The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience

Deborah Simonton, Deborah Simonton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351995740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Challenging current perspectives of urbanisation, The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience explores how our towns and cities have shaped and been shaped by cultural, spatial and gendered influences. This volume discusses gender in an urban context in European, North American and colonial towns from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, casting new light on the development of medieval and modern settlements across the globe.

Organised into six thematic parts covering economy, space, civic identity, material culture, emotions and the colonial world, this book comprises 36 chapters by key scholars in the field. It covers a wide range of topics, from women and citizenship in medieval York to gender and tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African cities, reframing our understanding of the role of gender in constructing the spaces and places that form our urban environment.

Interdisciplinary and transnational in scope, this volume analyses the individual dynamics of each case study while also examining the complex relationships and exchanges between urban cultures. It is a valuable resource for all researchers and students interested in gender, urban history and their intersection and interaction throughout the past five centuries.

Part I

Economy, Circulations and Exchanges

Introduction

Anne Montenach

In early modern and modern Europe, towns were often the motivators for economic change, controlling trade and capital formation; and the disseminators of culture, resources and information. Commercial cities flourished and developed complex manufacturing practices, while articulating systems of exchange – involving goods as well as people – with their immediate hinterlands and with wider regions. At the same time, in many areas of Europe, standards of living for the majority improved dramatically, leading to new practices of consumption. Towns greatly contributed to material and cultural exchange across the whole of Europe, thus playing a central role in the rise of modern Western capitalism and in the economic integration of the continent.1

In many respects, the gendered character of towns has not been central to traditional urban and economic history. The ways that women and men articulated their relationship to the European urban economy and, more generally, the influence of gender on the economic shape of towns, have attracted little attention from historians. Even though women appear to be everywhere in pre-industrial and industrial towns, many economic and urban historians have failed to see them or have relegated them to ‘women’s history’, as though their experience had no real relevance for urban research. Gender and the construction of gender roles have thus long been neglected by urban history, whereas economic historians have positively constructed the economy as a man’s world, where, for instance, merchant and craft guilds played a central role in the economic – but also political, social and cultural – life of early modern European towns in particular.2

However, for the last three decades, inventive research has paid growing attention to gendered economic roles and activities in various urban contexts – though much of it is isolated articles in journals or chapters in books, in which the ‘urban variable’ is often not articulated. This has led, for instance, to a re-evaluation of the role played by working women in the European urban economy from the Middle Ages onwards.3 The aim of this section is therefore to explore explicitly the relationship between the town, gender and economic development. From this perspective, and across six chapters, authors address a number of questions, which speak to how women as well as men specifically articulated their relationship to the gendered urban economy and the strategies they employed to operate in these worlds. Among these strategies, the essays pay particular attention to work as a major social resource, to mobility, to a combination of licit and illicit activities and to the role of sociability and social networking – from kinship and family connections to business partnerships. The perspective is to re-interrogate the way in which economic practices and experiences contributed both to reinforce or challenge gender roles and identities and to shape the towns. The aim of this section is also to stretch the traditional idea of economy by exploring different types of markets and their nexus.

Taking into account the urban context is a way of adding to our knowledge on classical issues of economic and social history such as patterns of transmission, credit, business, work, poverty relief or migration. Rules on transmission of properties and inheritance have thus mostly been studied in rural contexts. By considering the urban environment, Anna Bellavitis raises specific issues regarding the gendered transmission of immovable goods such as the family house or the workshop in early modern Venice. In the case of credit transactions analysed by Cathryn Spence, specific urban sources such as debt litigations from the burgh court records of Edinburgh show not only that women in towns had greater access to credit networks than their rural counterparts, but also that everybody could enter into credit transactions regardless of economic or social status. Hannah Barker’s chapter sheds new light on the small family-run businesses that played a central part in urban economic growth and social transformation during the period of the ‘industrial revolution’ but have been largely neglected by the historiography. It also stresses the fact that opportunities offered to female manufacturers and traders differed according to the dynamism and degree of regulation of a given town.

Rules and institutions were indeed at the heart of urban life, and the chapters in this section show that economic life was, in early modern and modern urban Europe, not cut off from the social, cultural and religious but also political worlds. Deborah Simonton reminds us that gaining permission or a privilege to trade in the urban world of eighteenth-century Europe was also a political story, since guilds and corporations that organised the town economy and had profound links to urbanisation, were closely tied to citizenship and political power. Towns were situated in local and national cultures and in legal codes, customs and practices that shaped men’s and women’s agency. All over Europe, women were discriminated against in terms of rights of citizenship, of property ownership and in access to work. However, the legal framework of women’s activities varied widely from one end of Europe to the other. If women as a whole suffered from restricted legal capacities, their actual autonomy was nevertheless promoted by the indecisions and contradictions of the law throughout Europe. Medieval statutes of Venice, which were enforced in early modern times, thus gave women broader property rights than in many other Italian cities, which had paradoxical consequences on the urban real estate market. More broadly, rules could be more or less flexible according to the evolution of economy and society, as shown, for instance, by the changing relationships between guilds and unfree workers. On a different level, whereas the legal urban framework shaped male and female roles and rights, numerous urban institutions or private and semi-public organisations, analysed both by Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller and Manuela Martini, also played a significant role in providing economic support to poor people, orphans or abandoned children, young women or migrant families. The urban experience, or in other words, confrontation with the institutional framework but also with the spatial landscape of a given place, therefore shaped men and women’s identities.

In fact, towns acted as gendered spaces not only at a very literal level, as shown for instance by Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller’s and Manuela Martini’s chapters, but also from a legal and cultural point of view. Local laws and institutions could thus enforce conventional gender norms or, on the contrary, enhance female agency. Of course women – and men – cannot be treated as homogeneous groups: their economic roles depended on a series of factors such as social, occupational and marital status. However, ideas about gender, about the definition of masculinity and femininity – the first increasingly shaped by work, the second associated with domesticity – and about activities appropriate to men and women had a great impact on economic opportunities for each sex.4 As shown by Deborah Simonton’s chapter, the concepts of skill and honour were thus at the centre of guildsmen’ identities in eighteenth-century Europe. But gender roles and stereotypes, which are themselves socially constructed, may shift and therefore need to be situated in time and space. Female servants who were engaged in moneylending in early modern Edinburgh learned to navigate networks of debt and credit and developed ‘life skills’ that challenged paternalism, argues Cathryn Spence. As in the case of businesswomen studied by Hannah Barker, reputation – or social credit – was a central value shared both by men and women engaged in economic transactions. Within a same social group – families in trade during the industrial revolution – some common elements, such as the domestic, the religious and the commercial, formed the basis of male and female identity.

Gender is a multifaceted concept that not only refers to the social construction of the categories of men and women but also to the social interactions between the sexes. By interjecting gender into the history of migrations and highlighting ‘the gendered paths to incorporation into urban labour markets’, Manuela Martini raises complex questions about women’s emancipation or dependence and, more broadly, about the transformation of hierarchies within the migrant family.5 Familial relationships and family strategies are key elements in the six chapters of this section. Sociologists and anthropologists have shown that familial relationships cannot be seen as completely cut off from the economy. Households were enmeshed in a complex environment of soci...