Navigating Gender and Space in the Town: Place, Identity and Traversing the Town

Gender is fundamental to how towns shaped themselves. Women were often, not always, the majority, which had implications for how they inserted themselves in and contributed to shaping the identity of towns. Similarly, where men predominated, their experience and the character of the town could vary appreciably. Gender tensions, over work and political rights for example, influenced formal and informal urban economies and polity. Economic, political and social transitions through networks, global exchanges, imperial and colonial exploits had important implications for both the character of the urban and perceptions of gender. Simultaneously, gender shaped urban culture. Historians interrogating femininity and masculinity have expanded our understanding of gender dynamics in the urban world, and furthermore recognised the kaleidoscope of sexual identities in society. Gender relations vary over space and time and are not the same from one city to another. Differences of race and ethnicity further complicate the picture. This chapter examines shifts in gender from a bourgeois ideal to a contemporary vision articulated in a radically changed urban world, where the vote is nominally universal, where equal pay and equal opportunity are mantras for a ‘modern’ democratic city. Transitions were not straightforward and there was no continuous road to modernity.