As a woman, my everyday urban experiences are deeply gendered. My gender identity shapes how I move through the city, how I live my life day-to-day, and the choices available to me. My gender is more than my body, but my body is the site of my lived experience, where my identity, history, and the spaces I’ve lived in meet and interact and write themselves on my flesh. This is the space that I write from. It’s the space where my experiences lead me to ask, “Why doesn’t my stroller fit on the streetcar?” “Why do I have to walk an extra half mile home because the shortcut is too dangerous?” “Who will pick up my kid from camp if I get arrested at a G20 protest?” These aren’t just personal questions. They start to get to the heart of why and how cities keep women “in their place.”
I started writing this book as the “Me Too” movement exploded.12 In the wake of investigative reporting that exposed long-time abusers and harassers in Hollywood, a wave of women and several men came forward to tell their stories about the scourge of sexual harassment and violence across workplaces, sports, politics, and education. Not since Anita Hill spoke out has the harm of sexual harassment generated such a level of media, institutional, and policy attention. While the rhetoric used to discredit survivors and whistleblowers has not changed much since the Clarence Thomas hearings, the (almost literal!) mountains of evidence against the worst culprits and most misogynist institutions are convincing many that something must change.13
Survivors of this abuse have testified to the long term, life-altering effects of continually facing physical and psychological violence. Their stories resonate with the vast literature on women’s fear in cities. The constant, low-grade threat of violence mixed with daily harassment shapes women’s urban lives in countless conscious and unconscious ways. Just as workplace harassment chases women out of positions of power and erases their contributions to science, politics, art, and culture, the spectre of urban violence limits women’s choices, power, and economic opportunities. Just as industry norms are structured to permit harassment, protect abusers, and punish victims, urban environments are structured to support patriarchal family forms, gender-segregated labour markets, and traditional gender roles. And even though we like to believe society has evolved beyond the strict confines of things like gender roles, women and other marginalized groups continue to find their lives limited by the kinds of social norms that have been built into our cities.
“Me Too” survivors’ stories expose the continued prevalence of what feminist activists call “rape myths:” a set of false ideas and misconceptions that sustain sexual harassment and violence in part by shifting the blame to victims. Rape myths are a key component of what we now call “rape culture.” “What were you wearing?” and “why didn’t you report it?” are two classic rape myth questions that “Me Too” survivors face. Rape myths also have a geography. This gets embedded into the mental map of safety and danger that every woman carries in her mind. “What were you doing in that neighbourhood? At that bar? Waiting alone for a bus?” “Why were you walking alone at night?” “Why did you take a shortcut?” We anticipate these questions and they shape our mental maps as much as any actual threat. These sexist myths serve to remind us that we’re expected to limit our freedom to walk, work, have fun, and take up space in the city. They say: The city isn’t really for you.
A decade or so after starting that pigeon feeding frenzy, Josh and I were back in London, old enough now to take the Tube to Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street by ourselves. Our parents probably just wanted to enjoy some kind of culturally-uplifting experience without being asked when we were going shopping every five minutes. Like the pigeons you’ll now find smartly navigating the Tube to their new favourite food sources, we taught ourselves to think and feel our way through the city on our own. Long before smartphones, we just had the Tube map and our instincts to guide us. We never felt afraid. The signs and announcements about safety and vigilance conjured distant news clips of IRA bombings, but this was nothing that could touch a couple of Canadian kids on vacation. By the end of the trip, we were (in our own minds) savvy little urban explorers only a step or two removed from being real Londoners.
About a year before that trip we went to New York City for the first time. This would have been 1990, a few years before Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policies accelerated the Disney-esque makeover of Times Square and other iconic neighbourhoods. We had a little freedom to roam the big shops of Fifth Avenue together, but there was no possibility of hopping on the subway alone here. In fact, I don’t think we took the subway once the whole trip, even with our parents. New York was a completely different beast than Toronto or London. For our parents, the excitement of this city was laced with a palpable sense of threat that seemed much more real than an IRA attack.
I think I learned then that a city—its dangers, thrills, culture, attraction, and more—resides in the imagination as well as in its material form. The imagined city is shaped by experience, media, art, rumour, and our own desires and fears. The gritty, dangerous New York of the 1970s and 1980s held sway in our parents’ minds. It wasn’t what we experienced in 1990 but it shaped what we knew or thought we knew about the place. And in fact, that hint of danger was alluring. It made New York New York: not Toronto, not London, and certainly not Mississauga. The energy and pull of the city was tangled up with the sense that anything might happen.
This tangled up sense of excitement and danger, freedom and fear, opportunity and threat, contours so much feminist thinking and writing about cities. As early as the 1980s, my own future PhD supervisor boldly claimed “a woman’s place is in the city.”14 Gerda Wekerle was arguing that only dense, service-rich urban environments could support women’s “double days” of paid and unpaid work. At the same time, sociologists and criminologists were raising the alarm over women’s extremely high fear of urban crime, fear which couldn’t be explained by actual levels of stranger violence against women.15 For feminist activists, acts of public violence against women sparked the first Take Back the Night demonstrations in cities across Europe and North America as early as the mid-1970s.
In everyday life, the statements “the city is not for women” and “a woman’s place is in the city” are both true. As Elizabeth Wilson attests, women have long flocked to city life despite its hostilities. She suggests that “there has perhaps been an overemphasis on the confinement of Victorian womanhood to the private sphere,” noting that even in this era of strict gender norms, some women were able to explore the city and take on new roles as public figures.16 Dangers be damned. The city is the place where women had choices open up for them that were unheard of in small towns and rural communities. Opportunities for work. Breaking free of parochial gender norms. Avoiding heterosexual marriage and motherhood. Pursuing non-traditional careers and public office. Expressing unique identities. Taking up social and political causes. Developing new kinship networks and foregrounding friendship. Participating in arts, culture, and media. All of these options are so much more available to women in cities.
Less tangible, but no less important, are the psychic qualities of the city: anonymity, energy, spontaneity, unpredictability, and yes, even danger. In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, heroine Lucy Snowe travels alone to London and as she dares “the perils of crossings” she experiences “perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure.”17 I’m not trying to say that women like being fearful, but that some of the pleasure of city life relies on its inherent unknowability and on one’s courage in braving that unknowability. In fact, unpredictability and disorder can come to represent the “authentically urban” to women who reject safe suburban conformity and repetitive rural rhythms.18 Of course, finding urban disorder exciting is a little easier if you have the means to retreat when you want to. In any case, fear of crime has not kept women from cities. However, it’s one of many factors that shape women’s urban lives in particular ways.
This book takes on women’s questions about the city, looking at the good and the bad, the fun and the frightening, in order to shake up what we think we know about the cities around us. To see the social