Abstract
Scholars of Anglo-Atlantic cities have generally focused on class, ethnic, and racial groups to explain the built environment and have focused largely on the small group of men who traveled the region, wrote extensively on the issue, and organized conferences to showcase their ideas and plans. What they have not done, argues Maureen A. Flanagan, is explore how ideas about the appropriate norms of masculinity and femininity shaped the built environment. Industrialization not only disrupted day-to-day city life but also undermined patriarchal control of the city and afforded greater independence for women. The duality that had at one time identified the masculine as public and productive space and the feminine as private and reproductive space was breaking down. This newfound public freedom not only intensified public struggles to control women's use of the city but also afforded men the opportunity to reassert a domestic ideology that promoted the idea of wife as mother in the home. Men, Flanagan asserts, believed that the purpose of the city was to foster economic growth, and the disorder of women was increasingly viewed as a central threat to male control. This struggle to control the city took many forms, and Flanagan does an excellent job of highlighting the familiar—moving people out of cities, creating the isolated suburban home and atomized neighborhoods, ignoring basic public services—and the less familiar—working to guarantee women's safety in public spaces and promoting efforts to make the city a home.
Published Version
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