The soldier was never named, arrested, inspected, or otherwise drawn into the legal system, and men have usually had an easier time walking down the street than have women. Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, talking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women’s sexuality. Throughout the history of walking I have been tracing, the principal figures—whether of peripatetic philosophers, flâneurs, or mountaineers—have been men, and it is time to look at why women were not out walking too.
“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal when she too was nineteen. “Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Plath seems to have been interested in men for the very reason she was unable to investigate them—because their greater freedom made their lives more interesting to a young woman just setting out on her own. There are three prerequisites to taking a walk—that is, to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints. Free time has many variables, but most public places at most times have not been as welcoming and as safe for women. Legal measures, social mores subscribed to by both men and women, the threat implicit in sexual harassment, and rape itself have all limited women’s ability to walk where and when they wished. (Women’s clothes and bodily confinements—high heels, tight or fragile shoes, corsets and girdles, very full or narrow skirts, easily damaged fabrics, veils that obscure vision—are part of the social mores that have handicapped women as effectively as laws and fears.)
Women’s presence in public becomes with startling frequency an invasion of their private parts, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally. Even the English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women’s walking. Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the streets, women on the town, and public women (and of course phrases such as a public man, man about town, or man of the streets mean very different things than do their equivalents attached to women). A woman who has violated sexual convention can be said to be strolling, roaming, wandering, straying—all terms that imply that women’s travel is inevitably sexual or that their sexuality is transgressive when it travels. Had a group of women called themselves the Sunday Tramps, as did a group of Leslie Stephen’s male friends, the monicker would have implied not that they went walking but that they engaged in something salacious on Sundays. Of course women’s walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive. Much has been written about how women walk, as erotic assessment—from the seventeenth-century miss whose “feet beneath her petticoat / like little mice, stole in and out” to Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle—and as instruction on the right way to walk. Less has been written about where we walk.
Other categories of people have had their freedom of movement limited, but limitations based on race, class, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are local and variable compared to those placed on women, which have profoundly shaped the identities of both genders over the millennia in most parts of the world. There are biological and psychological explanations for these states of affairs, but the social and political circumstances seem most relevant. How far back can one go? In Middle Assyria (circa the seventeenth to eleventh centuries B.C.), women were divided into two categories. Wives and widows “who go out onto the street” may not have their heads uncovered, said the law; prostitutes and slave girls, contrarily, must not have their heads covered. Those who illicitly wore a veil could be given fifty lashes or have pitch poured over their heads. The historian Gerda Lerner comments, “Domestic women, sexually serving one man and under his protection, are here designated as ‘respectable’ by being veiled; women not under one man’s protection and sexual control are designated as ‘public women,’ hence unveiled. . . . This pattern of enforced visible discrimination recurs throughout historical time in the myriad regulations which place ‘disreputable women’ in certain districts or certain houses marked with clearly identifiable signs or which force them to register with the authorities and carry identification cards.” Of course “respectable” women have been equally regulated, but more by social constraints than legal ones. Many things are remarkable about the appearance of this law, whose ordering of the world seems to have prevailed ever since. It makes women’s sexuality a public rather than a private matter. It equates visibility with sexual accessibility, and it requires a material barrier rather than a woman’s morality or will to make her inaccessible to passersby. It separates women into two publicly recognized castes based on sexual conduct but allows men, whose sexuality remains private, access to both castes. Membership in the respectable caste comes at the cost of consignment to private life; membership in the caste with spatial and sexual freedom comes at the cost of social respect. Either way, the law makes it virtually impossible to be a respected public female figure, and ever since, women’s sexuality has been public business.
Homer’s Odysseus travels the world and sleeps around. Odysseus’s wife Penelope stays dutifully at home, rebuffing the suitors she lacks the authority to reject outright. Travel, whether local or global, has remained a largely masculine prerogative ever since, with women often the destination, the prize, or keepers of the hearth. By the fifth century B.C. in Greece, these radically different roles were defined as those of the interior and exterior, the private and the public spheres. Athenian women, writes Richard Sennett, “were confined to houses because of their supposed physiological defects.” He quotes Pericles concluding his funeral oration with advice to the women of Athens—“The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you”—and Xenophon telling wives, “Your business will be to stay indoors.” Women in ancient Greece lived far from the celebrated public spaces and public life of the cities. Throughout much of the Western world into the present, women have remained relatively housebound, not only by law in some countries even now, but by custom and fear in others. The usual theory for this control of women is that in cultures where patrilineal descent is important for inheritance and identity, controlling women’s sexuality has been the means of ensuring paternity. (Anyone who thinks such matters are archaic or irrelevant need merely remember the anatomist-evolutionist Owen Lovejoy, discussed in chapter 3, attempting to naturalize this social order by theorizing that female monogamy and immobility were important for our species long before we became human.) But there are many other factors pertaining to the creation of a dominant gender whose privileges include controlling and defining the female sexuality often viewed as chaotic, threatening, and subversive—a sort of wild nature to be subdued by masculine culture.
Architectural historian Mark Wiggins writes, “In Greek thought women lack the internal self-control credited to men as the very mark of their masculinity. This self-control is no more than the maintenance of secure boundaries. These internal boundaries . . . cannot be maintained by a woman because her fluid sexuality endlessly overflows and disrupts them. And more than this she endlessly disrupts the boundaries of others, that is, men. . . . In these terms the role of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality, or more precisely, women’s sexuality, the chastity of the girl, the fidelity of the wife. . . . While the house protects the children from the elements, its primar
y role is to protect the father’s genealogical claims by isolating women from other men.” Thus, women’s sexuality is controlled via the regulation of public and private space. In order to keep women “private,” or sexually accessible to one man and inaccessible to all others, her whole life would be consigned to the private space of the home that served as a sort of masonry veil.
Prostitutes have been more regulated than any other women, as though the social constraints they had escaped pursued them as laws. (Prostitutes’ customers, of course, have almost never been regulated in any way, either by law or by social condemnation: think of Walter Benjamin and André Breton a few chapters ago, who managed to write about their relations with prostitutes without fear of losing their status as public intellectuals or marriageable men.) Throughout the nineteenth century, many European governments attempted to regulate prostitution by limiting the circumstances in which it could be carried out, and this often became a limitation of the circumstances in which any woman could walk. Nineteenth-century women were often portrayed as too frail and pure for the mire of urban life and compromised for being out at all if they didn’t have a specific purpose. Thus women legitimized their presence by shopping—proving they were not for purchase by purchasing—and stores have long provided safe semipublic havens in which to roam. One of the arguments about why women could not be flâneurs was that they were, as either commodities or consumers, incapable of being sufficiently detached from the commerce of city life. Once the stores closed, so did much of their opportunity to wander (which was hardest on working women, for whom the evening was their only free time). In Germany the vice squad persecuted women who were out alone in the evening, and a Berlin doctor commented, “The young men strolling on the streets think only that a woman of good reputation does not allow herself to be seen in the evening.” Public visibility and independence were still equated, as they had been three thousand years earlier, with sexual disreputability; women’s sexuality could still be defined by geographical as well as temporal locale. Think of Dorothy Wordsworth and her fictional sister Elizabeth Bennet upbraided for going out walking in the country, or Edith Wharton’s New York heroine in The House of Mirth risking her social status at the beginning of the novel to walk into a man’s house unchaperoned for a cup of tea and ruining that status for good by being seen to leave another man’s house in the evening (while the law controls “disreputable women,” “respectable women” often patrol each other).
By the 1870s in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, prostitutes were only allowed to solicit at certain times. France was particularly cynical in its regulation of prostitution; the practice was licensed, and both the licensing and the banning of unlicensed sexual commerce allowed the police to control women. Any woman could be arrested for soliciting merely because she appeared in the times and places associated with the sex industry, while known prostitutes could be arrested for appearing in any other time or place—women had been divided into diurnal and nocturnal species. One prostitute was arrested for “shopping in Les Halles at nine o’clock in the morning and was charged with speaking to a man (the stall holder), and with being off the beat stipulated on her registration license.” By that time, the Police des Moeurs, or Morals Police, could arrest working-class women for anything or nothing, and they would sometimes round up groups of female passersby on the boulevards to meet their quotas. At first watching the women get arrested was a masculine pastime, but by 1876 the abuses became so extreme that boulevardiers sometimes tried to interfere and got arrested themselves. The mostly young, mostly poor, unmarried women and girl children arrested were seldom found innocent; many were incarcerated behind the high walls of Saint Lazare prison, where they lived in dire circumstances, cold, malnourished, unwashed, overworked, and forbidden to speak. They were released when they agreed to register as prostitutes, while women who ran away from licensed brothels were given the choice of either returning to the brothel or being sent to Saint Lazare—thus women were forced into rather than out of prostitution. Many committed suicide rather than face arrest. The great champion of human rights for prostitutes Josephine Butler visited Saint Lazare in the 1870s: “I asked what the crime was for which the greater number were in prison and was told it was for walking in streets which are forbidden, and at hours which are forbidden!”
Butler, a well-educated, upper-class woman who grew up amid progressives, was the most effective opponent of Britain’s Contagious Diseases Acts passed in the 1860s. A devout Christian, she opposed the laws both because they put the state in the business of regulating prostitution and thus, implicitly, of condoning it and because they enforced a double standard. Women could be punished by incarceration or by the inspections dubbed “surgical rape” for the slightest suspicion of being a prostitute, and a woman found to carry a venereal disease was confined and treated, while men were left free to continue spreading it (similar measures have been considered and sometimes carried out in regards to prostitutes and AIDS in recent years). The law had been passed to protect the health of the army, whose soldiers had a much higher incidence of such diseases than the general public; it seems to have been based on a cynical recognition that the health, freedom, and civil rights of men were of greater value to the state than those of women. Many more extreme abuses than that of Caroline Wyburgh were carried out, and at least one woman—a widowed mother of three—was hounded into suicide. Going out walking had become evidence of sexual activity, and sexual activity on the part of women had been criminalized. Though the laws in the United States were never quite so bad, similar circumstances sometimes prevailed. In 1895 a young working-class New Yorker named Lizzie Schauer was arrested as a prostitute because she was out alone after dark and had stopped to ask directions of two men. Though she was in fact on her way to her aunt’s house on the Lower East Side, the act and the time were interpreted as signs that she was soliciting. Only after a medical examination proved she was a “good girl” was she released. Had she not been a virgin, she might well have been found guilty of a crime compounded of the twin acts of having been sexual and of walking alone in the evening.
Though protecting respectable women from vice had long been one rationale for state regulation and prosecution of prostitution, the eminently respectable Butler took on the formidable task of protecting women from the state, for which she was vilified and chased by mobs (often hired by brothel owners). On one occasion the mob caught her and she was badly beaten and smeared with dirt and excrement, her hair and clothes torn; on another, a prostitute she came across as she fled a mob led her through a labyrinth of back streets and empty warehouses to safety. Of course she herself had transgressed by moving into the public sphere of political discourse and challenging the sexual conduct of men, and she was decried by one member of Parliament as “worse than prostitutes.” As she lay dying in 1906, far more women were moving into that sphere and meeting with similar treatment. The women’s suffrage movement in the United States and Britain, after decades of quiet and ineffectual effort to gain the vote for women, became militant in the first decade of the twentieth century, with an extraordinary campaign of marches, demonstrations, and public meetings—the now-usual forms of outdoor politicking available to those denied entrée to the system. These demonstrations were met with an unusual degree of violence—by the police in Britain, and by crowds of soldiers and other men in the United States. Union activists, religious nonconformists, and others had been met by violence before, but some of the things that happened to the suffragettes were unique. In Britain archaic laws were invoked to criminalize the women’s public gatherings, and current laws that gave all citizens the right to petition the government were violated. In both the United States and Britain these women arrested for exercising their right to be and to speak in public went on hunger strike, demanding they be recognized as political prisoners. Both governments responded by force-feeding the prisoners, and the agonizing procedure—which involved restraining the woman, forcing a tube down her nostrils to her stom
ach, and pumping in food—became a new form of institutional rape. Once again women who had attempted to participate in public life by walking down the street were locked up and found the privacy of their bodily interiors violated by the state.
But women won the vote, and in recent decades most of this strange duet between public space and private parts has been not between women and the government but between women and men. Feminism has largely addressed and achieved reforms of interactions indoors—in the home, the workplace, the schools, and the political system. Yet access to public space, urban and rural, for social, political, practical, and cultural purposes is an important part of everyday life, one limited for women by their fear of violence and harassment. The routine harassment women experience ensures, in the words of one scholar of the subject, “that women will not feel at ease, that we will remember our role as sexual beings, available to, accessible to men. It is a reminder that we are not to consider ourselves equals, participating in public life with our own right to go where we like when we like, to pursue our own projects with a sense of security.” Both men and women may be assaulted for economic reasons, and both have been incited by crime stories in the news to fear cities, strangers, the young, the poor, and uncontrolled spaces. But women are the primary targets of sexualized violence, which they encounter in suburban and rural as well as urban spaces, from men of all ages and income levels, and the possibility of such violence is implicit in the more insulting and aggressive propositions, comments, leers, and intimidations that are part of ordinary life for women in public places. Fear of rape puts many women in their place—indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors rather than their own will to safeguard their sexuality. Two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, according to one poll, and another reported that half of British women were afraid to go out after dark alone and 40 percent were “very worried” about being raped.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 32
