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Feminist City. Leslie Kern
Читать онлайн.Название Feminist City
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781788739832
Автор произведения Leslie Kern
Издательство Ingram
I’d never realized how gutsy it was to do things like breastfeed in public. I knew intellectually that I was “allowed” to nurse my baby anywhere, but the thought made me cringe. The weird mix of reactions to my body that I’d experienced while pregnant taught me that I could never predict how I’d be made to feel. It was jarring to be revered and resented in equal measure. I was a divine figure in need of protection, but also out of place and taking up space in ways that make other people uncomfortable. The fact that news items about people being asked to leave public places while breastfeeding pop up on a regular basis—with breastfeeding explicitly protected by human rights laws in Canada—suggests that strong convictions about the proper place of breastfeeding parents remain in place.
When behaving correctly, keeping my inconvenient body contained, and parenting my baby in ways that satisfied dozens of strangers at once, I received smiles and assistance. The instant my presence became too big, too noisy, too embodied, I met angry glares, snide comments, and sometimes even physical aggression. There was the man who kept shoving me forward while in line at the grocery store. When I asked him to stop he told me to “get my damn stroller out of the way.” There was the woman on the incredibly crowded bus who called me a bad mother because Maddy accidentally stepped on her foot. There was the sales clerk in a Toronto department store who actually told me to wait while she finished serving a customer when I rushed up to the desk because Maddy had toddled off out of sight. Obviously she was found, but only thanks to another mom who rushed into action when she heard the panic in my voice.
This level of rudeness didn’t happen every day, but underlying all of this social hostility was the fact that the city itself, its very form and function, was set up to make my life shockingly difficult. I was accustomed to being aware of my environment in terms of safety, which had a lot more to do with who was in the environment, rather than the environment itself. Now, however, the city was out to get me. Barriers that my able-bodied, youthful self had never encountered were suddenly slamming into me at every turn. The freedom that the city had once represented seemed like a distant memory.
As I tried to navigate an unfamiliar set of everyday routines as a new mom, the city was a physical force I had to constantly struggle against. Wasn’t the city supposed to be the place where women could best juggle the demands of their double and triple days of social reproduction, paid work, school, and myriad other roles? Didn’t my PhD supervisor proclaim that a “woman’s place is in the city”?41 If that was true, why did every day feel like a fight against an enemy that was invisible yet all around me?
It’s true that I could walk to the grocery store, café, parks, and many other places I needed to access. I could take transit to school and the nearest subway stop was within walking distance. There were community centres and schools with programs for small children. Maddy’s day care was reasonably nearby. I could function without a car. Compared to the suburbs, this kind of urban density offered a lot more ways to manage parenting, grad school, and domestic responsibilities. In fact, what Gerda Wekerle (my supervisor) was responding to when she wrote “a woman’s place is in the city” in the 1980s was the nightmare of suburban living.
There is of course a long history of feminist critiques of the suburbs. Betty Friedan’s 1963 diagnosis of the “problem that has no name” included a scathing indictment of suburban life:
Each suburban wife struggles with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’42
From The Stepford Wives to Desperate Housewives, Weeds to Mad Men, suburban life has generated endless stereotypes. The Valium-popping housewife, the overprotective mom, the housewife with a dark secret, etc. And there’s no small amount of things to critique in terms of lifestyle, gender roles, and racial and class inequality. But feminist geographers were also looking at the very material of the suburbs, their form, design, and architecture as foundational sources of the “problem that has no name.”
We take the suburbs largely for granted now as a kind of organic outgrowth of big cities and a result of a natural need for more space and bigger family homes. However, the suburbs are anything but natural. Suburban development fulfilled very specific social and economic agendas. From providing much-needed housing for returning soldiers and their growing families to giving a boost to the post-war manufacturing sector, the suburbs were an essential component of a plan to sustain economic growth, especially after World War II. In North America, government programs facilitating home ownership turned us into nations of home owners, tying workers to their mortgages in a move that some felt would produce a more conservative, and importantly, anti-communist society. The residential real estate sector grew into one of the most significant components of the twentieth-century economy—so significant, that when the U.S. housing sector was undermined by risky lending practices in 2007, it triggered a global economic crisis. Perhaps most critically, as feminist architect Dolores Hayden notes, “single family suburban homes have become inseparable from the [North] American dream, of economic success and upward mobility. Their presence pervades every aspect of economic, social, and political life.”43
The economic role of suburban development was essential, but there was a social agenda as well, one that would massively affect race and gender relations. In the U.S., the post-WWII suburban boom coincided with a period when millions of African Americans were leaving the rural south in search of better opportunities in the industrial cities of the north. Rapid increases in the Black population of these cities tested the tolerant attitudes of the “progressive” north. Many white households preferred to decamp to the suburbs in a phenomenon that became known as white flight. Indeed, many early mass-produced suburbs such as the famous Levittowns were explicitly “whites only.” Over the long term, this pattern meant that non-white communities were confined to the crumbling, underfunded, and over-policed inner city and denied opportunities for wealth accumulation via home ownership. This is a major factor in continuing urban patterns of racial segregation and wealth disparity well into the twenty-first century.44
If the racial effects of suburban development linger today, so too do the gendered effects. Hayden puts it succinctly: “Developers argued that a particular kind of house would help the veteran change from an aggressive air ace to a commuting salesman who mowed the lawn. That house would also help a woman change from Rosie the Riveter to a stay-at-home mom.”45 Post-war propaganda was explicit about the need for women to relinquish their wartime factory jobs to returning men and the suburban home was the perfect “fix” for re-establishing normative gender roles. By providing a spatial solution to the temporary widening of women’s horizons, the public-private, paid-unpaid work divide could be “naturally” re-established between the sexes.
The suburban lifestyle both assumed and required, in order to function properly, a heterosexual nuclear family with one adult working outside the home and one inside. Large houses, isolated from transit and other services, meant the stay-at-home wife and mother was required to perform a full-time domestic caretaker role, overseeing the home and managing the needs of the breadwinner and children. As feminist planner Sherilyn MacGregor states, this built form has “created a lasting infrastructure for the [gendered] division of labour,” one that pre-supposes the traditional heterosexual nuclear family.46
Hayden contends that only a small fraction of households includes the sole male breadwinner/unemployed housewife with minor children. Indeed, this model has likely always been a small proportion of households and it rarely represented the lives of Black and working class women. And yet the predominant residential landscape is designed with this ideal. Because the built environment is durable over