Women In Public Space Research Articles

Taming Wild Girls: The Midnight Mission and the Campaign to Reform Philadelphia’s Moral Fabric, 1915-1918

Fearful of what they believed to be rampant working-class sexuality, which they associated with prostitution, and convinced that the root of sexual vice lay not with those men who pursued and purchased the services of prostitutes but rather with the prostitutes themselves, Progressive reformers launched a campaign to rid the streets of those who they believed peddled disease and immorality. Police raided suspected brothels, closely monitored dance halls, and questioned unescorted (and occasionally escorted) women in public spaces all in an effort to protect the decent, moral public from those willing to offer their very bodies for money.

Gender Socialization and Patriarchal Culture in Cuban Enterprise Management

Los profundos cambios que han enfrentado las empresas cubanas en la última década resaltan el papel importante de los directivos en las organizaciones, como impulsores de procesos de cambio, por lo que conocer cuáles son los estilos de dirección que aplican mujeres o varones, representa una cuestión de interés y actualidad, tanto para el mundo académico como para el empresarial. Este artículo muestra los resultados de una investigación desarrollada a partir de estudios de casos, para analizar la influencia de los factores personales y la cultura organizacional en los estilos de liderazgo de mujeres y hombres que se encuentran en posiciones directivas en empresas de Ciudad de La Habana. Como las mujeres constituyen la mayoría de la fuerza técnica y profesional del país, así como la mayoría de las graduadas universitarias, es importante no solo analizar la cantidad de mujeres que acceden y se desempeñan en puestos de dirección sino cómo influyen, modifican y transgreden (o no) con su actuación los patrones establecidos, asignados para ellas en una sociedad, que aunque socialista, sigue siendo patriarcal.

"Hop to the Top with the Iowa Chop": The Iowa Porkettes and Cultivating Agrarian Feminisms in the Midwest, 1964-1992

Over the course of twenty-eight years, between 1964 and 1991, members of the Iowa Porkettes, the women's auxiliary to the Iowa Pork Producer's Association (IPPA), promoted pork products in order to assert their roles as agricultural producers. For the members of the Porkettes, technological change and the growth of agribusiness provided new opportunities to challenge patriarchal hierarchies in agricultural organizations. Over time, as the overall number of hog farmers declined and the agricultural marketplace increasingly demanded professional expertise, the Porkettes transformed a women's auxiliary into a female-led commodity organization. Initially, members participated in appropriately "feminine" activities including Pork Queen contests, lard-baking contests, consultations with high school home economics instructors, and the distribution of promotional materials. By the late 1970s, however, members began to employ a new rhetoric shaped by their labor on the farm to claim an important stake in the production and marketing of commodities. They took responsibility for large-scale advertising campaigns, managed a growing budget, and became leaders within the IPPA. Their experiences offer insight into broader developments of second wave agrarian feminisms that enabled farm women's organizations to renegotiate gendered divisions of labor, claim new public spaces for women, and demand greater recognition from male agricultural leaders.

Dating in a Sexually Segregated Society: Embodied Practices of Online Romance in Irbid, Jordan

Mona, a sophomore at Yarmouk University in spends about 15 hours per week chatting online at the internet cafes that surround the university campus.1 She has many male friends online. At the same time, she is known among her classmates as a religious Muslim; she wears modern Islamic dress, combining a fashionable, patterned headscarf with a matching modest smock, and never talks unnecessarily with her male classmates. One day, she logged in at a popular cafe called Rishrush, and signed onto her favorite channel, Jordan.2 Since she hadn't previously planned to visit the internet cafe at this time, she hadn't arranged to meet anyone in the chatroom. There were over 100 people on the channel on that day; Mona scanned their screen names, looking for friends. Many of the names were in English. Some amusing ones, such as I_need_a_wife, caught her eye, but none of her friends were there. Mona didn't pick anyone to chat with right away, but soon several users were hailing On Jordan, as on all of the channels which are popular in Irbid, conversation doesn't take place in the main chatroom. Rather, users communicate with each other one-on-one-though they often carry on five or more private conversations simultaneously. Mona responded first to a user named because she liked the sound of his nick. They wrote to each other in the standardized Romanization of colloquial Arabic that has grown up in chatrooms and through mobile text messaging.3 As is conventional, he started by asking for her asl. This term, which sounds like the Arabic word for origin, was coined in English language chatrooms as shorthand for sex, location. In chatters identify themselves instead by listing their age, sex, and national origin. Mona told that she was 19, female, and Palestinian; he responded that he was 23, male, and Jordanian. The conversation proceeded slowly. Romeo told Mona that she was romantic; she denied it. asked her to dance. Mona resisted. Finally, asked Mona which cafe she was in. can't tell you that! OK, I can guess. in Rishrush. You're really smart! How did you know? didn't. I just said that because in Rishrush! which one are you? None of your business. You're the one down at the end, to the left of the door. This was true, but Mona denied it. No, not! So, which one are you? I'm not going to tell. Which one are you? Do you see the girl sitting next to you? Mona forgot that she had denied her identity. That can't be She's a girl! I'm the guy next to her. Mona turned very slightly to the left, trying to look as subtly as possible. She saw a Malaysian man. can't be He isn't Arab! What's wrong? You don't like my face? It's true, I look Malaysian. like it, but I still think it isn't you. OK, I told you who I am-so which one are you? insisted. Mona picked a boy. I'm the one in the red shirt, across from you. That's me! said Romeo, and proved it by making a small movement with his hand. and Mona continued to chat online for another hour, before he told her that he had to go. Each of them unsmilingly raised one hand in parting as he left. Since the late nineteenth century, Middle Eastern women have steadily increased their presence in spaces, such as the street, the university, the market, the office, and the mosque (Macleod 1993, Arat 1997, Asfaruddin 1999, Massad 2001, Thompson 2000, Newcomb 2006). While modernization projects throughout the region have relied upon them to do just that, concerns of honor and respectability have nevertheless haunted their efforts. Specifically, many local observers have feared that women in public space would form sexual or love relationships outside of the bounds of conventional courtship and marriage. …

Undercounting Women's Work in Iran

This paper explores the possibility of a considerable undercounting of women's labor force participation in the official surveys in Iran. According to the official data, the proportion of females in the total active labor force was about 15.5 percent in 2006. Furthermore, according to the official data the share of female in total active labor in agriculture was about 10 percent in 1996. An examination of a large body of field research on the subject, however, suggests a much higher participation rate, about 40 percent of total agricultural labor. This paper will examine these studies and explore the reasons behind the underestimations. Pointing at the growing visibility of urban women in public space, the increasing share of skilled and educated women, rising cost of living, and the need for both male and female incomes to support an urban family, some observers have suggested that the official data underestimate urban female labor participation, as well. Informal urban labor, however, has not been adequately studied. Anecdotal information, however, suggests the existence of a significant female informal economy in both traditional and modern industries. In 2001, I undertook a micro study of 350 working age women in the affluent northern part of Tehran and found that a large number of educated upper and middle class women were active in the informal market. This finding was in sharp contrast to the studies in other developing countries in which informal participants are generally poor and unskilled and are unable to join the modern formal economy. This paper will also explore the reasons for undercounting of urban female labor. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies at SOAS, London, 2006. The conference paper was entitled “Iran's Missing Working Women.”

Homeless Women in Public Spaces: Strategies of Resistance

This paper explores homeless women's use of public spaces and buildings in England. In doing so it problematises the spatial boundaries typically presented in the literature and research which suggest homeless women are largely confined to institutional or private spaces of homelessness. The paper argues that homeless women also use highly visible public spaces and semi-private spaces, and that these practices can be conceptualised in terms of resistance. Homeless women challenge the rules associated with occupying public spaces that either directly or tacitly exclude them, and they engage in identity work to resist being labelled as homeless.

Nationalism and the Visibility of Women in Public Space: Tilak's Criticism of Rakhmabai and Ramabai

‘Under the alien rule… when Brahmins break the law they are punished like other persons and women are visible in public like railway carriages where men could cast improper glances’. These were the words from the article ‘Shivaji's Utterances’ in the nationalist weekly Kesari for which Tilak was prosecuted for sedition in 1897. Vishwanath Narayan Mandalik, Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar and Bal Gangadhar Tilak criticized the reformers for encouraging women and non-Brahmins to occupy public space. They called their opposition as nationalist and reformers’ support to women and non-Brahmins as ‘un-national’. They argued that the caste system and confining women to the domestic space formed the basis of the Hindu nation. Reformers like Jotirao Phule, Gopal Hari Deshmukh, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Kashinath Triyambak Telang, Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar and Narayan Ganesh Chandavarkar were criticized as ‘denationalised persons.’ The nationalists in Maharashtra questioned ‘the right of alien rulers to interfere in the internal affairs of the Hindu society who encouraged the non-Brahmins and women to take up education and become visible in the public space’. This formed the core of the nationalist agenda during 1880-1920.

Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945

Between the World Wars, New Orleans transformed its image from a corrupt and sullied port of call into a national tourist destination. Anthony J. Stanonis tells how boosters and politicians reinvented the city to build a modern mass tourism industry and, along the way, fundamentally changed the city's cultural, economic, racial, and gender structure. Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, democratize Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits. Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's past: to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.

“Liberation Sticks” or “Coffin Nails”? Representations of the Working Woman and Cigarette Smoking in Canada, 1919–1939

When Canadian women first took up public smoking in the 1920s, the attraction was a complex one, both for them and for advertisers. Newly enfranchised and moving into the workforce in ever greater numbers, the (usually) young and single waged or salaried woman sought a ready symbol for her liberation as well as the pleasures resulting from the product itself to encapsulate the presumed freedom of the era. Commercial interests both responded to women's personal and cultural goals and furthered them by reconceptualizing smoking in the public mind as a behaviour associated with respectable, middle-class women in public spaces. Despite this representation, the archetypal woman smoker in the 1920s was a waged or salaried woman, not a middle-class one. Working women defined the image of the female smoker.

Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880–1905 (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 Julie F. Codell (bio) Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. xi + 214 , 37 illus.,$99.95/£55.00 cloth. Meaghan Clarke's groundbreaking study of Victorian women art writers examines their writing from different aesthetic and institutional frameworks and across all levels of periodicals-art journals, women's magazine, quarterlies, monthlies and newspapers-and reveals a female presence in art criticism more active than Victorians and subsequent scholars have recognized. "Both visually and textually, art was crucial to the market of journals, but simultaneously journals were crucial to the art market" (2), Clarke observes, succinctly articulating a vital relationship that embraced class, symbolic capital, and cultural nationalism. Furthermore, Clarke's explorations of the intersections among Victorian feminisms, art writing, and periodicals reveal women critics' elastic views about gender, itself ever-changing during the period. Positioned within and outside institutional loci (Royal Academy, other artists' professional organizations, journalism, individual periodicals' cultural authority), women art critics occupied diverse positions and used their writing about art as a vehicle for social and political, as well as aesthetic, agendas. Clarke deploys a notion of "tactic" as a planned means of intervening without having authority to do so (from Michel de Certeau), often from a border or "para-site" that is marginal yet subversive (from Rey Chow). Chapter 2 surveys Victorian art journalism, several women critics' careers, books for women on professions, editors' attitudes, women in public spaces, the role of university education as journalism became professionalized, and how women negotiated low pay, marriage [End Page 256] (their names were trademarks), and New Journalism. Clarke explores women's criticism in relation to institutions like salons and socio-professional networks both mixed in gender and all-female, to underscore the irony that women "were establishing the field and marginalized within it" (18-19) in "a complexity of masculine and feminine performances, concealing and revealing named identities, a tactic which enabled women to claim discursive authority in a variety of contexts" (23). Here Clarke conveys women's unstable positions on several fronts (femininity, journalism). Chapter 3 focuses on Alice Meynell's prolific career. Meynell and husband Wilfrid wrote under the pseudonyms Alice and John Oldcastle, which disguised them when promoting Wilfrid's work and that of their artist friends. Meynell also wrote anonymously for many different periodicals, including the Pen, the Weekly Register, Merry England, the Magazine of Art, the Pall Mall Gazette, the National Observer, and the World. Her growing reputation assisted that of her popular painter-sister Elizabeth Thompson Butler. (Such puffing was so widespread that Meynell's was hardly unusual.) Meynell contributed to popular artists' biographies and studio interviews by writing on male academicians and women artists. She championed the Royal Academy and was engaged in debates over the nude which, as Clarke notes, were often about women seeing or painting nudes, not nudes per se. Meynell argued that women were not morally compromised by seeing nudes. Admiring the Pre-Raphaelites, Meynell also appreciated impressionism and French-influenced Newlyn painters. She later devoted herself exclusively to suffrage. Chapter 4 is on Florence Fenwick Miller, who wrote in over a dozen periodicals between the 1870s and the 1910s. From a less cultured family than Meynell's, she received a medical degree from the Ladies' Medical College, ran for the London School Board, and became a "platform" woman. She focused on women artists' biographies, which Meynell did not, promoting those she considered "great" (her A-list included Rosa Bonheur, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae, Henrietta Ward). Writing a women's column in the London Illustrated News, she "conjoined dress and art, slipping between the two discourses" (94). As editor of the Woman's Signal (1895-99), she wrote to promote feminism through biographies and reviews of women's art in international exhibitions, largely ignored or denigrated by male critics. Through art, she promoted women's equality to a broad readership. Chapter 5 focuses on American Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who, like Meynell, worked in collaboration with her British husband. Clarke offers new archival information about Pennell's authorship, information badly needed for many women journalists. Unlike...

“The Most Beautiful Suffragette“: Inez Milholland and the Political Currency of Beauty

This article examines the role of beauty and image in the U.S. suffrage movement. It focuses specifically on Inez Milholland and on how she and the movement capitalized on her extraordinary beauty and used her image and media popularity to present an icon for the movement, thereby softening and making acceptable the spectacle of women in public spaces and political matters. Milholland provided the movement with a representation that undermined the association of female political participation with masculine women and gender transgression. She provided a constructed model of acceptable white femininity, one that answered the anti-suffrage movement's accusations that suffragists were masculine women, inverts, and “abnormal” women whose lobbying for the vote was proof of their wretched state. Milholland thereby helped to bring women into the movement who might fear the taint of masculinity and gender transgression.

Hijabin an Age of Fear: Security, Secularism, and Human Rights

In recent years, Islamic dress has emerged as one of the abiding sites of contention in the relationship between Muslim communities and the State. Specifically, the wearing of Islamic headscarves by women in public spaces has raised questions about secularism, women’s rights, and national identity. This article explores the debates about banning hijab in educational institutions across four jurisdictions: France, the United States, Turkey, and Australia. Through the analysis of various case studies, this article argues that an analysis focussed on human rights reveals common themes in the debate in each country: the fear of terrorism and fundamentalism, insecurity about national identity, and how to reconcile secularism with religious freedom, gender equality, and other human rights

The interplay of genres, gender, and language ideology among the Muskogee

Contrary to statements made by previous researchers, Muskogee women are linguistically active in ceremonial public spheres, though through the use of genres that differ significantly from men's. One of the genres performed in these contexts is gossip, which is described by some Muskogee men as a dangerous genre. This article explores why Muskogee women's and men's linguistic practices differ so strikingly in the ceremonial sphere, and what women achieve through their use of gossip. It is suggested that consideration of Muskogee language and gender ideologies in regard to these issues shows that gendered language use differences are rational and maintain balance between the genders. Insights from both ideologies also indicate that women's gossip is a powerful genre, the use of which is generally positive for Muskogee society. (Muskogee Indians, gender ideology, language ideology, gossip)* I N T R o D U C T I o N Attending gatherings and ceremonies during my dissertation research with the Muskogee Indians, a Southeastern Native American tribe, made me aware of differences between the linguistic behaviors of Muskogee and Anglo men and women in public space. I began by carefully documenting the behaviors and the settings in which the behaviors occurred, hoping that a relatively clear correlation among event, genre, and gender would emerge. However, it soon became obvious that, in order to come to grips with and explain the variation in linguistic behaviors among Muskogee men and women, I needed to explore and include aspects of Muskogee language and gender ideology. This article exposes how rich a description and explanation of linguistic behaviors can be when ideologies about distinct aspects of social life are included in the analysis. Muskogee gender ideology provides for gender roles that are complementary, with women in charge of the familial and domestic and men in charge of the extra-familial and commercial. In line with the observations of Rosaldo (1974:19), Ortner 1974, and others, the community's valuation of women's roles within society is lower than that of men's. Concomitant with this, men's speech is fre? 2006 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/06 $12.0() 23 1 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Tue, 21 Jun 2016 05:30:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Hijab in an Age of Fear

In recent years, Islamic dress has emerged as one of the abiding sites of contention in the relationship between Muslim communities and the State. Specifically, the wearing of Islamic headscarves by women in public spaces has raised questions about secularism, women’s rights, and national identity. This article explores the debates about banning hijab in educational institutions across four jurisdictions: France, the United States, Turkey, and Australia. Through the analysis of various case studies, this article argues that an analysis focussed on human rights reveals common themes in the debate in each country: the fear of terrorism and fundamentalism, insecurity about national identity, and how to reconcile secularism with religious freedom, gender equality, and other human rights

The men's gallery: Outdoor advertising and public space: Gender, fear, and feminism

Synopsis Outdoor advertising presents a unique case in that, unlike advertising in other media, an individual's capacity to avoid exposure is inhibited. Unlike the “private” world of magazine and television advertising, outdoor advertising is displayed throughout public space, thus making regulation of the medium a pertinent public policy concern. The inescapable nature of outdoor advertising, compounded with the increasingly sexualised display of women within, demands that an active public policy response occurs. This paper draws from the disciplines of criminology, architecture, and feminist geography to argue that the continued sexualised portrayal of women in outdoor advertising works to illustrate and contribute to the social inclusion of men and the social exclusion of women in public space. I argue that these portrayals fuel women's perceptions of fear and offence, and force them to limit their movements. I further suggest that such portrayals function to amplify masculine “control” of city spaces and reinforce women's exclusion.

Women and physical activity in an urban park: Enrichment and support through an ethic of care

Women's presence in public space is frequently understood within a “separate spheres” framework, but this framework does not fully account for women's presence in public spaces and their experiences there. An ethic of care (In a different voice (1982) Harvard university press; J. Env. Psych. 20 (2000) 103) has been proposed as an alternative framework for understanding both constraints and possibilities for women in public space. An ethic of care also helps to understand women's experiences of leisure, particularly physical activity. I explore themes of relationships and caring in interviews with women who did physical activities in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Women found enrichment and support for both relationships and activities among family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers in the park, which provided feelings of safety and enjoyment. The presence of others and chance meetings in the park also provided emotional social support and more long-term affiliations to support athletic interests such as team sports. This study informs research regarding the influence of the environment on physical activity and supports the assertion that an ethic of care provides a more comprehensive framework for theories of public space. However, other aspects of the environment should also be considered in further discussion of a theoretical framework for women and public space.

Women in Public Spaces: Theater, Modernity, and Actresses in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing

In the male-dominated theatrical world of early twentieth century China, actresses strategically relied on personal connections to survive. As “public” women and agents of mass media, they were utilized by men for different purposes. Theatrical managers and male audiences were intent on turning actresses into sexual objects in licentious plays, whereas nationalist reformers recruited actresses for mass mobilization. Actresses participated in the nation-building cause by presenting diverse human roles via the stories that either conveyed new ideologies or historical values. The fictional plots of women's emancipation, however, provided a learning process in which actresses could adopt the concepts of personal rights, self-determined marriage, and economic autonomy. The Chinese states, despite minor variations, always sustained ideals of gender distinctions and opposed or restrained women's public roles. The stories of actresses' survival and prosperity, nonetheless, demonstrated the tremendous endurance, flexibility, intelligence, and strength of Chinese women.

The City

The City

Tenuous boundaries: women, domesticity and nationhood in 1930s Turkey

In the 1930s modern architecture was highly popularised in Turkey mostly through the widespread promotion of the modern house. In the early stages of nation building, the modern house became one of the most potent symbols of the modern nation, which aspired to enter the European economic, cultural and political milieu as an equal partner. The image of the modern Turkish woman played a somewhat similar role, her increasing access to various aspects of the public sphere being highly publicised as the success of Turkish modernisation. Despite obvious links between women and architecture, ranging from their active promotion as suitable images for the new nation to the physical appearance of women in public spaces, issues of gender and sexuality remained conspicuously absent from the architectural historiography of modern Turkey. In this paper, I offer critical readings of contemporaneous representations that relate the modern house and modern Turkish woman to uncover the complicated and contradictory levels that constitute the seemingly coherent narrative of architectural and cultural modernisation. The analysis of the relationship between sexuality, space and architectural discourse effectively complicates the architectural historiography of modern Turkey and shows the active participation of architecture in the production of the social/cultural realm.

Portable Politics: Creating New Space for Suffrage-ing Women

A few of the plays written in support of the movement for women's suffrage in Britain before the First World War have recently been recovered and published, but most of these were intended for some kind of professional or at least conventional production. Susan Carlson is here concerned to look also at some of the pieces which saw print only in the ephemeral suffrage press, and production (if at all) only as part of meetings or demonstrations. Breaking down traditional distinctions between social, political, and theatrical spaces, she argues that all were part both of the dramatization of the struggle, and also of a broader reclamation of public spaces for women, whether of a public venue such as the Albert Hall, outdoor spaces such as Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square – or the humbler and lonelier space of the street corners on which women sold the suffrage newspapers that contained the plays – some of them about women on street corners selling suffrage newspapers.…Susan Carlson is Professor of English and Associate Provost at Iowa State University. Her books include Women and Comedy (University of Michigan Press), and she has recently published essays on Aphra Behn, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Shakespeare, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women playwrights. This essay is part of a longer study of British suffrage theatre and its connections to Edwardian productions of Shakespeare's works.