Breaking the Gender Code

Women and Urban Public Space in the Twentieth-Century United States

Georgina Hickey

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781477328224
• eBook ISBN: 9781477328248
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A history of the activism that made public spaces in American cities more accessible to women.

From the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle—and not so subtle—messages that they shouldn't be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts. In doing so, Hickey explores how gender segregation intertwined with other systems of social control, as well as how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and women's experiences of urban space. Drawing connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence, Hickey unveils both the strikingly successful and the incomplete initiatives of activists who worked to open up public space to women.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Right and Reason: Understandings of Women’s Presence in the Modern City
• 2. Building Women into the City: Infrastructure and Services in the Early Twentieth Century
• 3. The City and the Girl: Midcentury Consumption, Civil Rights, and (In)Visibility
• 4. When Girls Became Women: Confronting Exclusion and Harassment in the Long 1960s
• 5. The Public Is Political: Demanding Safe Streets and Neighborhoods
• 6. Taking Up Space and Making Place: Late-Century Institution Building
• 7. Privacy in Public: The (Almost) Policy Revolution
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index