Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City.

Flâneurie on bicycles: acquiescence to women in public in the 1890s

“…Yet the reason the flâneur has been regarded as ‘an exclusively bourgeois masculine type’ (Pollock 1988, 67) has nothing to do with women's restriction from flâneurie or a deficit of women's interest in the city and its happenings. Women certainly perused the city (Nord 1995; Deutsch 2000; Spain 2000; Mackintosh 2005), substantiating Howell's (2001, 26) remark that the ‘paradigm of urban spectatorship could not be exclusively authorised by middle‐class males, or even exclusively by men at all’. Rather, the oversight resulted from the simple proclivity of men, such as Berliner flâneurs Walter Benjamin, August Endell, Siegfried Kracauer and Franz Hessel, intentionally to omit women from their musings (Gleber 1997, 68–9).…”

“…Indeed, later research on public women is far more optimistic, more encouraging of the possible (Ryan 1990; Gleber 1997; Domosh 1998, 2001; Wilson 2001; Mackintosh 2005). Even Nord (1995, 12, 207–36), who suspects the idea of the female flâneur and who argues that fictional female flâneurs emerged from the Victorian woman's ‘consciousness of transgression and trespassing … and from her struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become a spectator’, implicitly concedes the possibility in her chapter on ‘The Female Social Investigator’, an interpretation the following discussion will support. We follow Gleber (1997, 86), maintaining that ‘the thesis of the “missing flâneuse” may too quickly foreclose our attention to instances of female flâneurie’ that Gleber herself is keen to recover.…”

“…Yet, women clearly walked the streets and had done so since the beginning of the modern city era, circa 1789 (Stansell 1987); ‘modern’ women as denizens of the streets had already been a century‐old reality in the era of the safety bicycle (see also Ryan 1990). Still, there is a suspicion that ‘the female bohemian who strolled and looked with freedom could not exist in the nineteenth century’ (Nord 1995, 15). The traditional view that women were not flâneurs arises from the idea that bourgeois society established laws of public morality that simply forbade women from such ungoverned pedestrianism; ‘ladies were not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets’ (Vicinius 1985, 297) and women challenged such mores at their peril.…”

“…However, scholars reconstructing historical womanhood construe women's publicity or publicness as qualified; women's public actions seem almost always to be accompanied by the moralizations and reprimands of conservative Victorians and Edwardians, whose moral zeal is infamous (Himmelfarb 1968; Himmelfarb 2000). 1 Presumably such strictures would render the idea of a female Victorian flâneur or flâneuse quite unlikely (Wolff 1990a; Nord 1995; Gleber 1997); note that the flâneur is seen by Isin (2002, 211–5) to be an anonymous bourgeois professional stranger and is always described by Baudelaire, Benjamin and others as masculine. Yet, women clearly walked the streets and had done so since the beginning of the modern city era, circa 1789 (Stansell 1987); ‘modern’ women as denizens of the streets had already been a century‐old reality in the era of the safety bicycle (see also Ryan 1990).…”

“…Within the context of a select body of work on female flâneurie and public womanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Vicinius 1985; Buck‐Morss 1986; Peiss 1986; Stansell 1987; Pollock 1988; Ryan 1990; Wolff 1990a; Wilson 1991, 2001; Walkowitz 1992; Nord 1995; Strange 1995; Gleber 1997; Deutsch 2000; Rappaport 2000; Spain 2000; Domosh 2001), is it plausible that one group of late‐century women did wander the streets practically free of qualifications, despite initial condemnations of the impropriety of their action? The group of bourgeois women we discuss here not only possessed privilege and influence but also used their considerable resources, which for many included an affiliation with institutions, especially voluntary organizations that promoted bourgeois domestic ideology (Mackintosh 2005), to accredit their presence in the streets.…”