She / He More Complex than Either / Or -On Wilson

She a Street Walker, Globe Trotter

Immediately we encounter the oppositional positing of two ideological systems: the class interest found in the “Victorian determination to control working-class women” and the gender interest or “feminist concern for women’s safety and comfort in city streets” (Wilson 90). Yet, feminist interests would go beyond a question of female safety and comfort, to attempt to answer the why question in the division of labor while opening the possibility of disrupting or destabilizing our normative ideas of women in cities-exactly what Wilson attempts.

I questioned whether the supposed spectacle of women in the streets and public spaces was due to the intensification of the public / private divide, instead of its erosion, and then, not just of its erosion, but of the erosion rather, of the fixed ideas of gender roles within private / public spheres. In other words, the intensification of a spectacular consumer society risked revealing the use and purpose of controlling the social body- which includes men, and women, and of every class divide.

It seems, at this historical moment, the city itself is becoming reified. Rather than seeing Engels of emblematic of hostility towards urbanization and/or romantic anti-urbanism (91), Engels is bringing up rather, a question of ethics which is at the heart of all systems of domination and exploitation. Sensationalizing women on the streets deflected from the question of ethical treatment of all people.

The alarm was not that women were out on the streets, but rather as Wilson states that the patriarchal order was being undermined by urban life (91). Everyone’s included here. After all, “a more educated, and civilized populace” meant the development of a strong hegemony and its greater exercise of social control. Yet, as Foucault also proposes, where there is power, there is resistance. Therefore, we can see a simultaneous movement of control and conformity while the patriarchal order was also being disrupted.

Looking at industrialization in the U.S., John D’Emilio explains for example,

“The expansion of capital and the spread of wage labor have effected a profound transformation in the structure and functions of the nuclear family, the ideology of family life, and the meaning of heterosexual relations. It is these changes in the family that are most directly linked to the appearance of a collective gay life.” (Capitalism and Gay Identity 102)

Yet, we often forget how heterosexual men (even middle-class men) were also regulated through gender roles and the supposed public / private divide. For example, a middle class family man follows monotonous and routine labor commutes and circuits to his place of work and home. While his movement may have appeared to be “free” he was also confined by the appearance or adherence to respectability etc. On the other hand, as we’ve read in the assigned novels, women in Britain moved about in the cities, and were also on lookers--witnesses of transactions. The genre of travel diaries for example, are of women traveling around the world especially to colonies where they enacted “the gaze” upon the colonized “other,” though noted, that they often travelled either to accompany their husbands, fathers, or for missionary / civilizing work.

I agree with Wilson that “Perhaps worse was that, in the rough and tumble of the city street and urban crowd, distinctions of rank of every kind were blurred” (91) pointing to the fear of exogamy and by that, I don’t mean simply outside one’s race, or culture, but also outside one’s class.

So, while urbanization highlighted the spectacle of women on the street, the spectacle was an exposure rather, for example as with the prostitutes, a great example of a person as both commodity and use value. Luce Irigaray for example goes as far as to propose that patriarchal sexuality and motherhood is a "masochistic prostitution of the (female) body to a desire that is not her own" (The Sex Which Is Not One, 25). I prefer Wilson’s approach in disrupting such fixed polarizations of good versus evil (93) which occurs when gender/sex distinctions are reified.

In short, I also agree that “in practice the private sphere was-and is-also a masculine domain” (98) and that what became public in the social milieu at the time was not the spectacle of public women necessarily but their use and commodity in a rising capitalist and patriarchal society. On the other hand, I cannot negate that women social mobility was blocked entirely through various institutions. Thus, becoming public signaled women as entering more fully into the economy as holders of property, legal contracts, and full citizens rather than as mere spectacles walking the streets.