Reflecting on Deborah Simonton’s “Gender in the European Town: Ancien Régime to the Modern” By D.Simonton, Routledge: Taylor & Francis, 2023. ISBN 978‐0‐415‐68444‐6

Deborah Simonton's Gender in the European Town: Ancien Régime to the Modern (2023) is an ambitious and richly textured anthology that explores the deep intertwining of gender, urban form, and socio-economic life from the early modern period into the contemporary era. Bringing together 16 essays, the book examines how gender roles and relations were both shaped by, and constitutive of, the European town. This review reads Simonton's volume through four thematic threads: urban space and mobility, gendered economies and entrepreneurship, civic identities and emerging masculinities, and ideology and memory, each anchored in relevant theoretical frameworks from gender studies and organization theory. This approach illuminates how the book's historical depth advances ongoing debates in Gender, Work & Organization Journal and related scholarship. Influenced by feminist urban theory (Kern 2020), Simonton's opening chapters trace how marketplaces, quays, tram corridors and night-time streets have long been gendered terrains of negotiation and contestation. Read through a feminist urban lens, they provide the longue-durée backstory to contemporary concerns with safety and spatial agency documented by Nash (2018) in her study of place, performativity, and flânerie in the City of London. Where Nash examines present-day strategies of calibrated visibility, Simonton uncovers seventeenth-century stallholders in Antwerp strategically positioning themselves at city gates to balance commercial opportunity and moral surveillance. All the essays on gender and transport in the book reveal how mobility within the city was gendered. Women's access to and use of public transport were often restricted by societal norms and safety concerns. This limited their ability to participate fully in urban life. Recent studies, such as those by Law (1999), have emphasized how mobility is a key factor in gender equality, a concept that Simonton's anthology illustrates with historical examples. Modern women's access to transportation remains constrained by various factors shaped by historical gender norms, socio-economic inequalities, and persistent cultural barriers. Public transport safety concerns are a significant issue, particularly in densely populated cities. In India, for example, frequent incidents of harassment on public transport in cities such as Delhi have led to a decline in women's use of buses and trains. To address this, the government introduced women-only metro cars and subsidized rides for women on Delhi's buses—measures aimed at enhancing both safety and affordability (Meena et al. 2024). The structural design of urban environments further exacerbates mobility limitations. In many sub-Saharan African cities, women face restricted access to private transportation due to pervasive economic inequalities. Limited pedestrian infrastructure forces many women to walk long distances, often under unsafe conditions, highlighting the intersection of poverty and gendered mobility challenges (Tanzarn 2016). Similarly, in European countries such as Germany and the UK, transport systems remain primarily designed for linear, commuter-focused trips. This design fails to account for trip-chaining behaviors, where women combine childcare, work, and shopping errands into a single journey. Such oversight demonstrates how transport planning often reflects male-centric assumptions about travel patterns (Uteng 2021). Cultural restrictions have also historically constrained women's mobility. Until 2018, women in Saudi Arabia were legally prohibited from driving, relying entirely on male family members or hired drivers for mobility. This restriction curtailed access to education, employment, and social participation, underscoring how legal frameworks can entrench gender inequality in transport (Al-Rasheed 2018). Although the lifting of the ban marked a progressive change, lingering socio-cultural barriers still limit women's driving freedom in more conservative areas. Simonton's analysis of Nordic tram networks also extends Law's (1999) theorization of gendered daily mobility by showing that 1890s working mothers already combined childcare, paid domestic service and market errands into tightly choreographed multi-stop journeys. Condensing the history of transport inequities, Simonton's material resonates with comparative research on safety segregation and trip-chaining (Ceccato and Paz 2017; Gauvin et al. 2020). Whether in 1890s Copenhagen or 2020s Latin America, safety anxieties and time poverty appear not as by-products of late capitalism but as structural features of urban modernity embedded in design choices. Inspired by Acker's (1990) work on gendered organization, the volume dismantles the myth of the self-made nineteenth-century businessman by foregrounding kin-embedded enterprise. The rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie in European towns led to the emergence of the businessman as a dominant figure in urban economies. However, the book challenges the notion that women were absent from this narrative. Essays highlight how it was women that played crucial roles in family firms, often managing businesses in their husbands' absence or after their deaths. This involvement challenges traditional gender roles and underscores women's agency in economic spheres. This historicizes contemporary findings on gendered succession and the resilience of primogeniture in family business research (e.g., Nelson and Constantinidis 2017). In Amsterdam's shipyards, widows re-hired crews and secured credit lines more effectively than male heirs whose legitimacy lacked the moral capital of experience. Their work calls for a deeper understanding of gendered expectations in family firm succession. Furthermore, a systematic literature review by Boukhabza and Ouhadi (2023) highlights the fragmented nature of research on female succession in family firms. The authors advocate for more comprehensive studies to better understand the factors affecting women's roles in family business succession. These studies collectively challenge the traditional notion of the businessman as the sole figure in urban economies, shedding light on the crucial roles women have played in family firms. By managing businesses during their husbands' absences or after their deaths, women have demonstrated significant agency in economic spheres, thereby redefining gender roles within the context of family businesses. Simonton's cases of “everyday feminist enterprise” also complement feminist work on entrepreneurship that emphasizes praxis and collective infrastructures of support (see, e.g., Branicki et al. 2023; Cardella et al. 2020). The book presents case studies of women who established and ran their own businesses, navigating legal and societal obstacles. These narratives align with contemporary discussions in Gender, Work and Organization, where scholars like Carter and Shaw (2006) discuss the barriers and enablers for women entrepreneurs. By rooting these practices in pre-industrial craft districts, the anthology anticipates Acker's (1990) diagnosis of gendered organizational logics: the wage factory did not invent gendered exclusion; it formalized patterns long honed in household workshops. Contemporary reviews of women's roles in family firms (Campopiano et al. 2017; Boukhabza and Ouhadi 2023) offer a useful mirror to Simonton's archival cases. In discussing performing civic identities, the book examines how gender influenced participation in civic life. Men's civic identities were often linked to formal roles in governance and public institutions, whereas women's civic engagement was channeled through informal networks, charity work, and social reform movements. This dichotomy reflects the gendered ideologies prevalent during the bourgeois century, where societal expectations prescribed distinct public and private spheres for men and women. Simonton's essays on militia pageants, charity boards and reform committees reveal civic spheres animated by gendered choreographies. Her findings give historical depth to contemporary accounts of women's unpaid volunteering as an indispensable but often invisible civic infrastructure. In eighteenth-century Genoa, for example, town councils outsourced poor relief to convent-led networks, preserving male tax privileges while institutionalizing women's civic labor. The book also charts the destabilization of artisanal masculinities as de-industrialization shifted status from guild hall to stock exchange—a pre-history of debates on men and masculinities in organizations (Connell 1993). Class and religion inflected these shifts profoundly: identical civic rituals could confer authority on Protestant burghers while marginalizing Catholic journeymen, exemplifying the intersectional entanglement of identity axes that Cho et al. (2013) insist must be central to gender analysis. The closing chapters invite readers to “listen” to the façades of bourgeois boulevards where gendered ideologies were literally built into stone. Here, Butler's notion of performativity meets material urbanism: façades encoded domestic respectability as much as any sermon or statute. Imagining the town’s past and present underscores the importance of historical memory in shaping contemporary understandings of gender and urban life. The book encourages readers to consider how narratives of the past influence present-day gender norms and urban policies. This approach is crucial for developing strategies to address gender inequalities, as it acknowledges the historical roots of contemporary issues. Simonton's discussion of post-war heritage campaigns led by women planners prefigures contemporary “memory-work” in urban professions, highlighting how heritage can reinscribe or disrupt patriarchal spatial orders. By staging a dialog between feminist urban theory (Kern 2020), gendered organization theory (Acker 1990), and intersectionality (Cho et al. 2013), the book exemplifies historically grounded, theoretically plural imaginaries capable of traveling across disciplinary and temporal boundaries. Simonton's Gender in the European Town bridges urban history and organization studies with rare authority. By threading archival vignettes through live debates on mobility, entrepreneurship, civic labor and masculinities, it shows that contemporary gendered inequities are the long shadow of arrangements forged centuries earlier. Its main weakness—limited engagement with race and colonial urbanism—opens a fertile avenue for extending this intersectional cartography into imperial port-cities and digital urban platforms. Future research might explore how platform gig work reconfigures the kin-based credit systems Simonton uncovers, or how feminist heritage activism can recuperate erased minority women's voices. This volume does not merely synthesize past scholarship; it sets a compelling agenda for the next wave of gender-and-urban inquiry. The author has nothing to report.