Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920

Deborah Simonton, Hannu Salmi, Deborah Simonton, Hannu Salmi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367208882
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315522791
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.

1 Introduction

Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience

Deborah Simonton and Hannu Salmi

As Enlightenment notions of the knowable and scientific predictability and of concepts of progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments became paramount in the mindset of Europe, catastrophes, and notably the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, shook much of Europe to the core and challenged the new world view with dramatic impact. This volume ends with another key catastrophe, the First World War, which similarly led to questioning many of the assumptions of progress and complacency, which had marked much of the previous century. As Gerhard Masur concluded, ‘There are few spectacles in the history of civilization comparable to this picture of Europe, basking in fruitful opulence under the autumn sun of its glory, ripe for the slaughter.’¹ Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience in Europe, 1648–1920 concentrates on the shift from pre-modern to modern from the perspective of the increasing presence of catastrophes in European imagination and everyday life. It specifically addresses the history of catastrophes in Europe between the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth from an urban point of view. Thus, the chapters in this volume extend across a dynamic period of historical change marked personally by the emergence of individualism; socially by the shift from a society of ranks and orders to a society stratified by class; economically by commerce, industrialization and consumerism; politically by the emergence of the nation state and an uneven, jerky engagement with notions of citizenship and democracy; and, developmentally by the rise of the town and the growing hegemony of urban life, albeit to varying degrees and at different points in time across Europe. This period was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to a new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism.

The book explores the influence of gender on the shape of towns themselves, the gendering of catastrophes and of spaces and the significance of gender as a force for urban change. It takes the view that gender is fundamental to the ways many towns shaped themselves, and that the effects of catastrophes and responses to them are not gender-neutral. The gendered dimension of urban history and the study of urban catastrophes both have long individual pedigrees. This collection reflects our interest in the way that each informs the other and proposes to bring the two together in order to illuminate questions of interest to historians, geographers and urban planners. In the chapters contained here, authors address how gender was involved in the events and cultural corollaries around catastrophes, and how gendered practices were negotiated during and in the aftermath of disastrous incidents in European towns and cities. They ask in what ways did catastrophe and gender operate to shape, reflect or facilitate the actual or imaginary experience of the town for individuals, households or groups. This approach has enabled us to ask questions that urban history has tended not to ask, since in many respects the gendered character of towns has not been central to traditional urban history, or even studies of catastrophe. For example, what does this approach add to our knowledge of the operation of gender over time and to our knowledge of the history of towns? These questions and our tentative answers have the potential to challenge current perceptions of catastrophes and to nuance the historiography of urban responses. It broadens our thinking about urban catastrophic events and their legacy in urban settings, and will help us to understand the contribution of gender to the culture of towns over time. Thus, a key objective is to bring together issues of European urban development, gendered identities and the relationship between these and catastrophic events.

This volume focuses on how both man-made and natural disasters affected urban communities across Europe, and explores the synergy of urban development in the aftermath of disaster by articulating the significance of gender in that response. The towns and cities that we consider in this volume have been chosen as ones that have a story to tell that is significant to our overall narrative about the relationships between catastrophes, urban spaces and gender. Each of the chapters addresses explicitly the specific urban context in which it is operating and outlines the distinctive and representational aspects of its location. Ranging from Moscow in the East to London in the West, from Pori, Finland, in the North to Lisbon in the South, it embraces a number of case studies interrogating the character of these catastrophes and specifically examines their longer-term impact. It also includes a chapter exploring the relationship between European and colonial cultures in the examination of Charleston, South Carolina and its adaptation to the lessons of the Great Fire of London in 1666. These studies involve large towns, like Lisbon and Copenhagen, middle-sized ones like La Rochelle and Turku, as well as smaller ones like Pori. Taking a number of approaches, largely drawing on cultural history, this volume explores emotional, spatial, political and economic responses. Dealing with a period from early modern to modern, this volume will go some way to filling what remains a gap in our knowledge, both in terms of the history of the European town and the role of gender and space in shaping its development.

The history of catastrophes is an emerging field of research. Its interests range from natural and environmental disasters to social, industrial and technological accidents, from local hazards to global threats with a plethora of cultural ramifications. There are books on famous disasters, for example, famines, like Karen Cullen’s Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) or fires, like the Great Fire of London in 1666, examined in two excellent studies by Neil Hanson and Adrian Tinniswood.² The nearest to this volume in its focus on urbanity and catastrophe is Catherine J. Kudlick’s study on the cultural meanings and social turmoil put forward by the cholera pandemic in the early nineteenth-century France.³ Kudlick’s work concentrates on one geographical vantage point and one period in time in contrast to our volume, which aims at understanding the change across a longue durée, through the perspective of urban catastrophes. Similarly, in its focus on catastrophes in urban surroundings, the collection on Cities and Catastrophes, edited by Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, Harold L. Platt and Dieter Schott, shares some common ground with our volume.⁴ Another ‘genre’ of catastrophe studies takes a comprehensive, global overview approach to their history, the most recent one being Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, as well as others, like John Withington’s Disaster! and Teofilo F. Ruiz’s The Terror of History.⁵ Furthermore, there are important studies that concentrate on a particular period in history, for example, Chantal Thomas and Jeanne-Pierre Dupuy’s L’Invention de la catastrophe au XVIIIe Siècle and Alessa Johns’ Dreadful Visitations. ⁶

This volume builds on this previous research, but it explicitly analyses a series of catastrophes and disasters in Europe through the prism of gender and urbanity. Dealing with well-known ones like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, or the First World War, and lesser-known ones like flooding in Vienna and cholera in Moscow, the authors take a fresh perspective utilising the lens of gender and an expanded approach to the concept of catastrophe. Compared to many other projects, it also has the distinct benefit of analysing the role of catastrophes over a longer time span, which illuminates how perceptions of disasters, their background and consequences, have changed from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth century. In contrast to some previous studies on disasters, the book Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience in Europe employs a broad definition of a catastrophe, by concentrating not only on external disasters and threats such as floods and earthquakes but also on internal hazards. It examines how sudden changes of circumstances influenced everyday life and led, in many cases, to an individual perception of a catastrophe. It also directs its central inquiry to how catastrophes hit urban centres and how the ramifications changed the city as well as explores their gendered implications. Chapters engage with a number of key questions, including how the disaster changed urban experience and how urban communities conceived, adapted to and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. To what extent were these experiences intersected and modified by other factors? What light does it throw on the changing nature and meaning of physical or psychological boundaries and conceptual spheres (public/private, male/female, licit/illicit, etc.)?

The Concept of Catastrophe

Without doubt, the history of catastrophes has deep roots in history, as far as we can see from the available source material. The Bible alone includes several references to catastrophes. Earthquakes appear numerous times in both the Old and New Testaments. In Matthew, for example, one reads an apocalyptic vision of the future: ‘For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places’.⁷ The history of catastrophes is bound together with the history of fear and the expectation of evil. In the fourth century BC, Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that ‘he would be a sort of madman or insensible person if he feared nothing, neither earthquakes nor the waves, as they say the Celts do not’.⁸ In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas answered that although the threat was unavoidably present, it did not feel close and thus cause fear. The fear of death and destruction are consequences of universal nature that cannot be avoided but against which the specific, particular nature rebels as long as possible. When the universal meets the particular in the present, there will be suffering and mourning, and when one tries to foresee its encounter, it causes fear.⁹

Throughout medieval and early modern periods, it seems obvious that disasters were seen to be instigated by the hand of God and through irreversible expressions of His will. In his book Sin and Fear: The Emergence of the Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, the French historian Jean Delumeau explores the rich history of guilt in Western Europe. People feared many kinds of things, from Black Death to Islam. During those centuries, Delumeau concludes, the introspection of fears materialized. In the case of external hazards, the attention was directed at the self, to the deeds of an individual, from which the problems were seen to stem. Delumeau thus writes about the birth of a guilt culture: the turn to the inner self that characterized Western culture, particularly during the seventeenth century.¹⁰

In the history of catastrophes, the eighteenth century deserves particular attention, primarily because of emergent industrialization and its ramifications. Industrial culture led to an increasing manipulation of nature and exploitation of natural resources. Structural changes in production were connected with the turmoil of social order and ways of life, and technology started to play an ever-increasing role in maintaining everyday practices. Simultaneously, risks in society increased in a rising curve. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has argued that this process included a profound element for change. In pre-industrialized societies, hazards were not essentially based on economic or technological decisions, they were ‘ “strokes of fate” raining down on mankind from “outside” and attributable to an “other”—gods, demons, or Nature’.¹¹ In an industrialized society, however, there were risks that depended on human choice. Obviously, industrial modernity has not succeeded in eradicating disasters, either natural or human-made, but it has developed different kinds of strategies in managing these threats, for example warning and evacuation systems and more alert disaster preparedness.¹² Many of the chapters in this book will address these tactics; they illuminate the ways they changed over time, and demonstrate an increasing risk potential in Western cultures. It is important to note however that there were also many similarities between pre-modern and modern disasters, in how they changed both personal lives and social communities.

This volume draws especially on the concept of ‘catastrophe’. Inevitably, the use of the word ‘catastrophe’ became saturated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century publicity. Its etymological background is the Greek word καταστροϕή, which means an overturning, a sudden turn or a conclusion.¹³ It appeared as early as the thirteenth book of Aristotle’s Poetics as part of a tragedy. In Aristotle, ‘catastrophe’ did not however refer only to a misfortune, a negative turn. It could also be a turn to the better. Aristotle notes that, in some works like the Odyssey, there is ‘a double thread of plot, and also an opposite catastrophe for the good and for the bad’.¹⁴ ‘Catastrophe’ was used for centuries as a dramatic concept. In the 1779 edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie one reads that catastrophe is ‘la changement ou la révolution qui arrive à la fin de l’action d’un poëme dramatique’ [the change or revolution that happens at the end of the action of a dramatic poem].¹⁵

It is difficult to estimate when exactly the concept of ‘catastrophe’ widened outside of dramatic theory to describe a disaster in the life of an individual or a community and to include both natural and human-made disasters. Most probably this kind of a conception emerged quite early on; when life was perceived as a drama, it became natural to interpret everyday life in dramatic terms. Through studying German encyclopaedias of the eigh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience
• Part 1 Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment and Absolutism
• Part 2 Catastrophe in the Age of Democracy
• Guide to Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index