The gender of walking: female pedestrians in street photographs 1890–1989

Abstract

This article focuses on the role of gender in walking by studying thousands of street photographs taken between 1890 and 1989 in the city of Turku. Analysis of the photographs presents female pedestrians as the most numerous and continuously large group on the urban streets and reveals gendered patterns and practices of walking. Furthermore, it showcases how female mobility patterns were ignored and harmed by the car-centred city planning and traffic solutions of the mid- and late twentieth century. At the same time, women's walking appears as a central enabler of the fragile technological system that is motorized urban transport.

Public toilets for women: how female municipal councillors expanded the right to the city in Sweden, c. 1910–1925

“…Instead, our result is in line with recent work by historian Tiina Männistö-Funk, and points towards the possibility of a Nordic pattern of female urban mobility that differs from the Anglo-American sphere. 67 Furthermore, our cases also lack any trace of an expressed fear of the public toilets being places where the intermingling of classes would lead to middle-class women becoming less respectable. Perhaps this lack of fear should be understood by the fact that the motions so clearly spoke to the needs of working-class women, which can be seen in some of their explicit arguments, by the political party of the signatories and by the placement of the conveniences.…”

Spotlight on the traveller: Individual experiences of routine journeys

“…Other sources such as newspapers and magazines may also provide some information, together with contemporary photographs that can reveal who was on the street at a particular time of day. 13 Court records such as witness and victim statements may also provide relevant data, 14 and an ambitious study of Amsterdam is currently utilising a range of sources to map spatial patterns of street use in the nineteenth-century city. 15 While the above archival sources do allow some reconstruction of who was on the street, when and where, they tell us much less about the motivations for travel and the feelings and emotions that mobility generated.…”

Using photography in history of science and technology:

“…2-3). Since then, many historians have been using photographs as primary sources in different fields, like colonial and post-colonial studies (Landau and Kaspin, 2002;Ryan, 2013), architecture (Nilsen, 2013), media (Leonardi and Natale, 2018), urban studies (Männistö-Funk, 2019), war (Brothers, 2011;Oldfield, 2019), and transportation (Pereira, 2022b).…”

“…For the purposes of this article, I wish to underscore the following aspects related to the history of science and technology, which can be observed and analysed in photographs, even if the original goal of the photographer was not to capture them, but to portray other details or perspectives (Männistö-Funk, 2019;Männistö-Funk, 2020, p. 172): (1) the varied dimensions of the implementation and use of science and technology: construction, implementation, operation, utilisation, experimentation, application in war, leisure, sports, tourism, transportation, healthcare, dissemination, outreach, research, urban planning, etc. ; and (2) representations, perceptions, narratives, social constructs of science and technology in a historical perspective.…”