Gender + Architecture: Women and the City

I hadn't intended to use this space to talk about classes of the non-making variety, but I feel compelled to write. We're in our second week of the Gender and Architecture seminar, and I was struck by our reading by Sarah Deutsch on the way that women both occupied and shaped the urban environment in late 19th and early 20th century Boston (text). Namely that women did indeed organize their own urban space, and how that was a cross-class and cross-cultural/ethnic activity. The section on Moral Geography (which revealed that the perception of a working woman's moral character was determined by place rather than action) particularly recalled for me Stephen Crane's Maggie: Girl of the Streets. Of course, Crane writes from a male perspective, expressing an urban environment in which young women fall prey. But I found the illustration of space -- the sort of sordid city landscape with which women had to contend compelling (67):

A girl of the painted cohorts of the city went along the street. She threw changing glances at men who passed, giving smiling invitations to those of rural or untaught pattern and usually seeming sedately conscious of the men with a metropolitan seal upon their faces.

Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness. She hurried forward through the crowd as if intent upon reaching a distant home, bending forward in her handsome cloak, daintily lifting her skirts, and picking for her well-shod feet the dryer spots upon the sidewalks.

The restless doors of saloons, clashing to and fro, disclosed animated rows of men before bars and hurrying barkeepers.

A concert hall gave to the gave to the street faint sounds of swift, machine-like music, as if a group of phantom musicians were hastening.

 And further (68-9):

The girl went into gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street and only occasional broad beams of light fell across the sidewalks from saloons. In front of one of these places, whence came the sound of a violin vigorously scraped, the patter of feet on boards, and the ring of loud laughter, there stood a man with blotched features.

Farther on in the darkness she met a ragged being with shifting, bloodshot eyes and grimy hands.

She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed like grim lips. The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over them, beyond them, at other things. Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance. Street-car bells jingled with a sounds of merriment.

At the feet of the tall buildings appeared the deathly black hue of the river. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence.

Crane's Maggie is literally absorbed by the city (she drowns herself in it), after being led into prostitution. He seems to be setting up a presumed fate for Maggie, an archetype for the poor, immigrant, working woman in  the Bowery (or perhaps any other fin-de-siecle industrialized city). Her morals, degraded primarily and inevitably by her surroundings, define her end.

Deutsch would argue that this characterization falls in line with the perception of working class women and girls by middle-class and elite men and women at the time. But Crane disregards the relative power held by women at this time. His image of the tenement life may be accurate, but he wrongly positions women as simply victims to it.