacturing sector, the suburbs were an essential component of a plan to sustain economic growth, especially after World War II. In North America, government programs facilitating home ownership turned us into nations of home owners, tying workers to their mortgages in a move that some felt would produce a more conservative, and importantly, anti-communist society. The residential real
