CityReads | 12 books on Women and the City

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12 books on Women and the City

Seeing women is as much about women's needs as it is about women's participation and contributions.

March is Women's History Month. I put together a second list of books about women and the city. The 12 books cover different historical periods, span multiple cities around the world, include multiple disciplines, and address multiple, intersectional issues of cities, gender, migration, race, class, space, planning, art, media, and literature. One book from the list, Women made visible, best summarizes the meaning of reading books on women and the city: seeing women is as much about women's needs as it is about women's participation and contributions.

1. Building Inclusive Cities: Women's Safety and the Right to the City

Building on a growing movement within developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as Europe and North America, this book documents cutting edge practice and builds theory around a rights based approach to women’s safety in the context of poverty reduction and social inclusion. Drawing upon two decades of research and grassroots action on safer cities for women and everyone, this book is about the right to an inclusive city.

The first part of the book describes the challenges that women face regarding access to essential services, housing security, liveability and mobility. The second part of the book critically examines programs, projects and ideas that are working to make cities safer. The final part of the book, entitled 'Tools', looks at three very significant concerns in the advancement of work on the safety of women and the right to the city: the issues of gender mainstreaming and intersectionality; maximizing the opportunities offered by contemporary communications and ways of capitalizing on them to promote women’s safety; and the ongoing debates about the evaluation of programmes and how we can evaluate knowledge around women’s safety once it is created.

2. City of Working Women: Life, Space, and Social Control in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing

This book investigates the life experiences of ordinary women, specifically in connection with Beijing's urban public spaces, during the late Qing and early Republican periods. The narrative starts with the last decade of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), when urban reforms began to transform the cityscape, provide more material goods, and inspire a feminist movement. The story ends in 1928, when the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) subjugated the local women's movement to a nationalist feminism and increased its intervention in lower-class women's lives. women in Beijing didn't present a homogenous social category; their reactions to the shifting and challenging social environment varied. Middle-class and working-class women adopted different approaches to their participation in the construction and reconstruction of urban public spaces.

3. City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London

City Women is a major new study of the lives of ordinary women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London. Drawing on thousands of pages of Londoners' depositions for the consistory court, it focuses on the challenges that preoccupied London women as they strove for survival and preferment in the burgeoning metropolis. Balancing new demographic data with vivid case studies, Eleanor Hubbard explores the advantages and dangers that the city had to offer, from women's first arrival in London as migrant maidservants, through the vicissitudes of marriage, widowhood, and old age.

In early modern London, women's opportunities were tightly restricted. Nonetheless, before 1640 the city's unique demographic circumstances provided unusual scope for marital advancement, and both maids and widows were quick to take advantage of this. Similarly, moments of opportunity emerged when the powerful sexual anxieties that associated women's speech and mobility with loose behavior came into conflict with even more powerful anxieties about the economic stability of households and communities. As neighbors and magistrates sought to reconcile their competing priorities in cases of illegitimate pregnancy, marital disputes, working wives, remarrying widows, and more, women were able to exploit the resulting uncertainty to pursue their own ends.

4. Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children's streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls' personal lives. Simmons argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity.

Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, social scientists' documents, delinquency home records, police reports, school records, girls' fiction writing, autobiographies, photography, and interviews with girls to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, "respectable" families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.

5. Constructive Feminism: Women's Spaces and Women's Rights in the American City

In Constructive Feminism, Daphne Spain examines the deliberate and unintended spatial consequences of feminism's second wave, a social movement dedicated to reconfiguring power relations between women and men. Placing the women's movement of the 1970s in the context of other social movements that have changed the use of urban space, Spain argues that reform feminists used the legal system to end the mandatory segregation of women and men in public institutions, while radical activists created small-scale places that gave women the confidence to claim their rights to the public sphere. Women's centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic violence shelters established feminist places for women’s liberation in Boston, Los Angeles, and many other cities.

Unable to afford their own buildings, radicals adapted existing structures to serve as women's centers that fostered autonomy, health clinics that promoted reproductive rights, bookstores that connected women to feminist thought, and domestic violence shelters that protected their bodily integrity. Legal equal opportunity reforms and daily practices of liberation enhanced women's choices in education and occupations. Once the majority of wives and mothers had joined the labor force, by the mid-1980s, new buildings began to emerge that substituted for the unpaid domestic tasks once performed in the home. Fast food franchises, childcare facilities, adult day centers, and hospices were among the inadvertent spatial consequences of the second wave.

6. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City

Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being 'sexually exploitable.' Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the 'citizen wife' and the 'common prostitute', the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market.

This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study of women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration.

7. In Paris: 20 Women on Life in the City of Light

Two quintessential Parisian women--model and fashion designer Jeanne Damas and journalist Lauren Bastide--shine a spotlight on twenty real-life women of Paris, dispelling the myth that there's only one type of Parisian woman and introducing us to the city that real Parisiennes live in. They're booksellers, singers, writers, activists, and antique dealers; they live in small studios, spacious apartments, or houseboats; their ages range from fourteen to seventy . . . and all embody the effortless chic and insouciant spirit of the legendary Parisian woman.

In Paris takes us into these women's lives, telling us about their careers, families, favorite nightlife spots, shopping habits, and beloved books and films. Full-color photos taken by Jeanne herself accompany charming lists of advice on the French art de vivre--from the best places to people-watch with a glass of wine after work to the perfect Parisian playlist to the ten things that a French woman would never, ever post on Instagram. Witty, elegant, and modern, In Paris is an ode to Paris through the eyes of its eternally cool women.

8. Migration and Domestic Work: The Collective Organisation of Women and their Voices from the City

With female migrants dominating low paid and ever-expanding domestic work worldwide, this book brings together the voices of 120 migrating women of 28 national identities and 10 different religious affiliations. Together they tell how patriarchal and religious gender codes in the family and at work shape their new lives in London, Berlin and Istanbul.

Through their own accounts, the study explores the intersecting multiple and gendered identities women carry from their home countries and how these are reshaped, challenged, changed, or not, as they encounter different structures, traditions and cultural codes in their new countries. With women's propensity for collective organising, whether via community, social movements or trade unions as a central theme, the authors also bring together issues of migration, work and identity with trade union and community organizing

9. Suffrage and the City: New York Women Battle for the Ballot

In 1917, women won the vote in New York State. Suffrage and the City explores how activists in New York City were instrumental in achieving this milestone. Santangelo uncovers the ways in which the demand for women's rights intersected with the history, politics, and culture of New York City in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The fight for the vote in the nation's largest metropolis demanded that suffragists both mobilize and contest urban etiquette, as they worked to gain visibility and underscore their cause's respectability.

The city's mores, rhythms, and physical layout helped to shape what was possible for organizers campaigning within it. At the same time, suffragists helped to redefine the urban experience for white, middle-class women. Combining urban studies, geography, and gender and political history, Suffrage and the City demonstrates that the Big Apple was more than just a stage for suffrage action; it was part of the drama. As much as enfranchisement was a political victory in New York State, it was also a uniquely urban and cultural one.

10. The migration of Chinese women to Mexico city

This book focuses on the migration strategies of Chinese women who travel to Mexico City in search of opportunities and survival. Specifically, it explores the experiences and contributions of women who have placed themselves within the local and conflictive networks of Mexico City's downtown street markets (particularly in Tepito), where they work as suppliers and petty vendors of inexpensive products made in China (specifically in Yiwu). Street markets are the vital nodes of Mexican "popular" economy (economía popular), but the people that work and live among them have a long history of marginalization in relation to formal economic networks in Mexico City. Despite the difficult conditions of these spaces, in the last three decades they have become a new source of economic opportunities and labor market access for Chinese migrants, particularly for women. Through their commerce, these migrants have introduced new commodities and new trade dynamics into these markets, which are thereby transformed into alternative spaces of globalization.

11. Women Made Visible: Feminist Art and Media in Post-1968 Mexico City

In post-1968 Mexico a group of artists and feminist activists began to question how feminine bodies were visually constructed and politicized across media. Participation of women was increasing in the public sphere, and the exclusive emphasis on written culture was giving way to audio-visual communications.

Women Made Visible by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda uses a transnational and interdisciplinary lens to analyze the fundamental and overlooked role played by artists and feminist activists in changing the ways female bodies were viewed and appropriated. Through their concern for self-representation (both visually and in formal politics), these women played a crucial role in transforming existing regimes of media and visuality—increasingly important intellectual spheres of action.

Foregrounding the work of female artists and their performative and visual, rather than written, interventions in urban space in Mexico City, Aceves Sepúlveda demonstrates that these women feminized Mexico's mediascapes and shaped the debates over the female body, gender difference, and sexual violence during the last decades of the twentieth century.

12. Women writers and the city: essays in feminist literary criticism

The city has a special significance in the works of women writers because –as women—they have a unique relationship to the urban environment, whether it is considered as an actual place, as a symbol of culture, or as the nexus of concepts and values determining women’s place in history and society.

Women Writers and the City, offers a diverse and comprehensive selection of analyses addressing the urban environment vis a vis women writers. The text's strength lies in its division of essays by region (Continental, British, and North American writers), and by critical approach (biographical-historical, linguistic, close textual, for example). In a succinct and persuasive Introduction, Squier poses the argument and the issues that govern the collection of essays: how women writers respond to the city that has been traditionally regarded as a male-centered culture and institution. Whether they praise the city or blame it, women writers respond to the urban environment in a significantly different way from men. The women writers discussed in the book include Flora Tristan, Marguerite Duras, Renée Vivienne, George Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and many others.

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