Constructive Feminism

Women's Spaces and Women's Rights in the American City

Daphne Spain

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501704123
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Constructive Feminism, Daphne Spain examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism's second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the women's movement of the 1970s in the context of other social movements that have changed the use of urban space, Spain argues that reform feminists used the legal system to end the mandatory segregation of women and men in public institutions, while radical activists created small-scale places that gave women the confidence to claim their rights to the public sphere.Women's centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters established feminist places for women's liberation in Boston, Los Angeles, and many other cities. Unable to afford their own buildings, radicals adapted existing structures to serve as women's centers that fostered autonomy, health clinics that promoted reproductive rights, bookstores that connected women to feminist thought, and domestic violence shelters that protected their bodily integrity. Legal equal opportunity reforms and daily practices of liberation enhanced women's choices in education and occupations. Once the majority of wives and mothers had joined the labor force, by the mid-1980s, new buildings began to emerge that substituted for the unpaid domestic tasks once performed in the home. Fast food franchises, childcare facilities, adult day centers, and hospices were among the inadvertent spatial consequences of the second wave.

Chapter 1

Feminist Practice

Social Movements and Urban Space

Social movements on behalf of marginalized people in the United States have been the engines for significant progress toward a just society. They take shape when one or more highly visible advocates (Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, in the case of postwar feminism) identifies an injustice and brings it to public attention; they gain strength when grassroots activists engage in collective action.¹ New spatial institutions became a hallmark of the Second Wave; creating them was a practice feminists inherited from US social movements that preceded them. Meaningful spaces, both religious and secular, sheltered disenfranchised groups while they gained the momentum to fight for their rights.

A long-standing scholarly emphasis on ideology has been augmented by the recognition that social movements also depend on a common identity as a basis for action. This distinction differentiates “old” from “new” social movements. “Old movements” are based on economic and class interests that mobilize participants to address injustices through a shared ideology, while “new movements” emphasize a common identity.² Second Wave feminism incorporated both. On the one hand, radical feminists proposed that women were a class, thereby centering them squarely in a Marxist ideology.³ Other feminists underscored formerly weak dimensions of identity, such as sexual preference, as a common bond. Developing positive identities requires members to reject the dominant, oppressive society and create their own values and structures.⁴ At its extreme, this leads to lesbians creating male-free communities. Some feminists used disruptive tactics to refute old identities.⁵ In 1968 the New York Radical Women staged guerilla theater actions at the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City. To protest women’s being judged only by their looks, about 150 demonstrators crowned a sheep as Miss America, then tossed their bras, high-heeled shoes, girdles, and hair curlers into a “freedom trash can.” They never burned the contents, but the media gleefully portrayed feminists as “bra burners” ever after.⁶

According to the sociologists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, mass defiance is most disruptive when protesters withdraw a crucial contribution from the institution that depends on it; they have their greatest political impact when powerful groups have large stakes in the disrupted institution. Those in power must also possess resources to grant if the protesters are to be satisfied.⁷ This theory was translated into practice when Second Wave feminists challenged the very institution of marriage, urging wives to demand that their husbands help with housekeeping and child care. Release from sole responsibility for domestic tasks, the thinking went, would enable women to establish full public citizenship. Men were less enthusiastic; it would be hard to overstate their investment in traditional marriage. Their ability to earn a living depended heavily on women’s unpaid work at home. And in the late 1970s most people in the United States supported that arrangement. National opinion polls revealed that approximately two-thirds of men and women agreed that it was “much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.”⁸ Feminists thus faced a skeptical audience when they tried to convince women that there were alternatives to marriage and the typical division of household labor. Eventually, though, feminists’ attitudes began to permeate society. By 1986 about one-half of women and men believed that wives should care for the home while men earned a living outside it.⁹

Such significant social change required feminists to create places where women could learn to demand it. A long line of social movements set the example. The abolition, suffrage, temperance, settlement house, and civil rights movements all changed the use of urban space. The Second Wave was next in line.

Historical Precedents

Social movements almost always alter the use of space, inevitably producing conflict in the process. Changes may be deliberate or unintentional, and they include both the destruction of existing places and the creation of new ones. Abolition is a prime example.

From the mid-eighteenth century until the Civil War, slave markets were central features in southern cities like New Orleans, Louisiana; Richmond, Virginia; and Washington, DC. Richmond’s flourishing slave trade between the 1830s and the 1860s spawned a dense network of auction houses, slave jails, and auxiliary businesses in the downtown commercial district.¹⁰ During the same era, abolitionists and African American ministers created safe havens in churches and homes along the Underground Railroad for slaves escaping the South. The black church was central to the “geography of resistance” developed by African Americans in search of freedom; it served as the black community’s political and social gathering place as well as its spiritual center.¹¹

Bishop Richard Allen, the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination, was known as the “Apostle of Freedom” because he and his wife, Sarah, used the basement of their Philadelphia AME church to shelter escaped slaves; they also opened their home to fugitives. In 1822 the minister William Paul Quinn was inspired by Allen to found the Bethel AME Church in the heart of Pittsburgh, which soon became a station on the Underground Railroad, as did the Cincinnati AME church. Across the country, black congregations operated way stations, with ministers as their active agents. Many destinations in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio eventually became free black communities for those who could make it that far.¹² When the Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery in 1863, slave markets were demolished, and the stops on the Underground Railroad were returned to their original uses.

A significant geographic change also occurred, over many years, as a result of abolition. The vast majority of former slaves lived in the rural South and had inadequate resources to leave immediately after being freed. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, African Americans began an exodus to Northern and Midwestern cities. They were encouraged to move by the nation’s best-selling black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, which called for a “Great Northern Drive” to begin on May 15, 1917. Within a few decades, the majority of African Americans lived outside the South.¹³ If one counts migration as spatial redistribution, the exodus of such an enormous number of blacks from one part of the country to another is indeed a significant spatial change wrought by a social movement.

Abolition laid the political groundwork for the suffrage movement.¹⁴ Since suffragists could demonstrate for their rights in ways that slaves could not, white women had more power to appropriate public space.

Known as the First Wave by today’s scholars, the suffrage movement began with the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. The abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Each had accompanied her husband, and both were prevented from speaking at the all-male convention. Angered, Stanton and Mott vowed to hold a women’s rights conference when they returned home.¹⁵ Exclusion from the all-male space in London motivated Stanton and Mott to create the all-female space of the Seneca Falls Convention at the Wesleyan Church, where they participated in the writing of the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which included the demand for woman suffrage.¹⁶

The First Wave encouraged women to appear together in public. Suffragists gathered at conventions and paraded in the streets as forms of political activity. Stanton remembered, “I could not see what to do or where to begin—my only thought was a public meeting for protest and discussion.”¹⁷ Stanton, Mott, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown mobilized other women with their lyceum lectures, conventions, and legislative committee hearings.¹⁸ On March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, more than five thousand suffragists took to the streets of Washington, DC, on behalf of their cause. Mobs heckled, tripped, and shoved the women, sending more than one hundred to the hospital and injuring hundreds more. Media outrage over the violence was so great that the Senate convened hearings the following week. One of the senators reminded the protesters that “there would be nothing like this happen [sic] if you would stay at home,” but the march earned public sympathy that would eventually translate into support for the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote.¹⁹ Women understood the power of their unprecedented visibility in the city.

Suffrage was controversial because it demanded rights for women. Temperance, though, was a respectable endeavor for women because it revolved around church and home. By the end of the nineteenth century most suffragists were supporters of temperance, and most temperance advocates were in favor of suffrage.²⁰

The temperance movement had a specific spatial agenda—to close saloons. This was the means to save the family from the moral perils of alcoholism. Temperance was also an indirect avenue for improving women’s rights. Since wives had no control over their husband’s wages, men could drink away their paychecks at the corner bar. The loss of family income meant mothers and children went hungry and unclothed. Drunken men might also beat their wives and children. It was easy to make the connections between alcohol, poverty, and violence. Eliminating alcohol would go a long way, the thinking went, toward ensuring women the rights to food, shelter, and physical safety.²¹

To this end, the American Temperance Society, including both women and men, was formed in 1826.²² In 1879 women formed their own organization, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). With Frances Willard as its president for nearly two decades, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization of its day.²³ Across the nation, members of the WCTU marched from their churches to saloons, singing and praying for barkeepers to shutter their doors.²⁴ Closing a bar did more than eliminate a source of alcohol. The nineteenth-century saloon was a social center where men could play cards or pool, talk about politics and sports, find a job, or spend time while unemployed. The saloon also filled more basic needs. It had a public bathroom, was often the only place to get a drink of water, and served “free lunches” for the price of a beer.²⁵ Most women, of course, never entered a saloon; it was a male-only space. The shock of seeing women kneeling and praying in a barroom was one of the WCTU’s most effective strategies in its crusade to banish alcohol.²⁶

While saloons were being closed, members of the WCTU were opening new places in the city. Willard issued guidelines about how to set up local headquarters, temperance coffee rooms, Friendly Inns (a type of settlement house), and homes for inebriate women. Spaces that already existed were put to new uses. The coffee rooms were to include reading areas, and the Friendly Inns established manufacturing shops in which men could trade their labor for food and lodging.²⁷ Temperance women gained victory when Prohibition became national law in 1920—the same year women won the right to vote. Although Prohibition was repealed in 1933, women had proved they could exert political pressure and modify the urban landscape, even without the vote.²⁸

The settlement house movement was a similar effort, not only fighting for the rights of women and children, but also adapting existing urban space for its purposes. Drawing inspiration from London’s male-only Toynbee Hall, Jane Addams and other college-educated white women feminized the US version of the settlement house movement at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1889 Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull-House settlement on Halsted Street in Chicago in a home originally built in 1856 for Charles J. Hull. The house had been used as a secondhand furniture store and as an old-age home before Addams and Starr rented it from Hull’s niece, Helen Culver. In the next twenty years Hull-House expanded from one building to thirteen.²⁹ It became the most famous in a network of settlement houses, including Hiram House in Cleveland and Denison House in Boston, which eventually numbered more than four hundred across the country.³⁰

The social settlement was a new use of space in the city. Residents appropriated existing places, most often in a converted home or row house, to serve as a “neighborhood living room” wh...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Spatial Consequences of the Second Wave
• 1. Feminist Practice: Social Movements and Urban Space
• 2. Women’s Centers: Nurturing Autonomy
• 3. Feminist Bookstores: Building Identity
• 4. Feminist Health Clinics: Promoting Reproductive Rights
• 5. Domestic Violence Shelters: Protecting Bodily Integrity
• 6. After the Second Wave: Necessary Spaces
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index