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Gendering Space in Boston

Everyone knows that space is gendered. How often, for example, do we tell our daughters not to walk alone at night? This dynamic restricts women far more than men, but both sexes understand it. Despite our everyday realities, women's historians have tended to treat space more as a metaphor than as a concrete issue that shapes women's lives. Many of the founding metaphors of the field, "separate spheres" for example, are spatial metaphors. But few historians have analyzed space itself as a category within women's history. Sarah Deutsch's Women of the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 18701940 addresses this lack by combining an analysis of gender, geography, and urban space. In so doing, she makes complex arguments about the ways women have attempted to shape and use the spaces of early-twentiethcentury Boston. Throughout her discussion, Deutsch pays careful attention to the ways women of different races, ethnicities, and social classes interacted with both public and private spaces in the city. She argues that women significantly increased their access to public space between 1880 and 1940, changing the nature of the city and, in particular, understandings of the public. However, with a few exceptions, women had very little influence over the actual structure of space, as they lacked the political and economic power to shape the city's urban planning. Rather than making an overarching argument about women's relationship to space, Deutsch concedes that women's access to spaces in the city always depended heavily on their race and class. As she writes in her conclusion, "but it was always 'women,' not 'woman,' who would gain access, always particular groups, contingent on particular configurations of power and alliances" (p. 285). Deutsch spends the first half of the book discussing the issue of space in the politics of everyday life, approaching it from several different positions: working-class matrons, middle-class and elite matrons, single working-class women, and the classic "new woman" of the progressive era. In the second