Ask any woman who’s tried to bring a pram on to a bus, breastfeed in a park, or go for a jog at night. She intuitively understands the message the city sends her: this place is not for you.
Working women were blamed for the breakdown of the traditional family and its consequences: namely, men straying into gambling and alcohol addiction. Even Friedrich Engels feared that women working outside the home was too great a disruption to society. Charles Dickens suggested that fallen women should be diverted to the colonies, where their low status could be ignored by the surplus of men in need of wives.
If the disorder of cities was a threat to certain women, and the disorder of certain women a threat to cities, the suburbs could provide a solution. Early ads for the London tube depicted such areas as Golders Green as refuges where women would be safe and conveniently preoccupied with homemaking and child-rearing, while fathers could easily access the city via expanded underground routes.
In the mass suburbanisation of North America in the 1950s, this “fix” for gender norms that had become unstable during the war was quite explicit. “Developers,” says Hayden, “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.”
Re-establishing these norms was seen as necessary to ensure full access to employment for returning male soldiers. What’s less-often understood is that this would enable access to another, no less vital kind of labour force: the unpaid women whose care work would keep the urban economy running, despite being unappreciated or simply unacknowledged.
The pandemic is merely exposing the fact that cities have been content to ignore domestic violence, not seeing it as an urban problem deeply connected to such issues as housing, employment, transportation, childcare, and of course the wage gap. Ultimately, tackling domestic violence may mean unsettling the heterosexual nuclear family in ways that would be deeply disruptive to the status quo – namely, disruptive to the long-standing reliance on the single-family home as a place of unpaid care work, a disruption cities can ill afford given their reluctance to fund childcare, subsidise housing and prevent violence.
The current situation offers an unprecedented opportunity for even bigger changes. One possibility comes via the anti-racism protests sweeping the globe: defund the police. Transfer that money to affordable housing, childcare and public transport, all of which would dramatically improve women’s lives in ways that increased policing never has. A second move: all those people suddenly deemed “essential workers” should be paid as if our lives depend on them, because they do. Third: reinvest in the public realm by creating accessible, barrier-free spaces and transport systems that would allow everyone full access to the benefits of city living.
