The City, Still the Hope of Democracy? From Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett to the Arab Spring

Abstract

This essay, an expanded version of the presidential address presented to SHGAPE in April 2012, poses the essential question of whether the City can ever be a true site of democracy if women do not possess free, equal, and safe access to a city's public spaces. The essay compares the writings, proposals, and actions of men and women in the Anglo-Atlantic world early in the twentieth century to reveal the distinct gendered ideas behind various reform movements directed at improving the urban built environment. It uses theoretical frameworks provided by feminist historians and social scientists to demonstrate that from the Progressive Era to events of the contemporary Arab Spring, the city has not been a place of democratic equality for women. Fear of women's public presence, of the disorder of women, has motivated men to construct cities to reinforce their desires to embound women in the private domestic space and to punish women for transgressing the boundary between the public and the private.