Diefendorf, Jeffry “I Love That City, But Which City?”
“Transnational
Comparisons of Women
as Urban Builders”
ABSTRACT: In the past decade, case studies have investigated the impact of women on the built environments of Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, London, and Berlin. As a group, these histories reveal a significant and widespread phenomenon of women appropriating and shaping urban space in Western cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These female “incursions” were often bitterly contested, as different groups struggled to make the modern city in their own image. By focusing their investigations on particular locations, the authors of these studies capture the specificity of circumstances – cultural, political, and economic – that gave rise, in each place, to gendered architectural claims. Historical records make clear, however, that female urban activists paid close attention to developments beyond their cities, and that influences crossed the Atlantic in both directions. This paper explores how a comparative approach to this gendered urban phenomenon might address both local and transnational perspectives.
Session III: Thinking Comparatively about the American Built Environment