Urban women are provocative; their mere presence has
frequently stimulated observers to label the
relationship between women and urban culture
problematic. As Mary P. Ryan recently noted, ‘To
search for women in public is to subvert a
longstanding tenent of the modern Western gender
system, the presumption that social space is divided
between the public and the private and that men
claim the former while women are confined to the
latter.’ What follows here is an examination of the
changing discourse of the relationship between women
and cities since the Civil War. Perhaps for the
reason indicated by Ryan, few systematic surveys
have been made of that literature. Only those works
which explicitly posit a connection between women
and urban culture are included here; it is not
enough that the women described be
in cities, there must be some
discussion of the interaction between the two. The
term ‘culture’ is used in the anthropological sense
– culture as a way of life. Many of the works
reviewed here examine women who somehow deviate from
the ‘ideal’ woman, who in the nineteenth century
seemed to be a married Protestant middle-class
non-employed mother. Thus they demonstrate abundant
interest in prostitutes, immigrant women and
wage-earning women, as well as in politically and
sexually radical women.