In “What Would a Non-Sexist City Look Like?” Dolores Hayden talks a lot about the relationship between gender and public/private space both in the city and the suburbs. I was googling for Hayden’s book, which I read excerpts from this year, and stumbled upon this article by Ilaria Salvadori about how the public and private spheres are gendered and unequally valued. Link
Since I’m far from an expert on the matter – and probably not even a worthy commentator being a male who doesn’t immediately notice how gender factors into public policy issues (e.g. transportation, housing, public health) – I’m curious to hear whether the “spatial design and material culture” of American cities are still in need of “a complete transformation,” as Hayden pointed out 27 years ago.
A reminder yesterday from Ben that all conservative cultural critiques have reactionary sexual politics at their core. Proselytizing for suburban sprawl, Reagan administration veteran Ron Utt
was once quoted in The New York Times denying that the sedentary lifestyle of suburbia contributes to obesity. Instead Utt points his finger at the washing machine, arguing, "you're fat for a lot of reasons, like the fact that you don't do laundry by hand."
It's just like a Heritage Foundation fellow to romanticize the days when soiled clothing was laboriously beaten with a paddle, scrubbed on a washboard, and then hung out to dry. It was women who did that work, both for their own families and as wage workers. And as anti-sprawl author James Howard Kunstler points out in Geography of Nowhere, it is women who so often get stuck shuttling children to and fro five times a day in our sprawling, car-dependent suburbs. The landscape of the 1950s all too often promotes the values of the 1950s.
Please remember that Campus Progress' terms of use do not allow promoting or endorsing any particular political party or candidate for office. Posts or comments that do this will be deleted.
!
Since I’m far from an expert on the matter – and probably not even a worthy commentator being a male who doesn’t immediately notice how gender factors into public policy issues (e.g. transportation, housing, public health) – I’m curious to hear whether the “spatial design and material culture” of American cities are still in need of “a complete transformation,” as Hayden pointed out 27 years ago.