<i>Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World</i> , by Leslie Kern

The city is the space where the intricate landscape of inequalities and varied forms of oppression experienced by its inhabitants is vividly displayed, revealing a complex web of contradictions. It is a stage where social, economic, and political differences among individuals are starkly evident both in the public domain and within the private sphere. In her book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (2020), Leslie Kern sheds light on these disparities through a gender-focused lens. In her research, she elucidates how the multifaceted layers of oppression experienced by women find expression within urban environments, often making women and their specific urban needs and challenges invisible. Especially for migrant, Black, Indigenous, and low-income women, cities tend to perpetuate this invisibility, underscoring the historical reality that urban spaces have been predominantly designed and managed by men, often to the exclusion or neglect of the needs of women. Across five distinct chapters, Kern explores various spheres where a woman’s urban experience diverges significantly from that of men. Addressing topics ranging from motherhood to friendship, from the city as a site of protest to its role as a physical space of fear characterizing the female experience in its streets, Kern delves into the nuanced complexities of the gendered urban life.The starting point of her analysis, which highlights how the modern city is conceived and designed by men and for men, emerges in the introductory section “City of Men.” Kern asserts that “women have always been seen as a problem for the modern city.” She traces this issue back to the Industrial Revolution, when the rapid expansion of European cities challenged Victorian social norms, blurring the lines between social classes and gender roles. According to Kern, urbanization induced a moral panic, linking urban life with threats to civilization and its associated social and ethical norms. This anxiety was particularly directed toward the growing presence of women, especially low-income workers entering factory jobs, as city residents, and their perceived contribution to urban social decay and demoralization. Fast-forwarding to the present, Kern concludes her historical reconstruction by highlighting how, while the social dynamics of cities have undoubtedly evolved to the contemporary era, the city, often regarded as a realm of expression and liberation where possibilities abound, remains a space where inequalities persist for women. Often it perpetuates these disparities, symbolically and tangibly excluding women and disregarding their specific needs as young girls, as mothers, as immigrants, as workers, and as individuals primarily tasked with caregiving responsibilities.Kern’s analysis, centered on the unique challenges faced by women in urban settings, seeks to provide a comprehensive critique of the city as a whole, encompassing its planning, organization, and functions. In advancing this line of inquiry, Kern draws upon the feminist notion that women’s perspective offers a privileged standpoint from which to comprehensively analyze social reality. Just as Marx analyzed capitalist society from the perspective of the proletariat—the subject whose experience is systematically denied and threatened by the very structure of society—Kern, by examining the city from the standpoint of the female subject, can unveil the structural issues underlying social dynamics that continue to make cities inhospitable for many women today. In doing so, Kern coherently adopts a gendered and feminist lens to uncover the uneven nature of urban contexts in their current form and the social relations embedded within them. Her analysis, predominantly grounded in practical, personal, and historical experiences, exposes the abstract masculinity inherent in urban planning at a theoretical level, which shapes social relationships and material conditions in urban contexts.1 Through the partial perspective of women, the flawed and distorted nature of the purported universality can be unveiled, thereby indicating the need for profound transformation in our cities. Indeed, the ways in which the “tyranny” of masculinity operates in urban planning are addressed by Kern in the introduction: “The primary decision-makers in cities . . . are making choices about everything from urban economic policy to housing design, school placement to bus seating, policing to snow removal with no knowledge, let alone concern for, how these decisions affect women” (15).The writer’s intention to bridge the social reality, where caregiving roles are largely assigned to women, and their actual urban challenges and practical needs emerges prominently in the section “City of Mums”:As often occurs in the text, through a line of inquiry and narrative that begins with reflections on her personal experience as a woman, Kern highlights how the role of motherhood—or, more broadly, shouldering the majority of the caregiving responsibilities—shapes the urban female experience, revealing specific needs that are often overlooked. Carrying out the caring role has a profound impact on women’s lives, affecting their participation in the labor market, career prospects, income, and pensions, as well as their daily mobility choices in the city.This set of concerns has been addressed by numerous feminist scholars and relates to what is now termed, expanding upon classical political concepts, social reproduction. It not only describes the inherently gendered labor of childbearing but also encompasses meeting essential needs such as nourishment, rest, and emotional care. In the past century, many feminists have analyzed the role of women’s labor in a capitalist society, emphasizing the centrality of their unpaid reproductive work, which often goes unrecognized as labor altogether. In the 1980s, Lise Vogel analyzed how capitalism has co-opted gender subordination, perpetuating and incorporating it as a mechanism of its own.2 With the rise of industrialization and the promotion of the “housewife” ideal, capitalism reinforced gender-based divisions of labor while simultaneously neglecting the interdependent relationship that connects the productive sphere—deemed the “real” work—to social reproduction. Without the latter, the entire mechanism, including our cities themselves, could not exist or function. Today, the burden of the “crisis of care” that defines our era disproportionately falls upon women and “mothers,” who are frequently tasked with caring for children and elderly relatives.3 These same women, who still endure wage disparities, are often the ones who must rely more heavily on public transportation, juggle multiple stops for various activities, and navigate complex routes.Shifting to the women’s practical daily challenges, “even though cities offer numerous advantages over suburbs, they are certainly not designed with the intention of simplifying the ‘double shifts’ of paid and unpaid work that women often undertake” (38). Building on this, Kern highlights how most urban transport systems are designed to facilitate the flow of traffic into and out of the city during morning and evening peak hours. They presuppose that the typical user is a male worker commuting directly from home to work and back again, without any intermediate stops or detours. This assumption overlooks the reality of women’s travel patterns, which often involve “trip chaining” due to the concurrent demands of productive and reproductive work that characterize many women’s daily experiences. As a result, access to basic services and infrastructure remains crucial for women’s participation in public life and their pursuit of personal goals and aspirations.Within Kern’s comprehensive work, the section on the “City of Fear” is certainly one of the most enlightening and original, due to the unconventional and innovative approach with which it addresses one of the crucial experiences shared by all women in urban contexts: “The socialization is so powerful and so deep that ‘female fear’ itself has been assumed to be an innate trait of girls and women” (120). The writer begins her analysis by addressing one of the primary challenges women face as urban citizens: the fear of gender-based urban violence and how it shapes women’s lived city experiences. Drawing from her personal experience as a white cisgender woman navigating urban spaces, Kern highlights the data on the ongoing harassment and violence women endure as urban subjects—particularly at night—and also focuses on its perception. She argues that gendered urban violence encompasses not only actual physical harm but also the fear and insecurity women experience, which impede their ability to inhabit public spaces. Following her analysis, fear, deeply rooted in historical and cultural constructs, influences women’s perceptions of safety but also dictates their interactions and presence in public spaces, as well as their mobility, work, and social interaction possibilities. Indeed, Kern elucidates how societal narratives, media portrayals, and everyday experiences of harassment perpetuate a heightened sense of fear among women, leading to the adoption of coping mechanisms such as avoidance of certain spaces or individuals. Importantly, Kern emphasizes the racial and class dimensions of this fear, noting how stereotypes and fearmongering contribute to the stigmatization of specific groups, further exacerbating women’s feelings of vulnerability while excluding racialized social groups from public life. In this context, drawing upon the concept of intersectionality, which, as we’ll explore, is fundamental to her analysis, Kern underscores how the extensive scope and long-standing history of violence against Indigenous women cannot be solely attributed to racism, colonialism, or sexism: “Gendered violence serves as a fundamental tool of settler colonialism, perpetuated by both state entities and individuals within the nation” (132).A city, in the author’s view, is primarily a mix of mechanisms that exert influence on bodies, shaping their social and economic possibilities and thereby potentially expanding or constraining the realm of opportunities and experiences. Whether addressing reproductive roles or the sexualization of the female body in public spaces, Kern emphasizes how “women can never fully retreat into invisibility because their gender marks them as objects of the male gaze” (31). Simultaneously, urban space acts as a pivotal tool for regulating and perpetuating normalized social inequalities, serving as the primary arena for the construction and administration of citizenship. Bodies are thus situated within sociospatial structures, delineating the boundary between the private and the public, the individual and the collective, where societal norms are either integrated or contested.4 In Kern’s urban analysis, the body emerges as a crucial analytical framework, particularly when diverging from the normative archetype of the able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender, and white male. Kern poignantly articulates, “As a woman, a complete sense of anonymity or invisibility in the city had never fully existed for me” (30). Indeed, according to the author, the experience of the female body in urban spaces is marked by hypervisibility, accompanied by a simultaneous invisibility of its inherent needs. Kern elucidates how this hypervisibility is particularly pronounced for pregnant or early motherhood bodies, stating, “It’s impossible to blend in when your body has suddenly become public property. Although women often experience comments on our bodies and uninvited physical contact, pregnancy and motherhood elevate these intrusions to a new level” (32). In doing so, along with the analysis of how gender-based violence acts as a constraining tool for women’s bodies in urban spaces, Kern vividly exposes the female bodily city experience within the reproductive sphere. Indeed, through the exploration of challenges tied to pregnancy, breastfeeding, and navigating urban spaces with a stroller, the author succeeds in elevating the study of the relationship between the female body and urban space to a completely innovative analytical level.But Kern’s objective goes further, as she tries to address the complexity and differentiation of the “female” experience: just as the conventional image of the urban dweller typically portrays a white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class man, the typical notion of a woman in this context is often that of a married, able-bodied mother engaged in a white-collar job. “While gender-based violence may be a common denominator, other markers of social location always shape the particular kinds of violence, harassment, and danger that women encounter. And these aren’t separable. A woman who has her hijab ripped off cannot be asked to choose whether it was sexist or Islamophobic violence” (132). With her simple yet clear and incisive style, Kern explains how experiences of violence, oppression, and invisibility in the city are often complex, multilayered phenomena. Here, Kern emphasizes the necessity for an intersectional perspective that regards “woman” as a complex and non-unitary subject, traversed by differences that multiply and complicate oppressions within urban contexts. As elaborated by Crenshaw—who, it’s worth noting, employs the metaphor of different roads converging in an urban intersection in her explanation of intersectionality—the interaction of the categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and disability can give rise to specific and nonuniform oppressive experiences.5 Intersectionality thus prescribes considering much more than the stereotypical white female experience in the city, undoubtedly posing complex yet necessary challenges in urban planning. Equally complex, however, is the challenge that guides every research project conducted in this spirit, such as Kern’s, which, in the name of this imperative and political necessity, is naturally open to limitations and difficulties.Although Kern recalls both in the premises and during the analysis the importance of outlining her personal experience as a white, able-bodied woman born in the West, in some cases there is a consistent attempt to incorporate references to cities, experiences, and approaches from contexts outside of the Global North. Such examples are presented as a source of inspiration from which Western cities might draw for future applications. While in some circumstances this perspective may be valid and punctual, at times a contradiction seems to emerge between the intent to localize the white woman’s experience in the Global North—different from that of the cities of the Global South—and the openness to considerations that go beyond such a geographical context. This ambivalence sometimes compromises the coherence of the argument, as there seems to be a lack of clear orientation toward the localization of the female experience or a delimitation of the geographical space of relevance for the research. It is nonetheless important to emphasize that some of the examples provided by certain cities in the Global South are indeed of interest and inspiration. However, they would benefit from being better contextualized and described to justify their relevance as models adaptable to distant and vastly different contexts.In its premises, Kern’s text carries the significant ambition of addressing most, if not all, of the challenges that women face in urban spaces. Through an intersectional lens, Kern frequently emphasizes the race, religion, and—last but not least—class and income differences that traverse and diversify women’s experiences in cities. Despite the author’s repeated engagement in this type of analysis, what seems to be lacking in Feminist City is a comprehensive examination of how distributive issues related to gender as a category that also generates class subordination are embedded in—and operate within—urban contexts. Except for the varied positioning of women, whether in the city center or suburbs, based on class, issues such as wage disparities, access to certain types of jobs, and the distribution of resources are not explored in their interaction with the urban dynamics and contests that presumably reproduce and reinforce them. Starting from the crucial idea of addressing the challenges generated by women’s social role, both a reproductive and productive one, she sometimes fails to address the specificity of some productive and distributive injustices when not related to some level of racialization. The lack of a specific discussion on this topic, which may warrant independent exploration, does not detract from the considerable value of Kern’s rigorous intersectional research efforts.Beyond the criticisms leveled, the text emerges as a preliminary and groundbreaking attempt to systematize the relationship between previously distant disciplinary fields, namely urban studies and gender studies. The highlighted limitations, far from seeking to invalidate her work, aim to underscore the points left open by the analysis as fundamental and intriguing topics for future research. The findings of Kern’s Feminist City, mediated by an accessible style and a compelling narrative, are crucial insights to advocate for transformative change to create cities that are truly inclusive and equitable for all inhabitants.