Session details
Organizer(s)
Danielle van den Heuvel (University of Amsterdam)
Keywords
Space, Mobility, Gender
Abstract
How did people use, occupy, and mobilized themselves through urban space in their everyday life? Furthermore, how and to what extent was urban space segregated as a result of these activities? In other words, to what extent do theories of ‘separate spheres’ or ‘public-domestic dichotomies’ apply to urban environments? Recent research has acknowledged that ‘ownership’ of urban space was much more complex than a division between public and private spaces or male and female spheres. This raises the need to examine further both these spaces and the way that people moved through them.
By reexamining early modern urban space as it underwent a transitional phase of so-called ‘modernization,’ the session investigates gendered use and mobility of urban space in the context of a broad range of social, economic and cultural-historical debates, such as urban household compositions, the gendered division of labor, and gendered identities and norms of behavior. By tracking people’s trajectory within urban space, we seek to capture both practices and experiences of space.
We also intend to stimulate a discussion of methodological approaches that employ time-space geography and digital mapping to shed new lights on textual material (juridical sources, travel guidebooks, personal diaries) as well as visual sources (topographical maps, paintings, prints).
The session is proposed and organized by the members of ‘The Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Eurasia (1600-1850),’ an NWO-funded research project at the University of Amsterdam. Along with the research questions described above, the project includes a comparative perspective. For this sake, it consists of subprojects on the relation between gender and urban space in Amsterdam and Edo (present-day Tokyo). As a result, we are also interested in issues of comparability and to what extent particularities and commonalities produce distinct mobility regimes for so-called premodern and modern cities.
Papers
From Village to City: Everyday Travel and Geographies of Community in Early Modern England
Author(s)
Charmian Mansell (University of Cambridge)
Keywords
Mobility, Travel, Gender
Abstract
In May 1598, Nichole Hooper met two women as she returned home from the city of Exeter to the town of Dartmouth in Devon. The women convinced her to return again to Exeter to sell a shirt on their behalf to a weaver there. Later, she learned the shirt was stolen from Hugh Richards, who lived in a village seven kilometres outside the city.1
In 1612, the servants of Joanna King travelled five times a week from the village of Compton Dando in Somerset to collect wheat and rye from a house in Radcliffe Street in the city of Bristol. Once their horses were loaded with the crops, they returned to the village where it was ground at Joanna King’s mill.2
One September morning in 1650, Joanne Symonds and her son John of Dunwere in Somerset returned home from Bridgwater market, carrying grain in pails on their heads. As they walked through a field where men were reaping, they saw Henry Abbott drown in the river.3
Early modern populations are frequently divided along parochial lines, and it is assumed that social and economic life largely played out within the arbitrary boundaries of the administrative parish. The frequent movement of people in and out of towns and cities over the course of a day or a week is often overlooked in favour of migration studies. The opportunities for work, leisure and other pursuits (exemplified in the cases above) that drew rural dwellers to visit urban spaces are the subject of this paper.
Using incidental evidence from ecclesiastical court and Quarter Sessions witness depositions, this paper interrogates patterns of everyday travel from rural to urban settlements in England between 1550 and 1700. The paper explores who made journeys from rural villages to urban settlements and why. It considers the impact of gender, age and occupation in determining the types of urban interactions these rural dwellers experienced, the urban communities that they belonged to and the distance they travelled to participate in them. By analysing these experiences of mobility and the interactions between rural and urban dwellers, I seek to present a new geography of early modern communities.
Mapping Mobility in Early Modern Amsterdam 1742-1791: Gendered Mobility, Scope, and Neighbourhood
Author(s)
Bob Pierik (University of Amsterdam/University of Uppsala)
Keywords
Everyday Mobility, GIS, Gender
Abstract
Based on witness testimony provided to the chief officer of Amsterdam, this paper introduces and explores the general gendered pattern of mobility in early modern Amsterdam. The 'Freedom of the Streets' database has been filled with spatial practices gathered from notarial depositions from 1742, 1750 and 1791. These detailed depositions were written up by a special notary and contain locations, times and personal information that make it possible to map mobilities, and chart mobility regimes of the early modern metropolis. The movements of people can be used to reveal both material and mental boundaries that shaped the city in practice. The scope of people’s movements help us understand how space was used in practice and how different people made us of and experienced the city.
Furthermore, this paper considers in detail the relations of the neighbourhood to daily life and mobility as they emerge through examination of the source material. The neighbourhood and the district are specifically considered as both physical and more abstract entities that can be used to evaluate the scope of mobility.
Producing Mobility in the Modernizing Metropolis: Walking, Begging and Peddling in Berlin’s Tiergarten, c. 1740-1830
Author(s)
Antonia Weiss (University of Amsterdam)
Keywords
Public Parks, Everyday Mobility, Gender and Class
Abstract
From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, parks and promenades assumed a central role in the daily life of European cities. From Munich to Paris, from Vienna to London, everywhere across the continent, royal gardens were opened to the public while new green spaces were also created to offer citizens a respite from urban life and an opportunity to immerse themselves in nature. Commentators at the time viewed these novel types of green spaces as a setting for different social groups to intermingle. In contrast to this, scholarship has predominantly presented this first generation of urban parks as synonymous with genteel walking culture. By contrast, the question of how people of different classes, gender and social status actually interacted in these parks is to this day very poorly understood.
This paper takes as a case study Berlin’s Tiergarten, which since its opening to the public in 1740 was regarded by both Germans and foreign visitors as a shining example of European park and walking culture. Undergoing numerous transformations under the Prussian kings, the Tiergarten reflected ongoing attempts to equip this young, ambitious and rapidly modernizing capital with international allure and standing. This, however, did not simply translate into a vision of the park as the exclusive domain of the urban elite. Initial research has suggested that begging and peddling were widespread practices in the Tiergarten. Such practices were paradoxically both persecuted and selectively sanctioned by the authorities, while also being sustained by the patronage of the urban elite. It was women in particular who were frequently granted permission to secure their subsistence in the Tiergarten by way of trade and begging. This paper builds upon these preliminary insights to investigate the Tiergarten as an urban arena in which several modes of everyday mobility – from peddling to promenading – coexisted. Drawing on a combination of police records, legislation, life writing and travel accounts, the paper explores how, at the intersection of class and gender, of sovereign will and civilian agency, there arose a unique mobility regime for this urban park.
Locked Doors, Porous Walls: The Ruota in Post-Tridentine Rome
Author(s)
Michal Lynn Shumate (IMT Lucca)
Keywords
Movement, Rome, Architecture
Abstract
disparate sites in Post-Tridentine Rome: a foundling hospital (Santo Spirito in Sassia), a church and convent (Santi Quattro Coronati), and a series of female servants’ quarters (Palazzo Barberini). Central to the design of the ruota is an embedded, rotating wheel that opens onto only one side of said wall at a time, allowing small objects to pass between while keeping persons at either side invisible to each other. Sites where the wheel device is extant in Rome represent different iterations of this highly charged and gendered early modern architectural feature: the ruota degli esposti where women could leave unwanted newborns anonymously, and conversely, the ruota that secluded the women who dwelled inside, whether in a cloistered convent or aristocratic palace.
Throughout the secondary literature, there are a few asides about the general affinity between these two uses of the ruota, but little inquiry or information beyond a short mention. The material lens of the diminutive ruota allows a consideration of disparate spatial phenomena of the period in concert with each other: the role of architecture as a metaphor for the female body and the highly charged nature of doors and windows as the access points to buildings and their uses (Cohen 1992), new restrictions for nuns and convents under the Council of Trent and the simultaneous aristocratization of convents and conventualization of noble families (Hills 2004), as well as other attempts to contain female sexuality, such as Pius V’s enclosed Ortaccio.
Illuminating Gender in the Early Modern Urban Space of Edo: A study on Edo Meisho Zue
Author(s)
Marie Yasunaga (University of Amsterdam)
Keywords
Visual Sources, Gender, Space
Abstract
How did people in the early modern period experience the urban space of Edo (today Tokyo)? In which way did gender affect people's presence and their mode of activity in the city? This paper aims to discuss these questions by examining the book illustrations in the Edo Meisho Zue (Illustrated Book of Famous Places in Edo) published in 1834-1836.
In order to capture diverse activities performed on the vast number of people from the book illustration, this research employs a hybrid method of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Incorporating the visual description technique common in traditional art historical practices with the verb-oriented method developed by the Gender and Work project at the Uppsala University, this method first decodes the visual representation of different scenes into simple verbal descriptions. Then it accumulates such historical accounts as a set of data, each of which linked to specific location information. In this way, an observation becomes possible, for instance, a woman carrying a baby is at a storefront of the geta clog shop, or two young ladies are browsing the latest publications on the threshold of a bookshop in the heart of the Nihonbashi area.
Visual representation, in general, cannot be easily regarded as the same nature of the source that would give an exact equivalent knowledge as what textual material would provide to uncover the historical past. The primary purpose of such books as Edo Meisho Zue to demonstrate the prosperity of the administrative capital of early modern Japan called a certain degree of idealization of the cityscape should be beard in mind. Still, thanks to the recording manner of drawing adopted by the artist Hasegawa Settan who often illustrated based on his on-site sketches, the Edo Meisho Zue offers a unique narrative of the city whose visual outlook before the arrival of photography is otherwise scarcely known. By examining the observed sceneries, this paper investigates the disposition of people's presence and how gender and spatial surroundings relate to each other.
Creating a Social Map of Paramaribo (1846)
Author(s)
Thunnis van Oort (Radboud Universiteit) Coen van Galen (Radboud Universiteit) and Rick Mourits (Radboud Universiteit)
Keywords
GIS, Space, Gender
Abstract
The purpose of the ‘Historical Database Suriname’ is to construct a database of the population of Suriname between 1830-1950, by combining a variety of data sources, such as the slave registers, census records, immigration records, and, crucially, the civil records that recorded the (free) population of the Dutch colony. Since the envisaged database contains geographical information, it is worthwhile to create an historical GIS infrastructure that allows mapping the data to anticipate a variety of future research questions or valorisation applications. In this panel, we would like to discuss some preliminary ideas for creating such a GIS system for the capital city of Paramaribo by focusing on a particularly rich source, the so-called ‘wijkregister’ of 1846.
When in 1828 the civil registry was introduced in Suriname, the colonial government prescribed an annual registration of all of Paramaribo’s free inhabitants in the ‘wijkregister’ (city district registry), ordered by plots (addresses). The registration contained names of (free) residents of a particular address, their age, profession, religion and skin colour, plus the number of enslaved people residing on the plot, categorized by skin colour, gender and whether adult or child. Not all annual registers have survived completely, the 1846 edition is one of the most complete and has been transcribed into structured data.
Plotting this dataset on the map of Paramaribo will supply us with a rich social map of a mid-19th century colonial city, visualizing the gendered and racial patterns underpinning colonial Suriname and injecting new quantitative evidence into recent debates on the formation of a community of former enslaved in Paramaribo (Fatah-Black, 2018; Neslo, 2016).
This GIS project is still in an early stage. We want to use the occasion of this panel to discuss and receive feedback on some of the fundamental decisions on how to structure the GIS in a way that not only suits this particular use case but is also sustainable for future applications in the context of the wider project. The HisGIS project in the Amsterdam Time Machine serves as an inspiration.
Out and About in London. Gendered Experiences of Mobility in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century Diaries
Author(s)
Anneleen Arnout (Radboud Universiteit)
Keywords
Gender, Mobility, London
Abstract
Much has been written about the gendered character of public space in the late nineteenth-century metropolis. Over the past few decades, scholars have convincingly demonstrated how the presence of middle- and working-class women in city centers moving about and visiting shops and other spaces of leisure, caused great societal unease (Walkowitz 1998; Rappaport 2000; Remus 2019). While the societal debates that ensued are well-known, we know far less about how these women moved through the city on a day to day basis and how they experienced their mobility. That is because everyday practices and experiences are far more difficult to get at then conceptualizations of these experiences in contemporary newspaper columns or novels (Andersson 2013).
In this paper, I want to explore how we could use diaries to reconstruct the gendered experiences of everyday mobility practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London. While most diarists are notoriously silent on the subject of everyday practices (Pooley 2017), many nonetheless contain clues that can help us reconstruct the emotional geographies of their authors. Building on recent insights from the history of emotions (Scheer 2011), I will approach the act of moving through the city as an emotional practice. Through the analysis of a selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century diaries, I aim to uncover how gendered experiences of mobility were produced.
To do so, I will analyze:
- the spatial practices discussed by each author, paying attention to the type of movement, the geographical scope and the company
- the emotional and sensory discourse with which they were described
- the way these descriptions referenced or overlapped with the gendered and classed discourses about public space that circulated more widely in London at the time.