Gender in the Streets of the Premodern City

Abstract

It is often held that between 1600 and 1850, women gradually withdrew from the public sphere of the street and moved to the private sphere of the home. This powerful narrative, linked to theories of modernization, remains a prominent feature in urban history, despite important revisionist scholarship. In recent years, scholars from fields as diverse as art history, economic history, literary studies, and human geography have made important contributions to further our understanding of the gender dynamics in historical city streets. This essay for the first time brings together the findings on gender and premodern urban space from these different disciplines. Starting off from the latest insights, it furthermore proposes crucial new ways for studying the history of gender in streets.

Introduction

Who “owns” the street? This simple question has been the focus of many a scholarly debate in fields ranging from sociology and urban studies to economics and history. While each discipline tackles this issue from a different perspective, there is one idea that is omnipresent in the discussions: the city street as a site for male privilege. This notion has a longstanding, yet problematic, history. It is often captured by the figure of the flâneur, who is iconic in the critical literature of urban modernity. ¹ A product of the great European cities of the nineteenth century, the flâneur spent his days wandering the streets of cities such as Paris and London, watching the urban spectacle pass before his eyes. The flâneur was bourgeois and exclusively male. In this line of thought, women are categorically excluded from “flânerie.” ² The dangers of the fast-growing cities of this period meant that women, especially but not exclusively those from the middle classes, needed to be controlled. Modern cities were filled with immorality and temptation, and therefore a great threat to the modesty, purity, and respectability of women. To maintain female virtue, and consequently patriarchy, women were best kept off the (male-dominated) streets and confined to their homes. Alternatively, their movements through the city were restricted by means of (male) chaperonage and the use of carriages. The suggestion is that in the modern city, men were not only more visible in the street but also controlled the conditions under which women could partake in street life. In the modern city, as a consequence, men “owned” the streets.

The idea of the flâneur and the male dominance of city streets remains a key feature in many of the debates on the nature of historical and contemporary cities, despite its obvious shortcomings. In 1992, Elizabeth Wilson had already pointed to the overwhelming presence of women, especially of lower classes, in the streets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European cities, thereby highlighting the problematic nature of the concept. ³ Her argument is echoed by several others, most recently Lauren Elkin who in her 2016 work, The Flâneuse: Women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, states that “we can talk about the social mores and restrictions, but we cannot rule out the fact that women were there.” ⁴ These authors further argue that women held a greater agency in the street than is traditionally assumed, shifting the passive role normally reserved for women to the male flâneur. He occupied the margins of the scene rather than the center, where, as part of the crowd under the flâneur’s gaze, we find the female passers-by. Accordingly, these authors also question the traditionally conceived power balance between male and female occupiers of the street, and suggest—albeit often indirectly—that the “ownership” of streets was not restricted solely to men. ⁵

Another important point of criticism regarding the concept of the flâneur is its time frame. Along with related developments, such as the rise of separate spheres for men and women, the idea suggests a clear-cut break from the past. In this premodern past, women supposedly had greater freedom to roam the city streets. However, as Karen Newman shows, “flânerie” is in fact much older and can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. ⁶ Correspondingly, and now commonly acknowledged, the ideology of separate spheres and the rise of domesticity also have a much longer and more multifaceted history than initially assumed. ⁷ Indeed, in the history of women and gender, it is widely accepted that a preindustrial Golden Age for women did not exist; we also cannot assume that the shaping of gender relations followed a similar trajectory across time and space. Together, this means that one of the central assumptions in many debates about gender and urban change, the unequivocal male domination of streets that arose with modernity, is no longer tenable.

For a longtime, one of the critical issues halting progress in our understanding of gender dynamics in cities on the road to “modernity” was the difficulty of extracting information from primary sources about ordinary women’s lives in the preindustrial period. ⁸ While obtaining information about the lives of men of a variety of ranks was relatively straightforward, women remained largely invisible. However, in the last two decades significant progress has been made, both through the development of highly transformative methodologies and important changes in focus. The spatial and material turns in the study of history and the increased attention paid to the everyday and the ephemeral have all contributed to a greater awareness of people and phenomena that had previously remained unnoticed. Moreover, developments in Digital Humanities, such as the mass digitization of primary sources and GIS mapping, have enabled new ways of studying well-known source material, thereby allowing gendered practices to more clearly come to the fore. As a result of these conceptual and methodological shifts, we have seen an unprecedented surge in detailed empirical studies on the workings of gender in early modern societies. In these studies, the complexity of the gendered usage of urban space is a feature that has not only become increasingly prominent but that also contests many of the longstanding assumptions about the gendering of city streets.

This essay surveys these new waves of scholarship. It aims to bring together the various strands of history and related disciplines that help to shed new light on gender relations in cities on the road to modernity, as well as to suggest crucial new avenues for research. While great power lies in the diversity of approaches to study spatial gender dynamics, this also carries the risk of isolationism. In this essay, I therefore argue that for a fuller understanding of the gendering of historical urban space, we should attempt to come to a more holistic approach by combining the various methods and techniques available. The essay particularly focuses on Europe in the period between 1450 and 1800. While in recent years several new studies on gender and the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have helped to adjust the tone of the debate on gender and urban space, ⁹ it is striking that in this context, scholarship on the early modern period has largely gone unnoticed. This essay therefore is also a deliberate attempt to help bridge the gap between the premodern and modern eras: as I hope to show, for a fuller understanding of the patterns of gendered street use and their underlying mechanisms, ultimately this is indispensable. ¹⁰

Gender and Urban Space

The relationship between gender and space is a well-established research topic in the historiography of the city. For a longtime, however, the primary focus was on the post-1750 cities of Northwest Europe and North America. ¹¹ Lately, there has been an important shift toward earlier periods, and cities and towns elsewhere on the European continent and beyond. ¹² This shift partly stems from the recent spatial turn in the study of early modern history, ¹³ but more fundamentally it reflects a movement in gender and women’s history that has been ongoing for some years.

For most of the twentieth century, the discourse on women’s position in society started off from the assumption, first voiced by Alice Clark in 1919, that somewhere in the preindustrial past, women had significant freedoms that were eroded in later periods. ¹⁴ This entailed among other things, a relative equality to men in their public roles. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall further developed this idea in the 1980s. In their influential work, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, the authors put forward the idea that with the rise of capitalism and industrialization, middle-class women withdrew from productive labor and were increasingly confined to their homes. The outside world of politics, business, and work—often simply referred to as the “public sphere”—became the domain of men, while the world indoors, that of housekeeping and childrearing, turned into an exclusively female “private sphere.” ¹⁵ The subsequent challenges to both the chronology and terms of this theory have led to a more nuanced picture of gender relations in the preindustrial period. Here, the emphasis is on diverse experiences and divergent trajectories rather than an overarching decline of women’s liberties since the 1650s.

With the waning of the Golden Age theory in the 1990s, historians increasingly responded to calls for prioritizing bottom-up research that places the lived experience of preindustrial women and men at the center. This also came with efforts to move away from primarily studying printed literature, as well as attempts to place smaller case studies in a wider context: all explicit invitations from scholars such as Amanda Vickery and Pamela Sharpe, who critically assessed the discourse of the separate spheres. ¹⁶ While this transformation in the history of premodern gender relations influenced many different areas of scholarship, it was to have a profound influence on the early modern history of gender and space. Crucially, as shown below, this shift both required and enabled an important reassessment of the categories and uses of space.

Two transformative pieces that illustrate the changes in the history of gender and space in the premodern city are Laura Gowing’s chapter The freedom of the streets from 2000, and Elizabeth S. Cohen’s article on women in Roman streets published eight years later. ¹⁷ Using a diverse range of primary sources, they show the difficulties of the relationship between gender and urban space in two of preindustrial Europe’s most prominent cities: London and Rome. As these authors each study a different part of Europe, they start off from slightly different historiographical traditions. Gowing’s chapter on London is a direct response to the traditional narrative of urbanization, modernity, and gender. Her work is also firmly set in the Anglo-American tradition, with its focus on the rise of the separate spheres and the associated confinement of middle-class women. Cohen’s article, on the contrary, stems from a different type of scholarship: that of the Renaissance Italian city. Debates about gendered street use in the cities of Renaissance Italy generally revolve around two longstanding assumptions. First, that life in the piazza and the type of sociability it generated was unique to Italian urban identity. Second, the idea of Mediterranean gendered seclusion, which meant that women were absent from urban public spaces and that as a result, Italian sociability was profoundly male. ¹⁸ The findings of both Gowing’s and Cohen’s studies firmly oppose the historiographical narratives they stem from: women of all ranks were found in the streets, where they encountered dangers as well as opportunities. Accordingly, the work of these authors fits the broader shift in early modern women’s history where it is now commonly accepted that, despite conventions or restrictions, “women were there,” be it in work, in politics, or in the street.

What precisely makes these two works stand out in the historiography of gender and the preindustrial city? While both are exploratory in nature, these pieces clearly show the power of shifting the focus and widening the source base. Instead of prioritizing didactic and prescriptive literature, they favor court records in combination with material such as archeological evidence and visual sources. The change in source material also means a crucial adjustment in perspective: from the elite male to nonelite urban dwellers of both genders. The studies furthermore reveal the importance of capturing actual practices, not only through exposing the everyday activities of ordinary men and women but also the language they spoke and the material conditions of their lives in the early modern city. What results from this is a nuanced yet complex picture of gendered movement through the premodern city, and of the functioning of preindustrial urban spaces. In addition, it leads both authors to advocate the development of a framework that captures gendered space in a more precise way than the public/private dichotomy does. Finally, and crucially, these two studies stand out for their appreciation of both outside and inside urban spaces, and the connections between them. This is in contrast to many works that have appeared before, as well as studies that saw the light afterward, where the focus is largely on indoor space, thereby confirming the persistent idea that women’s lives were mostly played out indoors. ¹⁹

Changing Perspectives

How much the expansion of the source base matters to historians studying gendered movement in the early modern city becomes instantly clear when we look at the case of Renaissance Italy. Cohen’s work on Rome follows two earlier studies of gendered geographies in another prominent Italian city: Venice. Whereas the first of the two, by Dennis Romano, analyzes gendered space through an examination of state laws, the second, by Robert C. Davis, uses travel literature as its main source. ²⁰ Romano was aware that his analysis resulted in an idealized geography shaped by the perceptions of the male elite. Nevertheless, he concludes that Venice had a strict gendering of urban space, in which piazzas and thoroughfares were seen as male spaces where (elite) men could engage in masculine activities such as business and politics, while “bounded, circumscribed female places were the setting for passive and private activities.” ²¹ Looking through the eyes of the lawmaker, the only women to be found in Venetian streets outside their own parish were prostitutes; respectable wives, daughters, and nuns remained in places largely closed to the outside world.

By contrast, the aim of Davis’s chapter was to focus “less on the goals underlying a sex-based urban geography,” than on the “experience by Renaissance men and women themselves.” ²² He did this by studying eyewitness accounts written by the numerous travelers who visited Venice. Although his work confirms the existence of a gendered dichotomy of urban space underpinned by law, the travel accounts illustrate a more complex narrative of the female use of urban space. For example, Davis describes Venetian patrician women who ventured out in the city on high platform shoes (zoccoli), using the fact that these shoes made them taller than most men to claim the streets that they supposedly were to avoid. What emerged from the accounts of travelers is some level of public visibility and agency for women other than prostitutes. Admittedly, in the travel accounts this is only one aspect of female presence in the city that is mentioned. As Davis highlights, the trope of the absence of women from public places is much more commonly referred to than that of the noble women in their platform shoes.

The picture that emerges from Cohen’s study on Rome is radically different. Her work prioritizes court records over legal documents and printed literature in a search for what she calls “lived practices.” ²³ In the archives of the Tribunale Criminale del Governatore, the criminal courts of the Governor of Rome, she finds numerous testimonies of ordinary people, both defendants and witnesses. These include women from varying ranks who in their own defense, or that of others, account how they navigated the streets of the city, often by themselves. ²⁴ Cohen notes Roman women of all social ranks leaving their homes to go to church; others venturing out to earn a living, by selling goods or working as a cleaner in someone else’s home. Grocery shopping, attending to animals and children, doing laundry, and running errands were also common reasons for women to go out. Some women were so poor they actually lived in the streets: female beggars who occupied the spaces in front of parish churches regularly appeared before the Roman criminal courts. The patterns of mobility that emerge from Cohen’s analysis of crime records reflect those found by Monica Chojnacka, who studied female working practices in Venice. ²⁵ Together, these studies show that the Italian Renaissance street looked very different from what was assumed. Instead of a strictly gendered city where most street users were males, as suggested by legal documents and the writings of foreign visitors, crime records show that these were in fact places where men and women of varying ranks participated in street life.

The transformative potential of court records with regard to investigating everyday phenomena is now widely recognized, and has gained popularity among historians of women and gender in particular. As a serial source that includes as much, or perhaps even more, information about women than men, court records offer a unique opportunity to unravel how women lived their life over time; sometimes, due to good recordkeeping, over centuries. The analysis of court records requires a great sensitivity from the historian, because not all that is written down can be taken as the truth. ²⁶ Nevertheless, these records provide access to the voices of those not normally heard: the majority of them ordinary women, mostly from middling groups and, to a lesser extent, poor backgrounds. Research based on court records initially focused largely on what was at the center of the court cases themselves: crimes, conflicts, or church discipline. ²⁷ However, historians are increasingly using this material more to the full. From early studies on crime and marriage formation and breakdown, we have moved toward studies of literacy, honor, sociability, time use, and labor. Economic historians have found court records exceptionally revealing for mentioning all types of paid and unpaid work undertaken by women and men, as well as the patterns of leisure, rest, and work. ²⁸ Social historians have used depositions and testimonies to analyze neighborliness, gossip, and the workings of reputation. Cultural historians have successfully extracted sensory experiences of the city from legal records. ²⁹

As we have seen, spatial practices also clearly come to the fore in court records, with regard to both the uses and the perceptions of spaces. Like Cohen and Gowing, other historians have recognized how useful these materials can be in mapping out everyday mobility. As early as 1995, Barbara Hanawalt had used coroners’ accounts to map the movement of men and women, and found clear distinctions between their mobility within the household and the city. ³⁰ More recently, Amanda Flather and Fiona Williamson provided in-depth studies of gendered spaces in English towns and cities, primarily based on court records. ³¹ Their work shows how women and men in places such as Colchester, Chelmsford, and Norwich, navigated indoor spaces including churches, taverns, and houses, as well as spaces outdoor such as streets, squares, and markets. A slightly different take on gendered spatial practices, this time in premodern Bologna, is provided by Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota, who return to one of the original fields of study for historians using court records: that of crime. However, instead of simply examining who committed which crimes, they focus on geographic patterns of one specific type of crime, violence, to explain gender differences in criminal behavior. Accordingly, they are able to show that violence perpetrated by women occurred in different places than male acts of violence. They link this finding to overall patterns of spatial mobility, especially sociability, as well as perceptions of what were seen as appropriate spaces for women and men. ³²

This brings me to the second distinctive feature of court records. Their power to bring lived practices to life—the aspect that many see as crucial to our understanding of gendered street use—does not solely lie in the opportunities they provide to chart people’s actions in a spatial context. As most authors discussing premodern space would agree, it is precisely the combination of descriptions of actions with the voicing of opinions and experiences that makes court records exceptionally useful. In their statements, defendants and witnesses regularly reflect on how particular spaces were perceived, and to what extent they believed women or men belonged in certain places. This happened frequently in the context of numerous disputes about honor, which primarily centered on the question of whether men and women followed their appropriate roles in society. ³³ However, it also appears in the records more casually, for instance, when people argued over the right to use a particular space, such as in a disagreement between two fruit and vegetable sellers in early seventeenth-century London highlighted by Gowing. When the male vendor told his female competitor to “stick to her own parish,” she responded by saying “the street was as free for her as for him.” ³⁴

What historians have been able to show by studying court records is that the meaning people attributed to spaces is much more complex than is often assumed. For example, Paul Griffiths in his work on night walking shows how perceptions of the safety of streets changed according to the time of day. ³⁵ The gendered meanings of urban spaces changed accordingly: while some places in the city were perfectly acceptable for women to visit during the day, after dark this became much more problematic. Along these lines, based on an analysis of neighborhood disputes, Gowing goes even further and concludes that Londoners did not share the same perceptions of space. According to her, women and men each had their own “mental maps” to navigate the city. ³⁶ The surfacing of the multiplicity of meanings that early modern city dwellers attributed to different urban spaces, as a result of the study of court records, has had profound consequences for the traditional public/private framework in which many historians of gender operate. That is what I will turn to next.

Reassessing Spatial Categories

Over the years, historians have become increasingly apprehensive about the analytical power of the concepts of “public” and “private.” Most scholars who investigate premodern gendered spaces offer alternatives they consider to be more appropriate than the traditional binary opposition. Before discussing the merits of these alternative schemes, we should first assess what has been learned in recent years about the character of urban spaces that are often labeled as public or private, and how they relate to masculinity and femininity, respectively. We will start with the type of space that is perhaps most easily pinpointed on the axis from public to private: the home.

The domestic home is often seen as the quintessential private space. It is also a space that is largely associated with women, and the protection of female honor. Very few historians would deny the symbolic meaning of the home in discussions about the role of women. Indeed, despite the growing reservations of scholars about equating the domestic with privacy and femininity, most acknowledge the persistent influence of this idea. Whether we look to the Low Countries, Italy, England, or Germany, we see the suggestion that women should ideally be kept confined to the domestic sphere reflected not only in prescriptive literature and laws but also in everyday arguments between people. ³⁷ Recent research, however, complicates this picture and reveals that the reality of life in the early modern home was often very different.

The first question that should be addressed is how private the early modern house really was. One of the difficulties here is assessing the contemporary meaning of privacy, as well as the issue of the extent to which privacy was desired by the people of early modern Europe. ³⁸ Scholars who have tackled these issues seem to agree that despite the slightly different contemporary meaning of the concept, early modern people did seek privacy, both in terms of separating themselves from the world beyond the household and other people within, as in seeking seclusion, withdrawal, and secrecy. ³⁹ Early modern houses were busy places: apart from sleeping and eating, people used them to conduct business, to work, and to socialize. Families often also housed others, including relatives, lodgers, servants, and apprentices. To what extent this affected the private character of the home was largely dependent on wealth. The homes of wealthier members of the urban population, who could afford to live in large townhouses or even palaces, had multiple rooms and layouts that enabled “public” and “private” functions to be separated. The front rooms, such as the sala in Italy and the Dutch voorhuis, were often very public: these were where business was conducted, as well as important social events, and people from outside the household were invited to enter. Generally, the further one moved to the back of the house, the more secluded spaces became. ⁴⁰ We also need to be aware that meanings of spaces could shift. For instance, an event like childbirth could make English parlors “female” and Italian bedrooms very “public.” ⁴¹ Nevertheless, the sheer size of the properties of the wealthy entailed that even though the riches of such households meant more staff in the house, it was relatively easy to obtain some level of privacy.

This was somewhat different in the homes of those lower on the social scale. Amanda Flather shows how in the case of middling and lower middling families, domestic spaces were very much shared spaces. Most middling families had live-in servants and apprentices, and as their homes were often not that large, they were forced to share most of their living quarters with these people. This meant sharing the table during meals, but could also involve their children sharing a bed with a servant. ⁴² Others, including the many migrants to the city, lived in lodgings, regularly occupying only a small room in a house full of strangers. These lodging houses, as Amanda Vickery argues, were places of constant comings and goings. While there is evidence that most lodgers were able to keep their rooms secure—and hence “private”—by locking them, they were often dependent on the goodwill of their landlords and fellow lodgers to maintain this privilege. ⁴³ The quality of the homes of many poorer city dwellers also meant that privacy might have been hard to achieve: Vickery gives an account of people living in sheds or stalls, and renting single beds. ⁴⁴ Through a close reading of court records, Laura Gowing manages to distill pictures of homes filled with eavesdroppers and spies, who made full use of the half-open doors and thin walls with cracks and holes to observe their neighbors. ⁴⁵ Prosperity was clearly an important factor in the extent to which homes could be private spaces: privilege and privacy were closely related. ⁴⁶

Finally, privacy within the context of the home was not just affected by the close contact between the various inhabitants of early modern dwellings, or by people coming in from the outside; it was also shaped by reversed contacts. Those indoors were in contact with the street through windows, open doors, balconies, and spy mirrors. ⁴⁷ Women are generally seen as the people who were most likely to make use of such opportunities. For many women, windowsills and doorsteps were important places of work: the dark conditions indoors made these spaces that offered daylight attractive spots to engage in needlework, sewing, and nursing. ⁴⁸ Doors and door openings also functioned as important places in the functioning of social control and neighborliness, where reputation and honor were questioned and defended in quarrels and disputes. Such practices were often associated with women from lower orders who figured prominently in defamation suits. However, evidence shows that elite women also sat by the window to observe the street, and men and women from the upper layers of society from time to time also used balconies. ⁴⁹

The observation that most early modern homes cannot be considered as fully private spaces stems from findings that similarly suggest domestic spaces cannot be seen as primarily female domains. It is evident that male apprentices, servants, and lodgers shared living spaces with the mistress of the household, as well as with female coworkers and landladies. The reality of the early modern house thus was more one of regular interactions between genders, than of complete separation. Perhaps the only cases where we find exclusively female domestic environments, outside of institutions such as convents, are the shared living arrangements of older women and widows that most of us will be familiar with. ⁵⁰ Interestingly, however, recent research on Rome reveals similar patterns of all-male cohabitation. Here, groups of coworkers such as porters and agricultural workers shared lodgings and clustered together in houses and specific neighborhoods. ⁵¹ While Rome was a male city par excellence, such patterns can also be found in other cities that were characterized by high levels of male labor migration, such as Istanbul and Amsterdam. ⁵² Both the private and feminine character of the early modern home should therefore not be overstated.

When assessing the character of public spaces, we encounter similar problems to those noted above, but here we start with the more profound confusion concerning what counts as a public space. What we can glean from most studies on this topic is that it is difficult to establish precisely which spaces count as “public.” While “private” is almost always equated with the home, “public” can refer to spaces related to business, politics, entertainment, or simply the outdoors. In most studies on early modern spatial practices there are, however, some spaces that are commonly identified as public, and therewith male: the market, the alehouse, the coffee shop, and the street. As in the case of the home, new research has also raised important questions about the labeling of these spaces. Flather for instance, shows how the ultimate “male” space of the alehouse was in fact more mixed. She found that a third of the clientele of Essex alehouses were women. ⁵³ Markets, as spaces where business was conducted, are also sometimes seen as profoundly male terrains. This was probably the case for some commercial spaces, such as exchanges; nevertheless, retail markets often looked very different. Recent studies have shown that great variety existed in the gendered make-up of markets according to the types of products sold and the local institutional framework, but it is clear that market spaces cannot be seen as dominated by men. Some, like many fish markets, were profoundly feminine spaces; others, such as meat markets, were strongly male-dominated. In addition, as was the case with each of the spaces assessed so far, the character of marketplaces shows great variation across time and space. ⁵⁴

What then do we make of outdoor spaces such as streets and squares, which are also often placed at the public end of the public/private distinction? Earlier in this essay, we considered the difficulties of seeing these spaces as belonging to men in particular; there is simply too much evidence of female movement through the city to sustain this idea. Another complicating aspect to the characterization of outdoor spaces that comes out of many studies is the realization that alleyways, courtyards, and neighborhoods were to some extent considered “personal territory.” ⁵⁵ Similar to the doorsteps and balconies mentioned earlier, such spaces were also regarded as an extension of the domestic realm. Similarly, as Anne Laurence observes, gardens could be seen as “the domestic outdoors”; spaces that were equally shared by men, women, and children. ⁵⁶ Most scholars agree such spaces thus cannot accurately be called public or private. Many therefore prefer to label these spaces as “liminal,” while at the same time concluding that such liminal spaces were highly feminized. Each of these liminal outside spaces, however, was in the direct vicinity of the home and hence confirms the traditional ideas about the gendering of urban space.

This is somewhat different from the view that Muurling and Pluskota take in their aforementioned analysis of the character of early modern streets. On one hand, they propose extending the category of a liminal, transitionary space between public and private to include the “open space” of the street. As they argue, and in line with earlier studies focusing on the street functions, streets are used as spaces to go from one place to another. Accordingly, Muurling and Pluskota conclude that streets are not “the epitome of the public sphere.” ⁵⁷ On the other hand, they argue that streets could simultaneously be totally different spaces: spaces of sociability. They convincingly show that streets could change into places of private sociability at times when people (men or women) stopped to have a chat, or for instance sat down on the pavement to play a game of cards. The recognition of the dual character of streets, as places of movement and as places of presence where both public and private moments could be shared, highlights the immense complexity of labeling spaces based on the public/private framework.

Over the years, various scholars have offered alternatives to more precisely capture the nature of spaces. The difficulty they all struggle with is the fact that while the public/private stereotypes and their associated characteristics do not hold up when confronted with evidence on lived experiences; these concepts nevertheless seem to play a large role in guiding people in their behavior. As a result, nearly all suggestions stay relatively close to the original binary opposition and adapt it in some way or another. ⁵⁸ Many add “liminal” as a category between “public” and “private,” others replace “private” with “domestic,” and again others add categories such as “urban,” “open,” “indoor,” or “outdoor.” ⁵⁹ In an attempt to capture the myriad of meanings that spaces involve, the categories shift when the focus of the author shifts. As a result, the new categorizations are hardly ever compatible, sometimes even further blurring the picture. However, one very important realization that has resulted from all these different takes on redefining premodern spaces is how spaces held multiple meanings that were constantly negotiated. ⁶⁰ In such negotiations, I argue below, lies an important key to enhancing our understanding of the gender dynamics of the premodern urban street.

Unraveling Negotiations in the Street

The struggle for the street has always played a central role in the history of urban spaces. For a long time, urban authorities and adolescent males were regarded as the most prominent actors in this contestation. This should not come as a surprise: both their actions and the documentary evidence about such actions are conspicuous. In an attempt to keep their city orderly and under control, city governments continuously issued legislation on the use and maintenance of streets. The outbreaks of violence between groups of young men, often on a large scale and generally highly organized, are similarly well documented and speak to the imagination of contemporaries and historians alike. As a result, the majority of studies that discuss the struggle for early modern streets refer to either government control or control by youth groups. ⁶¹

More recently, however, there has been an important shift in the thinking about the search for control of the street. Several historians are advocating that this should not simply be regarded as top-down or bottom-up phenomena. As Hitchcock and Shore put succinctly, “the contest over the street is not predominantly played between authority and disorder.” ⁶² Instead, scholars are increasingly recognizing that conflict and subtler forms of negotiation are to be found side by side. Laurie Nussdorfer, for example, shows how in sixteenth-century Rome, control of the streets was negotiated on multiple levels, from the neighborhood to the papal palace. On each level, different strategies were used to express and maintain power: this varied from “house scorning” to police patrols and the construction of buildings. Fabrizio Nevola in his study on Siena shows how even within one particular sphere—the patrolling of neighborhood streets—multiple jurisdictions competed. Like Nussdorfer, he finds that in the competition for control over urban space, different groups used different strategies to lay claim to the street. ⁶³ Other studies show how groups of people who are often seen as largely powerless, such as street vendors and street singers, could claim (parts of) streets through everyday use and their relationships with customers and audiences. ⁶⁴ These studies show that by moving from the very visible (laws and violence) to the more invisible aspects of negotiations over urban space, we are able to create a more fine-grained picture of what went on in the streets of preindustrial cities. Interestingly, in this picture, both the material aspects of the streets and the people who are often thought to have lacked agency, such as women, prominently come to the fore.

In their attempts to understand how the meanings of urban spaces were negotiated in the premodern city, historians are finding it useful to refer to ideas of spatial and social theorists such as Lefebvre and De Certeau. ⁶⁵ Here, the triangle of the legal city, the physical city, and the lived city, not only plays a crucial role, but more important still, the three elements are given (more or less) equal weight in the analysis. As a result, there is not only a growing awareness of the different formal power structures that determine the character of urban spaces (such as property ownership, laws, and customs) but also of informal aspects that determine who belongs in the street. These informal aspects are often described by a range of terms such as appropriation, social practice, and use, but can together be captured as the informal ownership of spaces. ⁶⁶ It is precisely the combination of formal and informal claims of ownership that can help enlighten the complex dynamics of gendered street use.

An imaginative piece that clearly shows how these different dimensions impacted on the gendered negotiations of urban space is an article by Katherine W. Rinne about Roman laundry sites. ⁶⁷ Without in fact explicitly referring to the categories mentioned above, the article reveals how urban planning, everyday use, gender norms, and the built environment together all contributed to the gendering of the streets of early modern Rome. Due to the sexual connotations of women with wet and (partly) bare bodies, and the fact that many professional laundresses were former prostitutes, the rather mundane activity of doing the laundry was seen as highly problematic. It created social tensions between men and women, for instance when the former wanted to use laundry sites for bathing, and between women doing their own laundry and the professionals hired by the elites. The authorities’ solution to such problems was to create specific laundry sites in the urban periphery, and to strictly regulate the times they could be used. Interestingly, these laundry sites each turned out somewhat different in nature, and were also attended by different groups of women. The one furthest out of town, in a district called the Velabro where many poor prostitutes lived, was a space where harassment was common and working conditions were poor. Both for these reasons and to escape associations with fallen women, many virtuous women avoided the site. By contrast, a laundry site near the Piazza del Popolo was very popular among ordinary housewives and girls. This was partly due to its location in the city in a mixed neighborhood rather than near a ghetto of prostitutes, but also resulted from its physical context. While next to the busy Piazza del Popolo and its adjacent city gate, the laundry basin was situated in a small street off the piazza and therefore out of sight from the crowds passing through the gate and gathering in the square. As Rinne argues, here women could create a “space for themselves under the watchful eyes of grandmothers and neighbors,” making it an attractive option for women concerned about their sexual honor. ⁶⁸ It also made it a predominantly feminine space where women gathered to work and let their children play, in contrast to the Velabro site, which was notorious for unruly youths who molested women. From Rinne’s detailed analysis, it emerges clearly that that government decisions, notions about female honor, location, physical space, and the type of use and users were all factors in shaping the gendered character of urban spaces. However, it is not clear from Rinne’s work how these factors precisely interacted and whether some factors at play may have been more important than others. This remains an important challenge for future work on gender and urban space.

What is furthermore striking about the article by Rinne is how studying patterns of everyday street use reveals the importance of differentiation, not just between gender but also between class and age. On one hand, we see that what applies to one category of women does not necessarily apply to others. On the other hand, it reveals that the presence of some women implies that others were absent. This shows how women, including those from the layers in society that lacked formal powers, could still claim ownership of particular spaces and through such ownership exclude others, both men and other women. The importance of social differentiation and the analysis of daily use are also reflected in another significant piece on the use of premodern streets. Robert Shoemaker’s study on the mobility of men and women in eighteenth-century London similarly reveals substantial differences between women from different social groups. ⁶⁹ As was the case for men, he finds great variety in how far, how often, and in what way women of different social categories moved around the city.

This may be nothing new to historians of women and gender, who for years have been calling for more attention to be paid to diversity between women and between men, but it is remarkable how few traces this appeal has left on research into historical urban space. Although in debates about gender and urban space, some scholars have indeed emphasized how the experiences of women from lower social groups were very different to those from the middle classes, each group tends to be treated in isolation in this field of scholarship. The early revisionist works by scholars such as Christine Stansell and Elizabeth Wilson are examples of this trend. Both crucially and successfully argue for a reassessment of women’s freedoms in a modernizing city, based on in-depth analyses of the experiences of working-class women. Nevertheless, their assessment of “the street” primarily deals with the lower social orders, largely ignoring the street use of other social categories. ⁷⁰ This is also the case in more recent studies, where the street—and concomitantly its users—is equated with prostitution, poverty, and working-class uprisings. ⁷¹ Shoemaker’s study, by contrast, shows how it is not only possible to unite both genders and various social groups in a single analysis of the gendered city; it also shows how such an analysis can reveal unexpected patterns of urban mobility in which women from a variety of backgrounds tended to travel further and occupy a more diverse range of spaces in the city than many males did. Therefore, in unraveling how gendered ownership of the city street is negotiated, a systematic analysis that incorporates people from all social layers is indispensable.

Toward Gendered Geographies of the Historic City

Examining the work that has been carried out on gender and urban space in the preindustrial period, especially in the last two decades, shows how much progress has been made concerning the challenging question of gendered street use. It is now widely accepted that the traditional division between public and private spaces does not necessarily equate to masculine and feminine spaces, nor that women were simply passive agents in the appropriation of space. At the same time, this examination also reveals important gaps in our knowledge. We still have little understanding of exactly how different factors impacted on street use, for instance how social status, age, and origin mattered in the everyday practices of city dwellers. Similarly, our spatial awareness of gender dynamics in the city is limited. Very little is known about how people actually moved through the city or how in that context the physical and lived city interacted. This brings me to two more profound issues that need to be solved: to what extent do presence and movement shape the ownership of streets in the same way, and how do these categories relate to freedom and agency? In literature, there is a tendency to equate especially mobility, but also a more static presence in the street, with liberty and autonomy. However, based on several examples highlighted above, one could for instance argue that freedom also meant the ability to choose to not leave one’s house or neighborhood. To be able to understand this better, it would also help if we had a clearer idea of what the concept of space meant to early modern city dwellers and how they perceived physical contact, crowdedness, and so on. Finally, it is clear from this overview that the knowledge we have gained about gender dynamics in premodern cities centers on particular areas of Europe, most notably Italy and England. In this final paragraph, I would like to propose that an essential way forward in this important debate is through the writing of gendered geographies of the premodern city. Such gendered geographies would ideally embrace three elements.

First, it is extremely important that we continue to chart both everyday use and spatial negotiations, but that we do this without focusing on one particular social group or specific space in the city. Although this remains a challenging task, Shoemaker’s work shows that it is possible when we combine source materials of a varied nature. His findings are not always based on direct observations, and sometimes require deduction, for instance where he uses sureties to show the circumscribed mobility of gentlemen. ⁷² However, since the publication of his chapter, significant progress has been made in the development of methods that allow more precise reconstructions of urban mobility and gendered street use. One crucial breakthrough comes from the field of labor history, and this method can be fruitfully applied to systematically uncovering the street use of a wide range of individuals. In an attempt to make visible the work of early modern women, a team of historians from the University of Uppsala developed the “verb-oriented method.” This analyzes the work activities of early modern men and women not by looking at an occupational title (a noun) as is done traditionally, but instead by studying the description of the work people undertook (in the form of a verb: for example, sewing, nursing, selling). ⁷³ As this project has successfully shown, the application of this method not only creates a more accurate picture of people at work and the types of work they undertook, it also allows for a much wider source base to be included in the analysis. In this way, court records can be studied systematically and quantitatively, but also for instance diaries, letters, and account books. ⁷⁴ Provided care is taken, this method may also be applied to studying visual materials and literary sources that depict aspects of everyday life in the early modern city. ⁷⁵ By adapting the verb-oriented method slightly and shifting the focus from work to location (i.e., where in the city activities take place), and including all the activities mentioned in the sources (not just work), we are able to come to a more systematic and comprehensive study of the various uses of urban space. In this way, people of a variety of ages and social backgrounds are included, as well as a diverse range of spaces at different moments in time: from the built-up urban environment of alleyways, streets, and avenues, to green spaces such as parks, gardens, and urban fringes ⁷⁶ ; and from different times of the day, the week, and the month, to different seasons. Of course, for all source materials, we need to be aware that the possibility of underreporting or misreporting of activities and the presence of (certain) groups of people might affect the results. Nevertheless, this methodology makes large sections of the hitherto invisible city visible, and allows for what we might call a “historical urban ethnography.” ⁷⁷

The collection of large quantities of unstructured data, as an approach such as outlined above requires, is greatly helped by the advances in digital humanities. Digital tools are also extremely important in a second aspect that is instrumental in enhancing our understanding of the dynamics of gendered space in preindustrial cities: visualizations. What is somewhat remarkable in this survey of the literature on gendered street use is that very few studies actually map presence and movement in the historical city. While most of the studies surveyed are aware of the spatial aspects of the patterns they observe, the analytical power of maps is generally lacking; as a result, the pictures that are sketched in these studies often remain relatively impressionistic. The history of early modern shops and shopping, by contrast, has in recent years shown how the precise mapping of activities can help to enhance our understanding of preindustrial economic and social practices. The plotting of shops and transport links on contemporary maps has made visible the clustering of certain shopping facilities, and has helped us to understand the rise of shopping as a leisure activity. ⁷⁸ More advanced techniques such as the reconstruction of the to-movement and through-movement potential, which illuminate the accessibility of certain parts of a city and the quickest through routes, respectively, are now also successfully applied in historical studies of retail and shopping. ⁷⁹ Given that the application of these techniques has worked well in an area of urban history with strong gender connotations, it is pertinent to apply such techniques more widely. Of course, when doing so in the context of gendered street use, a possible obstacle may be that what we are looking to map is a floating, and sometimes largely invisible, population instead of fixed shops or transport facilities. To solve this problem, we may, however, look to the social sciences for inspiration, where in recent decades important progress has been made in “mapping the unmapped” and accordingly in revealing spatial patterns of sidewalk use, street vending, and loitering. ⁸⁰

Maps not only allow for greater insights into patterns of gendered street use but also of the physical city. They illuminate the length and width of streets and thoroughfares, and the sizes of squares, gardens, and parks, all aspects that are considered imperative in shaping people’s behavior in the urban outdoors. We saw earlier that it is of great importance to incorporate the materiality of the city into an analysis of historical street use, and while in fields such as urban geography and architecture the dynamics between the built environment and people is central, in historical research this relationship does not always come as clearly to the fore. ⁸¹ Alongside digital maps, three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction can play an important role here. This provides insight into questions of surveillance (through windows or from balconies), or the ease with which one can claim a particular space, for instance due to its secluded nature or narrow shape. ⁸² Embracing these new techniques is therefore essential for historians wanting to better understand gendered street use.

Third, and last, we should aim to broaden and deepen our understanding of preindustrial gendered street use by expanding our chronological and geographical focus. By moving beyond the well-studied cities in Renaissance Italy and early modern England, we will be able to widen our knowledge of gendered spatial practices in cities within and beyond Europe. This will at the same time allow for a deepening of our understanding of the phenomena we observe, as we are likely to encounter urban environments with a different architecture, different institutional set-ups, and from different cultural and religious contexts. ⁸³ For a number of years there has been a call for comparative studies of historical streets, including their gendered practices. However, to date only a small number of studies on street life have taken a comparative perspective (either through time or space), and in many cases these involve putting different local case studies together instead of a systematic comparison or an integrated history of street use in different regions and time periods. ⁸⁴

Amy Stanley recently proved that there is great value in studying the experiences of early modern women across a geographical area larger than one continent. In an article on the mobility of early modern maidservants, she calls for a new type of global micro history that focuses less on interconnections and long-distance flows, and more on sedentary people and their everyday experiences. ⁸⁵ Her analysis of migration patterns of ordinary women (across countries, rather than within cities) greatly benefits from a global perspective, as it shows how gendered experiences can be similar across continents, despite substantial cultural differences. Findings such as these are immensely useful to historians of gender and the city, as they can reveal which factors mattered more than others in determining gendered practices. In a similar way, taking a long-term perspective will enhance our understanding, as well as allowing us to reunite the history of cities before and after “modernity” arose, especially in a global historical context where we would need to account for “multiple modernities.” ⁸⁶ Of course, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve all of this in a short period of time. One individual or even a small group cannot write gendered geographies for different cities across the globe, nor can this be done at once. ⁸⁷ However, from related fields of history that struggle with similar problems to those outlined above, we can learn that there is plenty that can be accomplished simply by slowly building up a picture of gendered everyday experiences in the city. ⁸⁸ Following their examples, it should not be long before the city street is no longer equated with male privilege, but seen as a social arena in which people of both genders negotiated spaces for themselves.