Breaking the Gender Code

Book excerpt: "Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the 20th century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for "public restrooms, rooming houses, anti-spitting ordinances, covered bus stops, employment bureaus, lunch rooms, and women police," through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces. In doing so, Hickey looks at how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and shaped women's experiences of urban space and the gains and limitations of this activism. She uses a wide range of archival material, from press coverage to neighborhood association records to etiquette manuals, and studies a variety of cities, from Minneapolis to Atlanta. Throughout, she draws connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence. Ultimately, Hickey unveils the institutionalized hierarchies that have made women feel uncomfortable in American cities and the "both strikingly successful and incomplete" initiatives activists undertook to open up public space to women. The manuscript is organized into eight chapters that move chronologically through the twentieth century, with an epilogue that reflects on how these issues manifest in the present"--