Gendering Spaces in European Towns, 1500-1914

Elaine Chalus, Marjo Kaartinen, Elaine Chalus, Marjo Kaartinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317976486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect cultural and intellectual currents, prevailing economic climates and unresolved tensions. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. They are also always gendered and contested spaces.

This volume, the last from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) project, approaches life in the European town over time and across class and national boundaries. Through contextualized case studies, it provides scholars and students with new research—snapshots—of contemporary physical and built environments that explores how contemporary urban residents experienced and deployed gendered urban spaces over an important period of modernization.

1 Conceived, Constructed and Contested Spaces

Gender and European Towns—Introduction

Elaine Chalus and Marjo Kaartinen

As historians who live in, as well as study, European towns, we know that towns are imagined, lived and experienced, as much as they are conceived and constructed. They reflect the cultural and intellectual currents of the day, the prevailing economic climates and the unresolved tensions in the lives of their inhabitants. They are physical entities, shaped by topography, time and technology, as well as social and spatial constructs. As such, they are also always gendered and contested spaces. Gender consciously or unconsciously informs the built environment; it underlies the opportunities for, and meanings of, movement through locations; it is a constituent component of street culture and neighbourhood life; and it plays an important part in the setting of boundaries, be they personal or collective, public or private, social or political, formal or informal, licit or illicit.¹

This volume, the last to emerge from the Gender in the European Town (GENETON) network, reflects a series of discussions and collaborations that brought many of us back, repeatedly, to considerations of how urban spaces, places and environments were gendered. We approached life in the modernizing European town from differing historical approaches and from a number of different national perspectives. The result is a collection of contextualized case studies that dovetails with, and augments, those we commissioned for the ‘Space, Place and Environment’ section of Deborah Simonton, et al., eds, The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience (2017).

The late Alex Cowan, to whom this book is dedicated and whose untimely death in 2012 robbed us of a valued friend, editor and contributor, did much to inform our thinking in both of these projects. Alex’s interest in the ways that gender and space informed each other in urban settings emerged primarily from his detailed research into early-modern Venice. It was developed through several key publications, including his 2007 books, Marriage, Manners and Mobility in Early Modern Venice and (co-edited with Jill Steward) The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500; and, most notably, his final two articles, ‘Gossip and Street Culture in Early Modern Venice’ (2008) and ‘Seeing is Believing: Urban Gossip and the Balcony in Early Modern Venice’ (2011). These last in particular grappled with the multiple uses to which liminal spaces such as windows, doorways and balconies were put.²

Our volume engages, metaphorically and at times literally, with Alex’s challenge to historians: ‘to raise our heads above street level and eavesdrop on the conversations which took place on the edges of the street as well as in the center’.³ The essays that follow ‘eavesdrop’ on the urban past through detailed case studies that stretch across Europe, extending from gendered examinations of illicit trade in late seventeenth-century Lyon and elite architecture in eighteenth-century Stockholm, through commercial urbanization in eighteenth-century Aberdeen and Odense, to the implications of industrialization and growth in Moscow in the early twentieth century. They consider, among other things, questions of male and female agency and actions, the operation of elite sociability, examples of intimate and community violence, and reflections upon forced political migration and divided allegiances. The result is a multi-layered picture of vibrant—even at times turbulent—urban spaces and the ways that they were used and experienced by contemporaries. They demonstrate not only how the spatial boundaries between and within streets, shops and homes were blurred by usage and ambiguity, but also how this indeterminacy inflects our understanding of the gendering of space itself in the early-modern town. On one level, they further nuance historians’ ongoing revision of notions of separate spheres—particularly of domestic space as female and public space as male. On another level, however, they serve to remind us of the powerful relationship between place and space, and the ways in which what is conceived may be appropriated, contested, subverted and shaped by individuals and groups. This process of purposing and repurposing is continuous; one need only look above the shop fronts in many modern European towns to hear the whispers of their gendered pasts.

Reflecting on the Spatial Turn

Over the past two decades, since the emergence of the spatial turn, spatial research and analysis has informed the thinking of—among others—historians, geographers, anthropologists, literary critics, artists, architects, sociologists and political scientists. They have interrogated and explored the concept of ‘space’, often in conjunction with its relationship to place, time, gender or power in quest of a more comprehensive, as well as a more subtly shaded, understanding of individual and collective actions and identities. In so doing, they have also broadened and deepened our understanding of the factors affecting the physical, material and cultural development of specific locations.

This disciplinary diversity speaks both to a breadth of applications and interpretations, and to the slipperiness of space as a concept. Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne addressed this specifically in their ‘A Historical Introduction to the “Spatial Turn” ’ in 2013.⁴ They noted the particular value of considerations of space in advancing synchronic and diachronic perspectives in historical analysis.⁵ The synchronic power of space as a category of analysis lies in its ability to provide a more precise understanding of simultaneity: ‘At any one time, members of given societies diverge in their activities, possessions, backgrounds, networks and imaginations, placing them—even when they meet face-to-face—in overlapping yet idiosyncratically constituted worlds of their own.’⁶ These insights in turn reveal more comprehensive, if often also more complex and contradictory understandings of the past. Space also encourages historians to think diachronically, across time, underlining the importance of the relationship between space and time. Most importantly, however, Kümin and Usborne argued that the spatial turn reminds historians of the importance of historical context. Our modern understanding of space, as ‘territorial, measurable, secular and abstract’, is not universal, but the result of ‘specific historical processes’.⁷

As gender and urban historians, our understanding of space as a category of analysis has been shaped by the thinking of many leading writers: Henri Lefebvre, Lucien Febvre, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Doreen Massey, Shirley Ardener and Hannah Moore, to name only a few.⁸ Following Lefebvre, Bourdieu and Febvre, we understand space to be constructed socially and, through labelling and habitus, to play an active part in the creation of social identity. Thus, space is a cultural experience, something that is located ‘between the individual and the environment’.⁹ For Febvre, space is essentially social and shared; it receives its meanings through various social practices. Social space is manifold: because space is socially constructed, it is dynamic; there are always many social spaces in one conceived space. It is also intimately bound up with place.¹⁰ As Edward Casey reminds us, we are place-bound: ‘we are placelings, and our very perceptual apparatus, our sensing body, reflects the kind of places we inhabit’.¹¹ Michel de Certeau has defined space as ‘a practiced place’, created through human agency and action by the coming together of a variety of factors at a given moment. He opposed the potential transience of space to place, which he understood to be stable or static—concrete, discernible. The relationship between space and place is complex, however, not reducible to a simple active/passive binary.¹² Here, Lloyd Kermode’s idea of ‘accretion’ is useful. Kermode views place and space operating in a symbiotic relationship, with one or the other emerging as dominant in differing circumstances, but with each supporting and requiring the other: ‘If one becomes the other, it is not so much in the sense of transforming as it is in the sense of accreting, producing either interesting contradictory layers of meaning or complementary stratifications over time.’¹³

The geographer Doreen Massey shares this notion of ‘becoming’. Space, for her, is always becoming, never fixed, never complete, especially in ever-changing urban settings. Space is instead marked by ‘simultaneous multiplicity’ and inherent instability: spaces cross-cut, intersect and/or align with each other; they also exist in ‘paradox or antagonism’.¹⁴ Consequently, time is integral to her conceptualization of space, and space-time to the arrangement and understanding of social relations. The view, then, is of space-time as a configuration of social relations within which the specifically spatial may be conceived of as an inherently dynamic simultaneity. Moreover, since social relations are inevitably and everywhere imbued with power and meaning and symbolism, this view of the spatial is as an ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification.¹⁵

For Massey, like Lefebvre, space has a history.¹⁶ It is also saturated with gender. Her ground-breaking essay, ‘A Woman’s Place’, written with Linda McDowell and first published in 1984, demonstrated both simultaneity and divergence in the construction of gender relations in four economically and geographically disparate locations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.¹⁷ Not only did it pointedly reveal that ‘what it means to be masculine in the Fens is not the same as in Lancashire’, but it also called attention to the important combination of geography, historical economic experience and customary practice in establishing location-specific understandings of femininity and women’s place in society.¹⁸

The gendered dimension of urban history and the study of urban space both have long individual pedigrees. This collection reflects recent interest in the way that each informs the other and builds upon important research done by scholars as diverse as Shirley Ardener in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (1993), Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt in Gender, Work and Space (1995), Judith N. DeSena in Gender in an Urban World (2008), and Laura Gowing in ‘The Freedom of the Streets’ (2000). It also serves as a useful complementary work on gender and space in the pre-modern city featured in Lin Foxhall and Gabriele Neher’s special issue, Gender and the City Before Modernity (2011). Most recently, it expands upon articles included in our sister publication, Deborah Simonton et al. (eds), The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience (2017).¹⁹

Overview

The chapters in this volume serve as snapshots in time and place. They extend across an exciting period of historical change, one that is marked personally by the emergence of individualism, socially by the shift from a society of ranks and orders to a society stratified by class, economically by rising commercialization, industrialization and consumerism, and politically by the emergence of the nation state with its concomitantly uneven engagement with notions of citizenship and democracy. All of this takes place, developmentally, against a backdrop of urbanization and the growing hegemony of urban life, albeit to varying degrees and at different points in time across Europe.

The chapters discuss the ways that gender, place and space operated to shape, reflect and facilitate the experience of the town for individuals, households and groups. They remind us that place, form and function mattered. Towns with specific functions—such as spa and resort towns, market or port towns, regional or national capitals—might be architecturally as well as materially gendered and spaced. Similarly, the physicality and proximity of discrete communities within towns—be they tradesmen and artisans, soldiers and sailors or refugees and immigrants—could encourage the growth of community or exacerbate personal tensions and political divisions. Towns offered opportunities to, and enforced constraints upon, their inhabitants.

The chapters in this volume have been divided into two parts. Those in Part I concentrate upon conceived and constructed spaces, whereas those in Part II focus upon contested spaces. This is not to suggest a hard-and-fast separation between these subjects, or to deny overlap between them. Instead, the two sections call attention to different aspects of urban development as well as differential rates of development; in providing snapshots of the multiplicity of ways that residents of early-modern towns understood, adapted and used the physical and built environment, the chapters explore the gendered implications of urban change and return repeatedly to the importance of class in shaping contemporary experiences of the town.

This gendered, class-related understanding of the town serves as the focus of the chapters by Johanna Ilmakunnas, Deborah Simonton and Anna Mazanik. Ilmakunnas examines the eighteenth-century Stockholm townhouse of the aristocratic von Fersens, one of Sweden’s leading social and political families. Her careful analysis reveals their appropriation and adaptation of French rococo style and décor—architecture, distribution of rooms, interior décor and furnishings—to make a statement of Swedish aristocratic power and fashionable sociability. While the layout of the Fersens’ townhouse contained gendered spaces for the master and mistress of the house, with greater degrees of luxury and comfort in the female public rooms, Ilmakunnas suggests that there was a complementarity between the male and female spaces that underlines their shared strategies of sociability and political ambition. In particular, she points to the importance of the dining room as a ‘pivotal’ space for mixed-sex socializing, where both the host and hostess could make use of food, furnishings and entertainment to display their social and political importance.

Place and display were also important to eighteenth-century bourgeois food and print traders, as studied by Simonton in two important eighteenth-century mercantile towns, Odense and Aberdeen. The men and women involved in these trades tended to locate their premises on important urban arterial routes, where they made use of locations, premises and advertising to claim space physically as well as imaginatively. Simonton draws our attention to the buildings themselves in which printing houses, bakeries, inns and kros (Danish inns offering food and sociability largely for men, as well as temporary lodgings) were situated, in order to look at the relationship between material culture, business structure and commercial purpose. In so doing, she highlights women’s commercial agency and participation in the urban economy, as well as the importance of families in constructing urban commercial milieus and spaces.

Mazanik moves forward in time to consider the unusual gendered urbanization of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Conceived, Constructed and Contested Spaces: Gender and European Towns—Introduction
• Part I Conceived and Constructed Spaces
• Part II Contested Spaces
• List of Contributors
• Index