The landscape of mid-19–century New York City was marked by pockets of consumer and leisure spaces. I argue that many of the fears and anxieties generated by this visual efflorescence of consumption focused on what became a socially constructed ‘type’: the New York Woman. The association of moral outrage at the dangers of consumption with spaces inhabited by the New York Woman created what I have called a fashionable moral geography. I suggest that this moral coding of the 19th-century city reverberates in contemporary discussion of late 20th-century cities.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AbelsonE, 1989When Ladies Go A-thieving: Middle-class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford Univesity Press, New York)
2.
BaudrillardJ, 1988America (Verso, London)
3.
BensonS P, 1986Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores 1880–1914 (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL)
4.
BoyerM C, 1985Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style 1850–1900 (Rizzoli, New York)
5.
BoyerM C, 1994The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
6.
Century Magazine1872, “The New York Woman”The Century: Illustrated Monthly Magazine page 762
7.
CowlingM, 1989The Artist as Anthropologist (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
8.
DanielsJ, 1997White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (Routledge, New York)
9.
de GraziaV (Ed.), 1996The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
10.
DomoshM, 1996Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in Nineteenth-century New York and Boston (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT)
11.
DriverF, 1988, “Moral geographies, social science and the urban environment in the mid-nineteenth century”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series13275–287
12.
EllingtonG, 1869The Women of New York or the Under-world of the Great City (The New York Book Company, New York)
13.
FosterG, 1850New York by Gas-light reprinted 1990 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
14.
GarbT, 1998Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-siecle France (Thames and Hudson, London)
15.
GilfoyleT, 1992City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (W W Norton, New York)
16.
HalttunenK, 1982Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT)
17.
HankinsM L, 1861Women of New York (Marie Louise Hankins & Co, New York)
18.
HarveyD, 1989The Condition of Postmodernity (Basil Blackwell, Oxford)
19.
HillM W, 1993Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830–1870 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
20.
HubbardP, 1998, “Sexuality, immorality and the city: Red-light districts and the marginalization of female street prostitutes”Gender, Place and Culture555–76
21.
HuyssenA, 1986After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Macmillan, London)
22.
JaherF C, 1982The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL)
23.
Kowaleski-WallaceE, 1997Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (Columbia University Press, New York)
24.
LaschC, 1978The Culture of Narcissism (W W Norton, New York)
25.
LeachW, 1994Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Vintage Books, New York)
26.
LearsJ, 1989, “Beyond Veblen: Rethinking consumer culture in America”, in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920 Ed. BronnerS J (W W Norton, New York) pp 73–98
27.
LockwoodC, 1976Manhattan Moves Uptown (Barnes and Noble, New York)
28.
McCabeJ D, 1872Lights and Shadows of New York Life; Or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City (National Publishing Company, Philadelphia, PA)
29.
MandelbaumS, 1965Boss Tweed's New York (John Wiley, New York)
30.
NeadL, 1997, “Mapping the self: Gender, space, and modernity in mid-Victorian London”Environment and Planning A29659–672
31.
NicholsonL, 1986Gender and History (Columbia University Press, New York)
32.
OgbornM, 1993, “Law and discipline in nineteenth century English state formation: The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869”Journal of Historical Sociology628–54
33.
OgbornM, 1998Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies 1680–1780 (Guilford Press, New York)
34.
PeissK, 1996, “Making up and making over: Cosmetics, consumer culture, and women's identity”, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective Ed. de GraziaV (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA) pp 311–336
35.
PooveyM, 1988Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
36.
RosenzweigRBlackmarE, 1992The Park and the People (Henry Holt, New York)
37.
RyanM, 1997Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
38.
ShuttleworthS, 1990, “Female circulation: Medical discourse and popular advertising in the mid-victorian era”, in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science Eds JacobusMKellerE FShuttleworthS (Routledge, New York) pp 47–68
39.
SmithM H, 1868Sunshine and Shadow in New York (J B Burr, Hartford)
40.
SpannE, 1981The New Metropolis: New York City 1840–1857 (Columbia University Press, New York)
41.
StansellC, 1987City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL)
42.
The New York Times1879, “The Woman of New-York”, 29 June, page 5
43.
WalkowitzJ, 1992City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Virago, London)
44.
WilliamsR, 1982Dream Worlds of Mass Consumption in Late Nineneeth-century France (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
45.
WilsonE, 1991The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
46.
ZaretskyE, 1997, “Bisexuality, capitalism and the ambivalent legacy of psychoanalysis”New Left Reviewnumber 223, 69–89
