2001, 8, 1

Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp.
524, 2001
To Garden, to Market: gendered meanings of work on an
African urban periphery [1]
SUSANNE FREIDBERG, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, USA
ABSTRACT This article traces the historical origins of a localized gender division of labor found in
two villages on the edge of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. Through social-historical analysis,
this article demonstrates that gender divisions of labor are not simply constructed in particular places; they
are constructs located near or far from other places, and thus inuenced by multidimensional interactions
between those places. Specically, this article shows how the villages location on the periphery of an
important regional city has shaped their experience of European colonialism, religious change and market
expansion in ways that have given particular meanings to certain kinds of work in commercial gardening.
More generally, this article shows how a focus on the historical meanings of work can provide insights
into local variations in gender divisions of labor.
Introduction
The villages of Sakaby and Dogona lie just north of the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina
Faso, on opposite sides of the river Houet. In many ways they resemble villages that have
become part of urban hinterland regions across contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa.
Some of the houses are made of mud and thatch, others of brick and tin. Next to many
of the houses stand granaries, lled with millet from the villagers own elds. Kept inside
walled courtyards are mopeds and farm tools, and an assortment of goods bound for the
urban market, such as sacks of maize, bundles of rewood and basins of vegetables
lettuce, onions, French green beansgrown in the gardens lining the banks of the nearby
river.
While commercial vegetable gardening is a typical feature of many African urban
hinterland landscapes [2], these particular gardens are tended only by men and boys.
Most of the daily tasks undertaken in these gardens are repetitive, arduous and
low-techexactly the kind of tasks so often dened as womens work, except that
women here do not do them. Moreover, from morning through midday during the
vegetable-growing season, women are nowhere near the gardens and are scarce in the
village as well. Most are in town selling their husbands produce or conducting their own
trades, and the men must await their return to receive their earnings as well as, often,
the midday meal. Some men complain that their wives come late, suspecting they stop
to drink millet beer along the way.
Why do only men work in the gardens? Local responses to this question vary. The
most common answer among both women and men is that gardening is physically too
difcult for women. Yet women in villages several kilometers away do tend gardens, and
Correspondence: Susanne Freidberg, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH03755 USA.
ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online/01/010005-20 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026299
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6 S. Freidberg
women throughout West Africa regularly perform all kinds of heavy labor. A few women
point out that they have no rights to riverside land. Many insist they would not want a
garden plot anyway, because it is a slow and unreliable way to make money. A few men
refer to Islamic norms; others mention their wives noble ancestry, implying they are too
proud for such dirty, stooping work. Others simply shrug it off to local custom. Its like
that here, they say, the women here just do not garden. Could it be that the women
do not garden here because the men, as elsewhere in colonial-era Africa, appropriated
the most lucrative economic activities (Leacock & Etienne, 1980; Robertson & Berger,
1986) ? Certainly, mens superior claim to land, labor and agricultural extension in the
years after World War II would have made it easier for them to take up gardening as
a commercial occupation. But this does not explain why gardening tasks (such as watering
and weeding) came be dened as exclusively mens work, rather than work done by
women for men. Nor is it clear that gardening was in fact more lucrative than the
commercial activities women took up during the same period. Indeed, over the past
several years, it has become a progressively less remunerative occupation, and many men
in Sakaby and Dogona now earn less from gardening than women can earn as produce
wholesalers or beer brewers.
For several decades in Sakaby and Dogona, the gardens have been central not only
to villagers livelihoods but also to local understandings of mens work, womens work,
and the rights and duties of marriage. The following discussion draws on this history in
order to explore the broader question of how gender roles, relations and identity are
shaped by the changing meanings and practices of work in specic geographic and
historical contexts.
At the broadest level, this line of inquiry is a familiar one. Feminist labor history, for
example, has explored how the gender categories formed around factory work are
shaped and reshaped by the events and relationships of the household and local public
culture as well as by those of the shop oor and international economy (Berg, 1987;
Canning, 1996, Horowitz, 1997) . In Europe and North America, feminist agrarian
studies research has analyzed the survival of the family farm in light of rural womens
changing work roles (Whatmore, 1991, Sachs, 1996) while in Africa, it has documented
how colonial labor regimes and agricultural development programs, implemented with
little regard for existing divisions of labor and property rights, have transformed gender
roles and relations in dramatic and often unexpected ways (Carney & Watts, 1990) .
Indeed, one recent example of this research examines the unintended consequences of
ostensibly gender-sensitive West African market gardening projects (Schroeder, 1999) .
This article, however, tells a story about the gendering of workand the ongoing
reworking of genderin a particular kind of place. Like urban hinterland villages
throughout Africa, Sakaby and Dogona have experienced dramatic social, economic and
environmental change over the past century. Equally important, they have been exposed
to a wide range of foreign cultural practices and beliefs, some of which they have
incorporated into their own. By examining the relationship between this historical
experience and the gendering of market gardening work, this article shows how
contemporary divisions of labor in Africas urban hinterlands are neither remotely
traditional nor simple inventions of colonial labor regimes, but rather, the products of
rich and complicated local histories. This article also makes a larger point about the
complexity of gender construction. I argue that gender divisions of labor are not simply
constructed in particular places (McDowell, 1993) ; they are constructs located near or far
from other places, and thus inuenced by interactions between those places (Massey,
1994a) . Moreover, interactions such as trade and migration should be recognized as
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Gendered Meanings of Work 7
multidimensionalthat is, they bring ideas as well as goods, and practices as well
as people. By analyzing how a set of such interactions have shaped the meanings
and practices of work in two urban hinterland villages, I present an approach to
understanding local variations in regional and sectoral gender divisions of labor.
The body of this article is based on ethnographic and archival eldwork conducted in
the Bobo-Dioulasso area in 199394 [3]. I want to begin, however, with a brief
discussion of two distinct research traditions which have informed this project and which,
I believe, could benet from some of the analytical insights of feminist geography. The
rst focuses on gender divisions of labor in African agrarian societies; the second
examines the dynamics of change in Africas urban hinterlands.
Times and Places for Work
Since the publication of Esther Boserups Womens Role in Economic Development in 1970,
African agriculture has proven an especially fruitful realm for the study of gender and
work. Boserup argued that food farming was more female in Africa than elsewhere
because, rst, historically low population densities never spurred the technical and
socio-economic developments associated with agricultural intensication (i.e. plough
agriculture and private property, both seen to encourage greater male participation in
food production) . In addition, she noted how colonial labor regimes pulled male labor
further out of food production, into export agriculture and off-farm employment
(Boserup, 1970) .
Arguably, the books most valuable legacy was the critical research and analysis it
provoked. Ethnographers and other eldworkers faced two immediate methodological
challenges. One was to deconstruct farming into units of analysis appropriate for
understanding the dynamics (and broader signicance) of variation and change in gender
divisions of labor. Another was to situate on-farm tasks within a wide range of other
workaday activities, each with their own economic and cultural value (Sachs, 1996) .
Numerous ethnographic and historical works collectively demonstrated how gendered
work roles have been more historically contingent and geographically varied than
Boserups model of an undifferentiated female farming belt suggested (i.e. Afonja, 1986;
for a review, see Moore, 1988, ch. 3) . They also showed how the institution of
non-pooled household budgeting (separate purses) , common in much of sub-Saharan
Africa, has historically shaped the meanings and practices of mens and womens
agrarian work in ways not captured by anthropologists evolutionary models of the sexual
division of labor (Whitehead, 1984; Guyer, 1988a; 1988b; Roberts, 1989) .
These advances, however, left certain questions unanswered. Although the now-sizable
ethnographic literature on contemporary African agrarian societies has allowed for
tentative generalizations about what kinds of crops or tasks are commonly dened as
womens versus mens, it has proven more difcult to generalize about the dynamics
of historical change in gender divisions of labor. This is partly due to the dearth of
reliable historical records, and partly to the sheer diversity of cultural practices associated
with particular tasks and crops in different places (on rice, for example, see Carney,
2000) .
Faced with these challenges, a number of Africanist researchers have explored
historical changes in gendered work through oral and written autobiographies and
revisits to earlier studies and eld sites. Within this body of literature, Jane Guyers
research (1988b, 1991) speaks perhaps most directly to geographers recent efforts to
understand how actors identities are formed and transformed through social relations
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8 S. Freidberg
spanning multiple scales of space and time. Guyer examines changing gender divisions
of labor in African agrarian societies through a focus on the rhythmic structures of work.
Changes in the timing and periodicity of daily, seasonal and occasional activities represent
not only general historical tendencies (i.e. agricultural intensication) but also gendered
shifts in the material value and power relations of work. For instance, the introduction
of a new tax may, at least initially, justify male household heads recruitment of wives
for cash crop production, thus giving women less time for other more personally
remunerative or satisfying activities. At the same time, however, this shift may also
undermine the legitimacy of husbands other expectations, such as the provision of a hot
meal every night.
Such changes, of course, often lead to intra-household conict and/or the renegotia-
tion of the rights and duties in question. Guyers research on colonial-era Cameroon
(1991) , for example, shows how the introduction of cocoa in the 1930s transformed the
late-nineteenth century Beti farming system, in which land cleared by men was
subsequently worked on by men, women, or both sexes, depending on the crop and the
stage of the cultivating/fallow cycle (Guyer, 1991) . In brief, men began planting cocoa
as a permanent forest crop on formerly rotated elds, so they no longer produced food
crops on those elds or regularly cleared new land. Women continued to cultivate
groundnuts and cassava on their own eldsthis work was considered a key taskbut
they compensated for the loss of mens contribution to household food supplies by
planting twice rather than once a year (1991, p. 270) . Women thus became the principal
household food producers, tting the Boserup model. But they also adjusted their daily
and seasonal work schedules in order to improve their access to mens cocoa income, i.e.
by selling them cooked foods, home-distilled liquor and bottled beer. At the same time,
many women became less willing to help men with their own crops, since the reciprocity
inherent in the old agricultural cycle was no longer assured. Later in the colonial period,
when the nearby capital city experienced a post-war economic and demographic boom,
many women once again adapted their planting cycles and crop choices, in order to take
advantage of strong markets for staple foodstuffs.
This Cameroon case study shows very clearly how the Beti agricultural gender division
of labor evident by the late colonial period was hardly primordial, but rather the
product of relatively recent shifts in womens and mens work rhythms. Guyers analysis
also links these temporal shifts in the gender division of labor to social and spatial
processes, at both the household and regional levels. The social processes include the
ongoing renegotiation of rights and responsibilities within the conjugal contract (White-
head, 1984) , as well as changes in womens relative status brought about by late-colonial
and post-independence economic growth and legislative reforms [4]. The spatial pro-
cesses include changes in the village-level geography of womens daily work (see also
Schroeder, 1999) as well as macro-level developments: urban growth, the extension of
transportation networks, and the increasing ow of goods, information and people
between city and countryside.
The options for altering the types and temporal rhythms of work, in other words,
are very clearly shaped by these spatial processes and by the transformations they
bring to particular places and locations. Guyers research in both Cameroon and in
southern Nigeria, for example, is set in urban hinterland regions (Guyer, 1997) . These
sites, like hinterland regions throughout Africa, have historically been characterized by
intensive, market-oriented agricultural production (relative to more remote rural areas)
and especially rapid twentieth-century economic, environmental and demographic
change (Swindell, 1988; Mortimore, 1993; Freidberg, 2001) . In these regions,
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gender and intra-generational divisions of labor have been affected not only by changing
conditions in neighboring urban labor and produce markets (Berry, 1993) but also, in
many cases, by the increasing scarcity of land and other natural resources needed to
sustain agrarian livelihoods (Turner et al., 1993) .
The linkages between urbanization, agricultural intensication and changes in
household-level divisions of labor have been quite well documented (Tiffen et al., 1994;
Guyer, 1997) . Most of this research, however, has been rooted in agrarian studies
analytical traditions, namely political economy, rural cultural ecology, and, more
recently, feminist household economics (Folbre, 1988; Hart, 1992) . In general, it has not
analyzed urban cultural dynamics; it has not considered how urban-based beliefs and
practicespromulgated by traders, colonizers, migrants and missionarieshave also
shaped hinterland gender construction in particular ways.
Yet, the historiography of African cities makes clear that hinterland communities have
long been exposed to urban culture (Coquery-Vidrovitch, 1991) . In pre-colonial West
and coastal East Africa, for example, such communities were introduced (though not
necessarily converted) to Islam through trade and tribute relations with urban merchants
and political elites (Levtzion & Fisher, 1987; Middleton, 1992) . During the early colonial
era, regions around administrative capitals, ports and mining towns were typically
subjected not only to the most rigorous tax collection and labor recruitment campaigns,
but also the most intensive Christian missionary evangelical campaigns (de Benoist,
1987) . The latter tended to target hinterland communities not only because they were
close to the missions themselves but also because they were considered particularly
vulnerable to the incursions of Islam (Audouin & Deniel, 1978) . Later, the same regions
became preferred retirement zones for African war veterans, who brought not only their
pensionswhich they invested in homes, commercial farming, or tradebut also ideas
and practices they had learned during service abroad (Saul, 1986) . In short, even if the
livelihoods and landscapes of African urban hinterland communities appear traditional
relative to those of the city, their traditions are products of extraordinarily extroverted
histories (Massey, 1994a) .
In order to understand how these histories have informed gender divisions of labor
and gender identity more generally, we need to ask a broader set of questions, aimed at
tracing ideological as well as material ows between city and hinterland. These kinds
of questions, of course, are already familiar to feminist geographers working in the
industrialized world (Massey, 1994b; Hanson & Pratt, 1995; Pratt, 1997; MacKenzie,
1999) . Taken as a whole, this research demonstrates the value of analyzing locally-
specic gender constructions in light of historical processes operating at different scales
but always with specic spatial trajectories and consequences.
In the context of this case study, this would mean asking: how have particular
urban-based communication networks and power structures inuenced the ways different
members of hinterland communities have thought about and negotiated gender roles in
different realms of daily life? How have these networks and structures also attached
particular social and symbolic meanings to certain kinds of tasks and occupations? What
ideas, laws and policies have most inuenced localized constructions of meaningabout
both gender and workand why?
The nal why is perhaps the most difcult to answer, but I include it to emphasize
that while peoples interpretations of particular cultural practices and ideas are by no
means predetermined, they do still need to be located. In other words, exactly how Islamic
teachings (for example) inform gender identities and gendered practices in a particular
place is an empirical question. But the analysis of empirical ndings must consider how,
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10 S. Freidberg
in that place, specic events, social institutions and daily practices have shaped peoples
understandings of Islam at different historical moments (Callaway & Creevey, 1994;
Bernal, 1994, 1997) . Such an analysis recognizes the possibility of hybrid gender
identities and mimetic practices, informed by interactions within and between diverse
social groups as well as multiple belief systems (Pratt, 1999; Saul, 1997) . It also recognizes
that local gender divisions of labor are not necessarily determined by any single cultural
or material logic.
The following account aims to illustrate these points. It traces the construction of a
particular gender division of labor in two villages where the meanings, practices and
conditions of work have been shaped by a history of close urban contact. The narrative
focuses on a series of overlapping historical inuences: namely, the regional spread of
Islam; the colonial administrations use of forced labor; the evangelical and economic
programs of the Catholic Church, and nally, dramatic post-World War II urbanization
and market expansion. By the end it should be clear that no one event or ideological
framework determined how residents of Sakaby and Dogona dened gender roles
around market gardening. Rather, faced with changing social, economic and political
conditions, women and men drew selectively on a range of experiences, resources and
cultural practices to negotiate meanings and claim rights to new forms of livelihood.
Commerce, Cultivation, and Cultural Pluralism in the Pre-colonial
Southern Volta Region
Sakaby, Dogona and the neighboring city of Bobo-Dioulasso all lie in a savanna region
once traversed by trans-Saharan and EastWest trade routes. As early as the sixteenth
century, Bobo-Dioulasso (then known as Sya) served as an important market and
stopover for merchants transporting gold and kola nuts from the southern forest zones
and salt from the northern desert (Wettere-Verhasselt, 1969; Diallo, 1990) . The earliest
known inhabitants of this region, the Bobo, had relatively little to do with this
long-distance commerce, but they probably exchanged agricultural foodstuffs for goods
such as salt.
Although the Bobo claimed founders rights to the land, they came to share it with
Mande-speaking gold traders, who began settling in the sixteenth century. The Bobo
have historically welcomed foreigners into their communities, in part for their ability to
act as neutral arbitrators in village disputes (Le Moal, 1980) . They called these Mande
settlers the Zara, meaning those who travel and trade. Like most long-distance
merchants of the era, the Zara probably observed at least certain Islamic practices. But
trade routes subsequently shifted, leaving the region more commercially and culturally
isolated. By the seventeenth century, most Zara settlers, while often maintaining some
sort of commercial activity, had adopted both the agricultural and religious practices of
the Bobo (Diallo, 1990) .
The two kinds of practices were in fact closely intertwined; the Bobo called themselves
the san-san, or the cultivating people, and many of their holidays and rituals were
organized around the millet season (Saul, 1991) . Information about the pre-colonial
agricultural division of labor is scarce, but oral traditions indicate that both men and
women participated in rainy season (MaySeptember) grain production. Men cleared the
elds and women seeded them, but most other tasks were shared. Mens and womens
agricultural labor, however, did not carry the same meaning. Men were (and in principle
still are) considered responsible for the provision of household grain supplies, and skillful
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work in the grain elds was a source of status. The Bobo respected the man who
increased the lands productivity through careful weeding and soil care (Saul, 1991) .
Millet cultivation was a communal activity, overseen by male patrilineage chiefs, who
were also responsible for distributing the harvest to the households of their wives and
adult sons. Women and junior men, however, had rights to whatever they produced on
their individual plots (zakane) . Unlike the communal millet elds (foruba) , some of these
plots were cultivated year-round. In Sakaby and Dogona, for example, young men
planted tobacco and sorghum (for brewing beer) on the banks of the river Houet. Their
work on individual plots not only produced crops much appreciated within the village,
it also demonstrated strength, the ability to provide for a family, even occult power (Saul,
1992) .
For Bobo women, the ethnographic record indicates that farming has historically been
a less important source of status than child-rearing, but individual production did provide
ingredients for the sauce which accompanies the daily millet porridge. Although the
sauce accounts for only a minor proportion of the daily calorie supply, it is considered
an important measure of a womans cooking skills. Women elders emphasize, however,
that in the days before European vegetables and manufactured avorings, sauces
contained relatively few ingredientsi.e. salt, oil, soumbala (a pungent avoring made
from seeds of the nere tree) and vegetables such as peppers, tomatoes and greens. Prior
to the expansion of mens market-gardening, women grew most of the vegetables
themselves, either in kitchen gardens or around the edges of the millet elds (Cremer,
1924) [5]. They also gathered wild plants with their sisters and co-wives (Saul, 1989) .
Cooperative work arrangements of this sort traditionally helped Bobo women accomplish
a variety of tasks.
Although Bobo women bartered vegetables and other foodstuffs with each other and
with passers-by (Sanou & Sanou, 1994) , they did not typically practice itinerant or
market place trade. LeMoals monograph on the Bobo emphasizes that trade was simply
not part of the Bobo cultural repertoire (Le Moal, 1980) . But this repertoire was probably
shaped by the fact that Bobo communities were for generations subject to slave raiding
and other forms of violence, as the region was colonized by the Kong Dioula empire
(based in the northern Ivory Coast) in the mid-eighteenth century (Sanou & Sanou,
1994) . Bobo villages built during the era of Dioula colonialism were large and fortress-
like; outside their walls village girls and women (the preferred domestic slaves) had to be
careful where they went.
The Kong Dioula established a centralized state in the Bobo-Dioulasso region, and
with it, new social hierarchies and categories. Most local inhabitants became tribute-
paying subjects, but the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a Zara ruling
family, whose members practiced warfare and trade (Saul, 1997) . References to royal
descent have since become part of the Zara oral tradition, and often an explanation for
contemporary work roles. Some Zara men in Sakaby and Dogona, for example, claim
their wives are the descendants of princes, and thus unsuited for agricultural labor.
The Dioula also built mosques, but not until the 1920s, under French colonial rule,
did many Zara begin to reclaim Islam as part of their identity. By then, Islam had taken
on a range of local meanings (Saul, personal communication, 1999) . For the families of
the Zara canton chiefs (the colonial appointees responsible for tax collection and labor
recruitment) , Islam reinforced their status as a political elite. It also represented
opposition to the Catholic missionaries, who from their early days in Bobo-Dioulasso
were highly critical of the canton chiefs exercise of authority (De Montjoye, 1980;
Kounda, 1997) . For Zara men who might have engaged in seasonal warfare prior to
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12 S. Freidberg
French conquest and pacication, Islamic scholarship and religious observance offered
an alternative route to recognition and respect (Quimby, 1979) . For merchants, Islam
provided a link to African trade networks, at a time when African commerce in general
was highly restricted. In short, Islamization occurred for a variety of reasons in the
Bobo-Dioulasso area, and conversion had different consequences for different people.
Overall, however, it did not result in signicant spatial or social segregation between the
converts and the Bobo. In Sakaby and Dogona, Zara families continued to live among,
marry, and share many of the daily practices of their Bobo neighbors.
How did the spread of Islam transform local constructions of gender and work roles?
Evidence of immediate, concrete changes is largely anecdotal; for example, older Zara
women in the village of Sakaby claim that their mothers brewed dolo (sorghum beer)an
activity which they, as Muslim women today, cannot even consider. Indeed, now all the
dolo-makers in the village are Bobo. On the other hand, the adoption of Islam did not,
in general, lead to Zara womens seclusion or veiling, or to any major changes in their
roles in millet production (Roth, 1996) .
Over the longer term, the spatial separation of mens and womens daily activities
became a normative ideal, though how much it was actually realized varied between
town and village settings as well as between households of different sizes and means
(Roth, 1996) . This ideal, like other manifestations of Muslim orthodoxy, reected
ongoing changes in the social role of Islam. During the late colonial period, a number
of Zara men and women used their earnings from commercial farming, trade and civil
or military service to travel to Mecca, thereby fullling one of their basic duties as
Muslims. They won respect for making this long and costly voyage, as it showed both
devotion and worldly success. But the pilgrims also encountered and, in some cases,
adopted practices associated with the typically more orthodox Islam of the Middle East
and North Africa. Again, monetary wealth helped: it enabled some Muslim patriarchs in
the peri-urban villages, for example, to hire laborers, and thus minimize their wives
visible presence in the eldsanother widely-recognized Islamic ideal. In this way,
certain practices associated with Islam acquired a secular prestige even in villages where
only part of the population was Muslim, such as Sakaby and Dogona.
Very few farming households in these villages withdrew women entirely from agricul-
tural production; they typically continued to seed the millet and help with the harvest.
Yet these days, men in Sakaby and Dogona commonly invoke Islamic norms to explain
why they would not want their wives to work in their gardens. These explanations, I
would argue, reect the mens concern not so much about their wives public
appearances as about their own. In other words, they are making statements about their
own socio-economic status, as commercial gardeners who do not need to call on female
household labor. To understand how work in the gardens took on these symbolic
connotations, we must examine the conditions under which the crops and labor processes
associated with this work were introduced.
The Early Colonial Era: feeding cities by force [6]
In 1895, the French claimed the semi-arid territory that became Upper Volta to secure
a labor supply for infrastructure projects and export agriculture elsewhere in the French
West African Empire (AOF) (Englebert, 1996; Roberts, 1996) . But the colonial adminis-
tration had more ambitious plans for the hinterlands of Bobo-Dioulasso. The regions
relatively fertile, well-watered land had the potential to feed not only the town and its
military base but also neighboring towns.
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In the early 1920s, therefore, the colonial agricultural ministry recruited local laborers
to build a dam on the Houet, just upstream from Sakaby and Dogona. It then turned
part of Sakabys riverside land into a large vegetable garden, known as the public
garden. The colonial agricultural ministrys early annual reports expressed condence
that the local peasants, already accustomed to tending local vegetables in kitchen
gardens, would learn quickly the skills of European-style horticulture (Rapport Agricole,
1932) . And apparently, they did: the public garden harvests yielded produce ranging
from strawberries and green peas to potatoes by the ton.
But the villagers of Sakabyand Dogona, just across the riverdid not work in the
public garden by choice. Especially during the World Wars, the project of feeding the
tens of thousands of African and French soldiers based in the Bobo-Dioulasso military
camp placed huge demands on inhabitants of the surrounding countryside. Faced with
both cash and in-kind taxes, village households had to intensify agricultural production
even as many of their members were recruited for labor service. Despite AOF laws
specifying that only adult males perform compulsory work, women and children were
regularly conscripted to pound grains, carry loads, and work on construction projects
around Bobo-Dioulasso.
The Sakaby public garden was one of the work sites where villagers young and old,
male and female, were all drafted for daily weeding and watering. According to elders
accounts, the garden supervisor, a colonial appointee from Mali, beat people as though
he was going to kill them. The elders also recall day-to-day meanness and hardship:
We couldnt even bring food to the garden. Certain authorities, just to be cruel,
would knock over our plates of food. They made us work hard all day and at
the same time didnt let us eat We were mobilized with our wives, from
morning until night, and at the end we earned absolutely nothing.
Individual humiliation and corporal punishment were common techniques of colonial
discipline. Men who failed to pay their taxes, for example, would be placed in the stocks
until someone else came up with the money. Women shelling peanuts for the military
camp were forced to spit at the end of the workday, and if their saliva contained any nut
fragments, they were beaten. But the Sakaby public garden differed from most other
forced labor sites in that it was located within the village itself, in view of peoples homes,
and on land valued both for its fertility and its proximity to sacred sites in and along the
river Houet. It represented, therefore, a particularly odious form of colonial invasion,
and a source of collective shame not easily forgotten.
The public garden also differed from other labor sites in that it served as a training
ground in a specialized, employable skill, at least for men. Having learned how to grow
temperate-climate vegetable crops, some village men found paid work in local European
expatriates private gardens. The women who worked in the garden also gained
experience, but women in general were very rarely hired for any kind of paid
employment, not even as domestics. In that sense, European gender norms informed the
economic value of gardening skills from an early date.
In addition to garden employment, men in Sakaby and Dogona began earning income
as independent producers on their own riverside plots. The agricultural ministry supplied
vegetable seeds and technical advice with the understanding that the harvests would be
turned over to colonial authorities; no sales on the open market were permitted. But once
villagers discovered that Europeans in town would pay handsomely for certain kinds of
scarce fresh produce, they began selling potatoes secretly, with the help of town-based
women traders.
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14 S. Freidberg
The era of the public garden was a short one, relative to the regions history of
invasion and colonization. Forced labor and restrictions on local trade were ofcially
abolished throughout the AOF in 1946. But for the villagers of Sakaby and Dogona, the
years of compulsory service had at least two important consequences. First, it provided
them with a local comparative advantage in the immediate post-war years, when
demand for fresh vegetables was strong and growing rapidly both in Bobo-Dioulasso and
neighboring cities. African veterans, civil servants, and European expatriates willingly
paid premium prices for lettuce and French beans, and for a few years the gardeners in
Sakaby and Dogona enjoyed an uncrowded market.
Second, the experience of forced labor in the garden imbued the most frequent,
tedious and unskilled tasksnotably watering, which must be performed two or even
three times dailywith lasting connotations of drudgery and servitude. Men in Sakaby
and Dogona take pride in their technical knowledge as gardeners, but invariably describe
watering as the most tiring and tiresome aspect of their work. Some even refer to it as
a contemporary form of forced labor. But if men cannot delegate this work to their sons
and cannot afford hired labor or motorized pumps, they do it themselves. They do not
delegate watering to their wives or other female household members, even though this
commonly happened only a generation ago. The gender division of labor in market
gardening, in other words, has changed quite rapidly in Sakaby and Dogona. The
following sections examine how this change was shaped by these villages participation
in urban-based markets and missionary activity.
The Mid-colonial Era: missionaries and matrimony
The Catholic Church opened a mission in Bobo-Dioulasso in 1927 (De Benoist, 1987) .
Although the missionaries (known as the White Fathers) found the regions population
generally less receptive to Christianity than the Mossi peoples in central Upper Volta, the
villages just outside Bobo-Dioulasso were different. The youth of these villages converted
early and in large numbers, and often against the wishes of their parents. The
missionaries relatively greater success among the Bobo in villages such Sakaby and
Dogona owed partly to frequent contact: they regularly visited villagers in their homes
and elds, and invited villagers to the mission to attend weekly Mass, catechism classes
and holiday celebrations (De Montjoye, 1980) .
But young adults in the peri-urban villages were also perhaps more receptive to the
new religion because it offered allies and weapons against oppression which, from their
vantage point, was particularly apparent. In other words, they saw the sharp contrasts
between their own subjugationboth to the colonial administrations rules and those of
the village eldersand the liberties and material prosperity enjoyed by Europeans and
elite African townspeople. The Bobo-Dioulasso White Fathers generally learned the
Bobo language, and the local youth did not hesitate to tell them how they felt about
forced labor and corrupt canton chiefs (De Montjoye, 1980) . The White Fathers
subsequently attempted to portray themselves as agents of freedom, even at the risk
of angering local administrators. In Sakaby and Dogona, this proved an effective
evangelical strategy, at least amongst the youth. As one elderly Sakaby man recalled:
Their coming was ill-perceived by general opinion. But we, the youth, we
converted, and we welcomed the missionaries presence in the village. Their
arrival helped lessen abuses against the villagers. When someone was hand-
cuffed for not paying taxes, there was a kind of solidarity. We all chipped in
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to pay the tax and free him. Eventually even the missionaries opposed the
handcufng.
This welcome enabled the missionaries to exercise considerable inuence in the peri-
urban villages, which they referred to as the core of their evangelical territory (De
Montjoye, 1980, p. 40) . Their goals went well beyond simple conversion; rather, they
believed that the future of Catholicism in the region depended on the Bobos adoption
of monogamy and the European peasant farming practices. Their campaigns on these
fronts ultimately shaped the gender division of labor in market gardening in Sakaby and
Dogona, though not how the missionaries intended. Missionary work introduced new
ideas about conjugal rights and duties but, as a perceived threat to elders domestic and
spiritual authority, it also sparked intra-village conicts. These conicts contributed to
the breakdown of customary forms of extra-household cooperation and the emergence
of fragile new labor processes and gender roles, organized around the nuclear family
household.
In Sakaby and Dogona, these rolesespecially as they applied to market gardening
in turn came into question after World War II, when opportunities in marketplace and
regional trade led not only youth, but also women, to challenge patriarchal authority.
Ironically, even while conicts over garden work appear to have contributed to an
upsurge of polygamy and marital tensions in these villages, Bobo women invoked
Christian gender norms to work their way out of the gardens.
These norms were impressed upon Bobo men and women by Catholic missionaries
who, like their counterparts elsewhere in French West Africa, actively opposed the
custom of arranged marriages. The Bobo-Dioulasso White Fathers called on the colonial
administration to advance the liberation of women by outlawing forced matrimony
(De Benoist, 1987) ; they also offered refuge to young women who wanted to marry fellow
Christians rather than their arranged ances, who were often much older. Such women
might live for months at the Mission, waiting for their families to relent. The missionaries
kept them occupied with the domestic arts and virtues of Christian wifehood: attending
catechism classes, learning to knit and sew, and working in the mission laundry and
kitchen. In the villages, meanwhile, opposition to missionary intervention in marital
affairs occasionally turned violent, as when family members intercepted nuns attempting
to escort girls to the mission (De Montjoye, 1980) .
Local French ofcials initially refused to intervene in local marital affairs, in order not
to upset the village elders. But in 1932, a new administration issued a memorandum
permitting couples to have ofcially-recognized Church weddings even against their
elders wishesprovided the woman rst swore that she had completely forsworn the
customs of her ancestors in order to embrace the Catholic religion (Catholic Mission,
1936) . This condition was intended to impress upon young women that Christian
marriage was a sacred and irrevocable commitment. In later years it became clear that
neither Christian women nor men saw their marriage choice in that light. But at the time
it represented a serious affront to parental authority, leaving some newly-wed couples
estranged from kin and neighbors, and thus cut off from important sources of moral and
economic support.
The rst generation of Sakaby Christians received an ample dose of missionary
counsel regarding their duties as husbands and wives. As one elderly couple recalls:
Wife: Before the marriage, they gave advice to couples. The told the woman
to obey her husband and do what he wanted. And the man, they told him to
do what his wife could not physically do.
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16 S. Freidberg
Husband: They told you to have mutual respect.
Another woman remembered:
In the catechism they spoke of these things: that a man must not make his wife
work too much, that he must help her, that she is less strong than him.
This emphasis on womens obedience and mens superior physical strength differed little
from the advice young Bobo might have received prior to a customary marriage. What
differed much more were the conditions in which the young Christians found themselves
trying to fulll spousal duties. Living as couples with young childrenrather than in
large, extended family households, with multiple adults in the same compoundthey
had relatively few people whom they could turn to for help with day-to-day tasks and
expenses. Young wives especially felt the strain; one Sakaby woman remembers, they had
to be everything for their husbands.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, to be everything included, in at least some
households, helping to weed and water the husbands vegetable garden. Oral accounts,
although often contradictory, indicate that the extent and frequency of wives garden
work depended at least partly on household size and age structure [7]. Nonetheless, it is
important to recognize that wives garden help was no more traditional in these villages
than any other aspect of European-style vegetable gardening (an activity still usually
called by its French name, maraichage) . Like the crops themselves, gardening tasks were
introduced in the colonial public garden, and there they were performed, under
compulsion, by both women and men.
But colonial compulsion also created the conditions in which men in Sakaby and
Dogona, at least for a while, were able to recruit wives to help in their own gardens. The
colonial regime designated responsibility for taxes to male household heads, who in turn
made heavy demands on household dependants. Young men could avoid these demands
by eeing south to the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana) , joining the military, or
nding paid employment in town. But social norms combined with tight restrictions on
local economic activity gave women in Sakaby and Dogona less room for maneuver. In
other words, although the Catholic Church provided some women with an alternative to
arranged marriage, colonial law and economic policies gave them very few alternatives to
the nominal security and social legitimacy offered by marriage of any kind. This lack of
alternatives constrained wives bargaining power within the conjugal household. In short,
the extraordinary demands and constraints imposed on peri-urban villages created social
and economic conditions conducive not only to the missionarys evangelical campaigns,
but also to the development of new household structures and labor processes. These
conditions, however, changed dramatically after World War II.
The Late Colonial Era: the women go to town
On April 11 1946, in response to growing nationalist movements in its African colonies,
the French republic ofcially abolished forced labor (Englebert, 1996) . For villagers in
Sakaby and Dogona, the liberation brought changes more immediate and profound than
political independence in 1960. Two were especially signicant: rst, work in the public
garden ended, as did restrictions on local food trading. Second, the Wars end marked
the beginning of a demographic and economic boom in Bobo-Dioulasso. As elsewhere
in post-war West Africa, the French Governments investments in urban infrastructure
and social services both responded to and encouraged unprecedented rates of rural
urban migration (Venard, 1986) . Upper Voltas veterans and retired civil servants played
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an especially important role in the post-war transformation of Bobo-Dioulassos regional
economy, as many invested their pensions in urban real estate and transport companies,
trade, and commercial farming (Saul, 1986) .
This boom translated into increased demand for garden vegetables, both common
(i.e. tomatoes, cabbage and onions) and European varieties (such as green beans, green
peas, and lettuce). In Sakaby and Dogona, dry season commercial gardening became a
source of prosperity and status for many men. But it also became a source of
intra-household tension, as garden tasks began to conict with womens efforts to take
advantage of growing urban demand for other kinds of goods and services. The
expansion of market relations, I believe, gured importantly in the eventual renegotiation
of the household division of labor in market gardening, towards one in which men and
their sons tended the gardens, and women, sometimes with their daughters help, took
the produce to market. But longtime contact with urban-based traders and missionaries
set the stage for this shift, by providing examples of different conceptions of gender roles
and relations in and beyond the household.
It should be emphasized that the missionaries inuenced social norms less than they
had hoped. Their evangelical work became much more difcult after the liberation, as
Bobo elders reasserted their authority over the younger generation. In the immediate
post-war years, the numbers of young men (many of them back from labor service
abroad) participating in customary initiation ceremonies increased, while school enroll-
ment and attendance of catechism classes fell sharply (De Montjoye, 1980) .
The immediate post-war era also saw increasing challenges to the sanctity of Christian
marriages. The ritual abduction of bridesa standard part of a customary Bobo
marriagewas extended to married Christian women. Even more troubling to the
missionaries, Bobo women themselves began to abandon their Catholic spouses. Having
earlier crusaded for the liberation of women, the missionaries now called for greater
discipline:
A woman may abuse her liberty and act on caprice if there is not some order
or another imposed on her. Her liberty gives her rights, but also imposes
duties. These obligations she can best understand under the light of Christian-
ity however even then she has not acquired the personality which permits
her to act for herself in all cases. She is still a morally weak being (Tounouma
Parish, 194647) .
One of the missions key strategies for recovering its inuence in the Bobo countryside
centered on the promotion of modern peasant agriculture, through the example of
specially-trained and equipped family farmers. Selected graduates of catechism school,
provided with a small house and some livestock, were expected to teach and persuade
[neighboring villagers] of the primordial role of natural fertilizer [and] dry season
market-gardening; in short, they were expected to provide proof of peasant evolution
(Tounouma Parish, 195051) . The missionaries chose only married catechists to be
future family farmers, since the wives little tasks in the kitchen and their understanding
of their husbands situation were an essential part of the overall example. If all went well,
the missionaries predicted in 1950, [The catechists] material situation would be much
improved, and the Mission could nally play an excellent, appropriate role in the
evolution of the peasant masses (Tounouma Parish, 195051) .
The family farm program illustrates how efforts to reshape household gender
relations and production processes were central to the missionaries evangelical strategies.
But although the program contributed modestly to the spread of market gardening in the
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18 S. Freidberg
Bobo-Dioulasso hinterlands, the example of the catechist-farmers hardly brought about
a major transformation in Bobo farming or, for that matter, marital relations. In other
words, the dissemination of Christian gender norms through Church-supported rural
development programs was by no means automatic.
By contrast, the expanding urban market drove changes not simply in labor processes
but also in the temporal rhythms and locations of both womens and mens daily work.
For the men of Sakaby and Dogona now free from other labor obligations during the
gardening season, and free to sell their produce openlythe late 1940s and 1950s
marked what some called the honeymoon era of their gardening careers. They spent
their earnings on bicycles, mopeds and clothing, and built houses with tin roofs. At a
time when many young men aspired to civil service posts, at least some men in Sakaby
and Dogona considered commercial gardening preferable in that it was not only
protable, but also respected and personally satisfying.
It was also encouraged by the colonial administration. Eager to stimulate local food
production for the urban market, the provincial government offered loans for maraichage
and other forms of commercial food farming. It opened a Grand Marche in the city center
in 1951, and built several other neighborhood markets over the next decade. The city
also sponsored produce fairs, complete with prizes for the gardeners with the choicest
vegetables. Like agricultural extension programs more generally, all these incentives were
aimed at men.
But even without government encouragement, by the early 1950s women from Sakaby
and Dogona were engaging in a variety of urban-based commercial activities. Their
increasing participation in urban commerce reects changes not simply in market
demand but also, and more fundamentally, in the spatial and social conditions shaping
village womens occupational opportunities (Hanson & Pratt, 1995) . Partly because the
trip to town was no longer considered dangerous and partly because of the longtime
example of Zara women traders, the urban market had become a socially acceptable
workplace for Bobo women.
Indeed, although men from the peri-urban villages usually marketed their own
European vegetables (such as radishes and green peas) to restaurants and expatriate
households, they increasingly relied on their wives to help sell common-variety vegetables
such as cabbage and tomatoes. The revenue, it was understood, belonged to the men,
since they had use-rights to the garden land. But a woman who sold her husbands
produce in town typically used a portion of the daily earnings to buy sauce ingredients,
such as oil, spices and vegetables not grown at home. Since the sauce was a womans
responsibility anyway, this purchase amounted to a form of payment from the gardener
to his wifeone that the wife had considerable control over, since she handled the
money rst. By contrast, when a woman helped her husband in his garden, he decided
on the compensation.
In addition to selling their husbands produce, Bobo village women sold fuel wood,
shea butter and wild plant foods, all of which were in high demand in the city. Trade in
these goods required little or no initial capital investment and relatively little extra time,
since many women had to gather wild products and go to market anyway, as part of their
duties as mothers and wives. Such trades also did not involve much competition from
Zara Muslim women, for whom foraging was generally considered an even less
appropriate activity than farming. Some Bobo women from Sakaby and Dogona also
took up brewing millet beer (dolo) for the urban market, which prior to the spread of
Islam had been dominated by Zara townswomen. In short, village womens efforts to
respond to new market conditions while still meeting domestic obligations helped create
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the kind of new social space Suzanne Mackenzie observed among homeworkers in
British Columbia (Mackenzie, 1999) . Within this social space of the market placewhere
importantly, village women worked at a new distance from their menfolkthere
developed new ideas about gendered rights and responsibilities, and new challenges to
household power relations.
Like men, women used their earnings to buy personal items (clothing especially) and
to meet obligations to their parents and other natal kin. But women also needed a regular
source of income in order fulll their responsibilities as mothers and wives. For example,
the availability of imported foodstuffs such as sugar, tea, coffee, wheat our and dried
milk, as well as a wide range of European vegetables, had helped to transform local
meal and culinary standards (Freidberg, forthcoming) . Milk and sugar, added to tea or
porridge, became desirable parts of breakfast, as did French-style bread; a proper sauce
now contained an assortment of vegetables, plus purchased spices and ideally meat or
dried sh. Other relatively new expenses for women included fees for grain milling,
medical care, and often their childrens schooling.
The key point here is that during the post-war era of rapid urban growth and relative
prosperity, the regional economy offered women in peri-urban villages new opportunities
in small-scale commerce. But to take advantage of these opportunities they needed time
in town, which meant they needed to be able to fulll at least some of their domestic
provisioning responsibilities in town through the market. For this they needed access to
cash. Under these conditions, selling a husbands vegetables offered a woman distinct
advantages over growing them, because it allowed the woman much more direct control
over the revenue. In principle, the daily earnings belonged to him; in practice, she might
pocket as much as she thought she deserved.
Womens effort to relocate part of their daily work is one important reason, I believe,
why they eventually withdrew their labor from the gardens. This occurred in a number
of ways, over a time period of approximately three decades, starting in the 1950s. Some
women stopped working in the garden when they got old or sick, or their sons grew
strong enough to replace them. Others stopped at a younger agei.e. after they had
their rst child. In such instances, the gardeners probably had alternative sources of
labor. But in other households, according to a number of elderly informants, women
simply refused to water any more. None of the women admitted that they themselves had
done this; rather, they only said that some women did so.
According to one informant, a woman might appeal to the issue of physical strength,
saying to her husband, You are tired. I too am tired. You are the stronger one, and yet
you want me to go water? Although this seems like a minor expression of disobedience,
it had consequences. As one elderly woman observed, if you refuse to work with your
husband, its obvious that hes going to keep everything he earns for himself. Another
said that refusal might lead a husband to take a second wife, both as a solution to the
problem of labor in the garden, and as a rebuke, because he felt that you were not fully
engaged with him. The men might have planned to take second wives anyway, but this
comment reveals how deeply disputes over garden labor affected certain couples marital
relations. Such disputes may well have led, in some cases, to divorcebut neither men
nor women were willing to discuss this subject in any detail.
Conclusion
In Sakaby and Dogona, stories about women who refused to help their husbands
emerged only after a series of long conversations with a small number of older women.
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20 S. Freidberg
The most common historical explanation for why gardening is mens work makes no
mention of these stories. Rather, it dwells on environmental changesin particular, the
drop in the local water table and severe riverbank erosion, both partly results of
urbanizationthat have made garden-watering more time consuming and physically
demanding (Freidberg, forthcoming 2001) .
Although these changes in the gardeners water supply have been marked, they do not
by themselves explain the current gender division of labor. By most accounts, change in
the river levels became noticeable only in the 1960s, yet women were already refusing
to work in the gardens in the 1950s. Today people in Sakaby and Dogona may well
believe that women are not physically suited for hauling water out of the river, but this
was certainly not the original or only reason why women stopped this particular kind of
work.
Rather, the redenition of what is physically mens work or womens work must be
understood in the context of changing economic conditions, power relations and social
norms both within and beyond the household. This article has discussed a series of
experiences and events which have shaped the meaning of gendered work, both
specically (i.e. imparting symbolic or social signicance to particular tasks) and in the
more general sense of dening gender roles.
The association of garden watering with forced labor, for example, has endured. In
some parts of Africa, populations subjected to compulsory cultivation during the colonial
era subsequently rejected, at least temporarily, the crops and farming techniques forced
upon them. Villagers in Sakaby and Dogona continued gardening after 1946, despite the
memories of beatings and humiliation, not only because it was their most reliable source
of income, but also because for men, at least, market gardening offered far more than
tediumespecially if they could delegate the watering to someone else. During those
honeymoon years, they considered it a challenging and protable occupation. The
meanings they assigned to gardening reected not only favorable market conditions but
also long-standing Bobo norms valuing mens agricultural skills, and the contemporary
status granted to producers of top-price, prizewinning vegetables.
For women, however, market gardening meant something entirely different. Some
may have beneted indirectly, as the wives of wealthy and respected gardeners. But
many found weeding and hauling water no more rewarding than it had been for their
mothers during the years of the compulsory labor regime.
Yet the era of forced labor also brought women a wider range of normative resources.
The Catholic Churchs gender ideologies hardly liberated women in any broad sense,
but the missionaries of Bobo-Dioulasso did their best to convince villagers that adoption
of the European household model would help them achieve not just salvation but also
material prosperity and modern social status (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992) . Within this
model, the missionaries espoused obedience as a wifely virtue, but also emphasized that
a man must not make the wife work too much [for] she is less solid than him. The
Catholic Church did not necessarily introduce the notion of the weaker sex to the Bobo
people, but it did gure importantly in their discourse on Christian marriage and gender
relations. Whenever possible, women used this discourse to their advantageas when a
woman told her husband, You are the stronger one, and yet you want me to go water?
Finally, urban-based Islam also shaped the gender division of labor in market
gardening, and not only in Muslim households. By hiring labor in order to minimize
their wives presence in the gardens and elds, wealthy Zara Muslim village gardeners
helped make the spatial segregation of mens and womens roles in market gardening an
indicator of status. In addition, the fact that these same men permitted their wives and
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daughters to engage in commerce showed Bobo men that womens trading was not
necessarily morally suspect. The Zaras example arguably made it more acceptable for
Bobo women to spend all day at market, and to expand their commercial contacts and
activities.
In short, in Sakaby and Dogona, both the villagers perspective on regional economic,
environmental, social and cultural changes and the ways they were able to participate in
them were very much shaped by the fact that they lived on the edge of a city. The
gendered meanings they have assigned to market gardening are products of this local, yet
extroverted, history. Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, the gendering of garden work has
taken a quite different course. In fact, in some areas men do not want to be seen
anywhere near a watering can (Schroeder, 1999) .
Such local particularities, however, do not invalidate efforts to understand broader
geographic patterns and historical tendencies in gender divisions of labor. Rather, the
challenge is to trace how gendered norms and practicesin any kind of work,
anywherehave emerged out of the local articulation of broader historical forces. This
article examined a small locality, remote from the regional economies most often studied
by feminist geographers. But the gendered meanings of work here, as in many small
places, have a complex history, informed by (among other things) the overlapping
inuences of Islam, colonial labor and trade policies, missionary enterprise, and the
expansion of market relations. This case study does not predict what division of labor we
would nd in other villages engaged in similar activities, but it does suggest that the study
of gendered work could benet from an approach to history both more holistic and more
explicitly geographic.
NOTES
[1] The Fulbright Foundation Institute for International Education, the National Science Foundation Geogra-
phy and Regional Science Program, the University of California-Berkeley Provosts Fund, and the Rocca
Family Foundation Fellowship for Advanced African Studies provided funding for this research. I would
also like to thank Fatimata To and Jeremie Coulibaly, for their assistance in the eld; the residents of
Sakaby and Dogona, for their time and patience; Mahir Saul, for his thoughtful comments; and two
anonymous reviewers, for their detailed and constructive suggestions.
[2] See, for example, Swindell, 1988; Vennetier, 1989; Mortimore, 1993. The urban hinterland (Michael
Mortimores close-settled zone) generally refers to a region of varying size where economic activity is
oriented towards the urban market, and average population density is usually considerably higher than
average density in more remote areas. This region encompasses a narrower peri-urban zone, extending
about as far from the city as it is feasible to travel in a day by foot or donkey. Some peri-urban settlements
are relatively new products of urban sprawl; others, like Sakaby and Dogona, are at least as old as the
city itself.
[3] This year-long eld research project aimed to trace the social history of market gardening in Bobo-
Dioulasso and its immediate hinterlands, and to understand how changing meanings of work in both the
gardening villages and the market places were related to broader political economic, social and environ-
mental changes. In Sakaby and Dogona, therefore, I began with a survey of 180 market gardening
households (dened here as units of residence and at least partially shared consumption), from which I
selected a sample of 50 households, chosen to represent the diversity of the villages garden operations.
Over a period of 4 months, I interviewed all the members of each household (except pre-adolescent
children) who participated in the production or marketing of vegetables. Normally, I and my Dioula-
speaking translator interviewed individuals in private, though occasionally men wanted to listen to or
participate in interviews with their wives. I also collected several oral histories from village elders. Later, in
two different urban market places, I interviewed a total of 83 women vegetable traders. Finally, I examined
colonial era records kept in three different archives: the colonial government archives of LAfrique
Occidentale Francaise, in Dakar, Senegal; the Bobo-Dioulasso municipal archives, and the archives of the
Catholic Mission of Bobo-Dioulasso.
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22 S. Freidberg
[4] These reforms strengthened mens inheritance claims but also improved womens legal rights to the land
they kept in cultivation (Guyer, 1991, p. 271) .
[5] In more rural areas, Bobo women still cultivate a range of leafy greens as well as legumes such as
groundpeas, both for home use and local markets. But they also commonly buy non-local vegeta-
bles, brought from the Bobo-Dioulasso wholesale market by women traders. In Sakaby and Dogona, only
a handful of the women interviewed reported growing anything on their own.
[6] Unless otherwise noted, descriptions of events based in Sakaby and Dogona are based on the oral accounts
of elders in these villages.
[7] The extraordinary difculty I encountered in collecting precise information on this subject was in itself
instructive. Some older women described their work in their husbands gardens in considerable de-
tail, while others claimed that women had never, ever done garden work. One of the former groupa
longtime widow explained that some of her peers would not admit that they had done this work
because, given the contemporary belief that men should not need womens garden help, it would shame
their husbands.
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Gender, Place and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 2536, 2001
Domestic Geography and the Politics of Scottish
Landscape in Nan Shepherds The Living Mountain
GILLIAN CARTER, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, Australia
ABSTRACT In its exploration of the reading possibilities of a domestic geography metaphor, this
article highlights an engagement with the natural world as both embodied experience and textual practice
in Nan Shepherds neglected prose work, The Living Mountain. Domestic geography is intended as
a pathway which shows how the structure and content of this text are inseparable and, by highlighting
the complex narrative arrangement of The Living Mountain, privileges the textual representation
of an engagement with the natural world from the perspective of a native dweller. In unearthing this
forgotten native perspective on the Scottish landscape, the article examines how Shepherd uncovers the
hidden ideological nature of the dominant discoursesof science, history, romanticism and landscape
aestheticswhich have come to dene the Scottish landscape. Drawing on the limited biographical
material available on Shepherd, and in a close reading of the text itself, the article shows that both the
Cairngorm Mountains and the manuscript of The Living Mountain were an important part of
Shepherds everyday space.
Introduction
In her May 1940 letter to her friend, the acclaimed author, Neil Gunn, the Scottish
novelist, essayist and poet, Nan Shepherd (18931981) , describes her afnity with his
ction:
To apprehend thingswalking on a hill, seeing the light change, the mist, the
dark, being aware, using the whole of ones body to instruct the spirityes,
that is a secret life one has and knows others have. But to be able to share it,
in and through wordsthat is what frightens me. It dissolves ones being, I
am no longer myself but a part of a life beyond myself when I read pages
which are so much an expression of myself. (Pick, 1987, p. xvi)
With a slight change of perspective, however, Shepherd could as easily be describing her
own book, The Living Mountain: a celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (1940s,
1977) [1]. The deceptively simple, slender text of The Living Mountain is vast and dense,
with multiple meanings that move out in all directions at once, indeterminate and
indenite, beyond discursive boundaries and outside generic conventions. The fully
embodied engagement with a specic landscape, the dissolving of ones being, and the
transgression of the boundary between the self and other, all operate in The Living
Mountain, in and through words. In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd constructs the
Correspondence: Gillian Carter, Department of English, University of Western Australia, Nedlands 6907, Australia;
e-mail ,[email protected] ..
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026307
25
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26 G. Carter
Cairngorms in time and space by regularly walking in them and then shaping them into
a narrative form, highlighting an engagement with the natural world as both embodied
experience and textual practice.
At rst, The Living Mountain would appear to invite readings from a number of obvious
content-based levels: it is simultaneously a book on hill-walking, a tribute to the
Cairngorm Mountains and a spiritual journey. In his introduction to the 1996 reprint of
the text, Roderick Watson, for example, reads The Living Mountain as a spiritual journey,
aligning Shepherds vision in it with Wordsworth in The Prelude and, in the Scottish
context, with the later MacDiarmid and the Carlylean austerity of his pursuit of stones
and spirit on the high places (p. x) . However, aside from Watsons 1997 reading of the
text as a part of a thematic reading of Spirit and Substance in all Shepherds work, and
despite extensive commentary on her ction in recent years, The Living Mountain has not
received any published critical examination at all. Shepherds ction received inter-
national critical acclaim at the time of publication and then, as is so often the case with
womens writing, disappeared until the late 1980s when Canongate reissued The Quarry
Wood (1928/1987) and The Weatherhouse (1930/1988) , followed in 1996 by The Grampian
Quartet, which contains, alongside the rst two novels, Shepherds third novel, A Pass in
the Grampians (1933) , and The Living Mountain. Her volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms
(1934) , remains out of print.
A close reading of The Living Mountain soon reveals that the apparent thematic
simplicity and obviousness of the text is underwritten by a complex narrative arrange-
ment. The generic distinctions between personal history, natural history and social
history are blurred in this text. Elements of various disciplines are incorporated into the
narrative: botany, geography, geology, local history, news stories, anecdote, personal
experience and reection, folklore, mythology and poetry. The narrative embraces the
poetic, the practical and the descriptive, and the narrative voice conveys both intimacy
and detachment. It moves between the general, the particular and the personal. The
narrative is structured in such a manner that it moves from the inanimate, to the
animate, and the metaphysical. As each element, inanimate and animate, natural and
cultural, makes the living mountain, so each element makes the text. The structure of
the narrative is closely woven with its content.
The complexity and variety of The Living Mountain, then, invites a larger range of
responses than a single theoretical or thematic approach can encompass and, because of
this, my own reading of the text strains to follow a number of different paths. For
example, although the subjective I is elusive and childhood references minimal, it is
tempting to read it as an autobiographical work. Locating The Living Mountain in womens
traditions of travel writing is an interesting possibility, but so too is extending Watsons
reading of Shepherds spiritual journey. Aligning Shepherds vision with Neil Gunns
metaphysical insights into the nature of being, insights which are closely tied to the
landscape in which they evolve, and, indeed, have evolved over time, offers yet another
possibility. This idea could be furthered, too, in a fuller work exploring traditions of
landscape representation specically within the Scottish context. In the reading of
Scottish literature, this last idea is a relatively uncharted area both in terms of Shepherds
own neglected work and also in terms of a specic focus on the literary representation
of landscape, as I will briey demonstrate in the next section.
The land, regional and national, has been, and still is, a major thematic concern of
Scottish writers. In contrast, in Scottish literary history and criticism, landscape, where
it is examined at all, is mentioned more for the accurate capturing of a region and its
various geographies and weathers, than its inuence on, and importance in, the
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Domestic Geography 27
narratives of the writers, with, perhaps, the exception of the work of Neil Gunn. In the
light of recent debates over the Scottish natural heritage, and the number of different
voices represented in that debate, that this neglect remains is somewhat surprising. For,
as Simon Schama writes in Landscape and Memory, National identity would lose much
of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its
topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland (1995, p. 15) .
In About This Life: journeys on the threshold of memory, Barry Lopez expresses his concern
about the modern-day Americans relationship with, and knowledge of, their own land:
The more supercial a societys knowledge of the real dimensions of the land
it occupies becomes, the more vulnerable the land is to exploitation, to
manipulation for short-term gain. The land, virtually powerless before political
and commercial entities, nds itself nally with no defenders. It nds itself
bereft of intimates with indispensable, concrete knowledge. (Lopez, 1998,
p. 137)
These intimates with indispensable, concrete knowledge are the men and women more
or less sworn to a place, who abide there, who have a feel for the soil and history, for
the turn of leaves and night sounds (p. 133) , who have a deep understanding of a place
born of the intimacy of experience and developed over time. While Lopez is describing
specic regional American geographies, his words are equally as applicable within the
Scottish context. For, in the current natural heritage debate, and as Fraser MacDonald
points out, the voices of the native dwellers so often remain unheard in the face of
dominant economic and political interests (1998) .
If what lies at the centre of the natural heritage debate, as Mark Toogood expresses
it, is the power to dene what nature, tradition and, indeed, the Highlands, are and
can be related to constructs of nation and national identity tied to landscape and the
legitimation of what constitutes national heritage (1995, p. 103) , and if the legitimation
of what constitutes national heritage is imposed from outside, as both Toogood and
MacDonald argue, then it becomes all the more imperative to unearth some of these
native perspectives which may well contest these dominant representations. MacDonald
particularly points to the necessity of having a voice that represents the lived experience
of a place and resists the shared mythologies of conservation and the estates (p. 238) .
Uncovering the cultural construction(s) of nature is, of course, not simply specic to the
Highlands, but concerns much broader areas of what is, arguably, considered to be
wilderness or wild land within the Scottish (and others) landscape.
Uncovering the hidden ideological nature of the dominant discourses which have
come to constitute the natural landscape in Scotland is something Shepherd does quite
clearly in The Living Mountain. Throughout The Living Mountain, Shepherd upsets hege-
monic ways of seeing and understanding the world, ways of seeing and understanding
which are perpetrated and naturalised through the discourses of history, romanticism,
science and landscape aesthetics. Shepherds use of formal discourses in her representa-
tion of the Cairngorm Mountains does not promote a dissociated, detached view of the
world, a view promoted by landscape aesthetics and scientic language, in particular.
Rather, she subverts these discourses and provides an alternative to a masculinized ideal
of selfhood founded on separation from nature, rational objectivity and a need to
dominate (Kroeber, 1994, p. 17) , by establishing the discursive boundaries and then
transgressing them. While this informs my reading of The Living Mountain as a whole, it
will be more closely examined in my second section, where I will show how Shepherd
creates her textual landscape by weaving her structuring metaphors, wordplay, textual
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28 G. Carter
slippage and plurality, and obscuring strategies, in, around and through the master
discourses of science, history, aesthetics and romanticism.
Taken from this position, The Living Mountain can be read as a text which refuses to
be constrained by traditional discursive and generic boundaries; a text which moves
beyond habitual means of charting the world and unsettles habitual ways of perceiving
a landscape, a kind of domestic geography [2] that maps borders and then transgresses
them. Domestic geography describes a way of engaging with a landscape that is a part
of daily life for a native dweller rather than a traveller, tourist or scientist passing through
a region. It alludes to a repeated engagement with a single landscape that is an important
part of the authors everyday space. My third section will specically examine the idea
of everyday space in relation to Shepherds life and the construction of the manuscript
of The Living Mountain. Reading The Living Mountain by means of domestic geography
enables us to, in the words of Phil Macnaghten & John Urry, look at how nature
becomes embodied and embedded in daily life through the senses, time, space and
practice (1998, p. 104) , while remaining aware of the freedom and constraints held by
daily domestic circumstances.
Literary Context
In her recollection of Nan Shepherd, well-known author, Jessie Kesson, described her as
elusive despite 40 years of correspondence between them. Kesson writes that Nan was
reticent to talk about her books, and that she had known Nan Shepherd for 3 years
before she found out that she had written a novel. It was with some reluctance that
Shepherd eventually lent her a copy of The Quarry Wood. In contrast, Shepherds
enthusiasm toward The Living Mountain was different. Jessie Kesson writes, To conrm
my instinct of Nans attitudes to her books, she immediately on publication, sent me a
copy of The Living Mountain, inscribing it, To Jessie Kesson, kindred Spirit. She was
radiant about that book. And rightly so (1990, p. 190) .
As a public gure, Anna (Nan) Shepherd was well known in her native Aberdeenshire.
A prize-winning student at the University of Aberdeen, Shepherd went on to teach
English literature at the then Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers for the next 41
years. Upon retirement, she became editor of the Aberdeen University Review for 8 years (to
which she had contributed a number of articles and reviews, and continued to do so) and
was awarded an honorary LLD degree in 1964. She edited and wrote the Foreword for
The Last Poems of Charles Murray, offered critical insight into the poetry of Hugh
MacDiarmid, encouraged younger writers such as Jessie Kesson, and maintained a long
correspondence with the Highland novelist, Neil Gunn (Donald, 1977; Forrest, 1986) . In
the very few available recollections of Shepherd, all remark upon her lifelong love affair
with the Cairngorm Mountains. But, for someone who was so active in the literary and
cultural world of the north-east, very little is recorded about the person of Nan Shepherd.
Perhaps her reticence and elusiveness has something to do with this.
As a writer, Shepherd has, in recent years, been reclaimed and celebrated. During the
1920s and 1930s, she appears to have been forgotten, possibly because she did not t
within the predominantly masculine agenda of the time. Hugh MacDiarmids essay, The
modern scene, sets out this agenda. In it, MacDiarmid, canonised as the key literary
gure of this period, emphasises the process of the revaluation of Scottish literature and
history. The new Scottish novelists, he writes, have taken this agenda on board:
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the heightened national consciousness, the return to Scotland spirit, the new
creative use of the vernacular and Gaelic backgrounds linguistically and
otherwise, the sense of a separate Scottish tradition with a continuity of its own
and qualities and potentialities very different from that of the English tradition,
are all exemplied in the new Scottish novelists. (1934/1977, p. 47)
MacDiarmid goes on to list a number of writers as representative of the new Scottish
novelists, including women writers such as Willa Muir and Nancy Brysson Morrison, but
Nan Shepherd stands out through exclusion. However, as Roderick Watson points out,
Shepherds novels are different to the key novels of the period, the line that runs from
George Douglas Browns The House with the Green Shutters (1901) , to Lewis Grassic
Gibbons A Scots Quair (193234) . She shares none of the violence and destruction of the
former, and none of the fatalistic bleakness of the latter. Instead, as Watson writes, All
her work is clearly derived from her own background and from a love of the people, the
culture and the landscapes within it (1990, p. 209) .
To date, the emphasis of Scottish literary critics and historians has, quite rightly, been
on Scottish languages and identity, both extending and contesting MacDiarmids
nationalist agenda. However, this emphasis has led to a neglect of Scottish landscape as
a signicant feature in its literatures. In terms of women writers, Douglas Giffords recent
chapter in The History of Scottish Womens Writing does not see landscape as holding any real
signicance at all. In Giffords view, the Scottish womans journey to independence and
womens rights is the overriding common concern of women writers, as opposed to his
interpretation of the more mystical nature of the mens tradition which, for Gifford, is
manifested in an ancestral landscape and mythical archetypes (1997, p. 580) . Developing
this idea further, Gifford asserts that landscape, in his view, takes second place in the
womens tradition:
The Findlaters, Carswell, and Morrison exploit the possibilities of landscape
and weather to the great enhancement of their narratives, and Carswell
especially would seem to exploit both the womens and mens traditions to the
full. Shepherd and Muir herself will make use of vivid settingsbut none of
these women allow consideration of intimations of land and immortality to
cloud their main issue, which is simply that of the importance of human
relations within community. (1997, p. 590)
In all Shepherds work, the regional landscape is an important feature, so important, in
fact, that the title of each of her books is named for a place, and not a person or event.
This would suggest that the narrative arrangement of her work is spatial rather than
temporal, and that the individual is not, in fact, central, but exists as a part of a place
and as part of a community. In contrast to many of her mainly male contemporaries,
Shepherds work does not taper off into a mythical Scotland, but rather, myth and legend
are brought into the everyday domestic space of her narratives. For Shepherd, the main
issue is not simply that of human relationships within community, it is made much more
complex by the relationship of both the individual and the community to the land with
which they interact and within which they act.
Conventions of Landscape Representation
Throughout the text of The Living Mountain, Shepherd continually draws attention to
alternative perspectives and viewpoints, undermining the traditional authority of what
Mary Louise Pratt calls the Monarch-of-all-I-survey scene, typical of European
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30 G. Carter
romanticism. Here, a lone (European male) speaker-protagonist stands up on a high
place of some kind and describes the panorama below, producing a simultaneous verbal
and visual picture in words (1988, p. 22) . Shepherd draws on this convention of
landscape representation, utilising and frequently overturning the three aspects identied
by Pratt. Briey, these are, that rstly, the landscape is aestheticised as in a painting
specically set out with reference to the viewers vantage point. Secondly, most nouns are
modied by adjectivessome literally, some as metaphorswhich provides a density of
meaning relating back to the viewers culture. And, thirdly, there is a relation of
dominance between subject and object, seer and seen: what the subject sees is all there
is. This third strategy enables the viewer to impose complete authority over his vision
(1988, pp. 2425) . For the traveller close to home (and also the explorer and scientist
abroad), writes Elizabeth Bohls, the picturesque substitutes imaginative for real pos-
session as a central principle in aestheticizing land (1995, p. 92) . There is a link between
vision, power and possession.
Pratt argues that the passive language of science in travel writing promoted an urban,
lettered male authority over the whole of the planet; it elaborated a rationalizing,
extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations
amongst people, plants and animals (1992, p. 38) . Shepherd undermines the authority of
scientists with gentle irony, I nd I have a naive faith in my scientist friendsthey are
such jolly people, they wouldnt b to me unnecessarily, and their stories make the world
so interesting (p. 52) , subtly pointing out that scientic discourse, like all discourse, is
produced within language and is, therefore, shaped by the same processes that are used
to make ction. Shepherd does, however, use scientic language to describe her
mountains, but also notes the reliance on books, a formalised, and therefore distanced,
means of conveying scientic information: Their physiognomy is in the geography
booksso many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits over 4000 feet
(p. 3) . She describes in intimate detail the plants, animals and insects specic to these
mountains, and notes that they, also, can be veried in the books. Shepherd then
counterpoints this learned referentiality as of less importance than actual involvement:
But why should I make a list? It serves no purpose, and they are all in the books. But
they are not in the books for methey are in living encounters, moments of their life
that have crossed moments of mine (p. 59) . And of the geographical statistics she
comments, but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that
matters to human beings, is a reality of the mind (p. 3) . The purported objectivity of
science is shown to be less real than subjective, embodied involvement.
By the early twentieth century, the discourses of history, romanticism, science and
aesthetics had become so well entrenched as to seem natural ways of understanding the
world. Shepherds inscription of these discourses disrupts this perceived naturalness and
draws attention to their underlying reliance on formalised ways of describing the world.
She describes how she alters her perception by peering through half-closed lids, and
notes that our habitual vision of things is not necessarily right: it is only one of an innite
number, and to glimpse an unfamiliar one, even for a moment, unmakes us, but steadies
us again (p. 88) . Unsettling habitual vision is exactly what Shepherd does in both the
narrative landscape of The Living Mountain and her physical engagement with the
Cairngorm Mountains:
By so simple a matter too, as altering the position of ones head, a different
kind of world may be made to appear. Lay the head down, or better still, face
away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your
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world upside down. How new it has become! Details are no longer part of
a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is
everywhere. Nothing has reference to me, the looker. This is how the earth
must see itself. (p. 12)
By adopting a childlike, playful view of the world, in putting her head upside down
between her legs and displacing the self as the reference point, Shepherd completely
dismantles the authoritative position attributed to sight. By disrupting the link between
vision, power and possession, Shepherd not only undermines the discourses which
promote aesthetic and scientic detachment, but also those that promulgate conquest,
domination and mastery.
One of the most striking features of The Living Mountain is its narrative and narrated
multiplicity, and its continual movement: movement between discourses, places, in time
(personal, historical and geological) , and between the general and the particular. Where
we know in reality that Shepherd was literally simultaneously here and not here when
writing her narrative (as indicated by her Foreword) , and her visits to the mountain were
progressive in real time, the temporal and spatial ordering of the narrative moves out,
to use Patricia Yaegers words, in all directions at once (1996, p. 5) . The narrative offers
a multiplicity of perspectives on the mountains, and this multiplicity is carried not only
through direct reference, but also by slippage in discourse, place and time. Movement in
time is conveyed through tense changes, seasons, months, times of day, weather, place
changes, memory, and indicative words such as once and one day. Building on what
has gone before, in both narrative time for the reader, and the real, progressive time of
her visits to the Cairngorms for Shepherd, we come to understand that she has
experienced the mountains, not simply once and from one view, but many, many times
and from many perspectives.
Nan Shepherds narrative multiplicity and slippage in perspective also occurs in her
representation of the various groups that have specic interests in the region. In her
Foreword, particularly, she presents the views of the dominant groups represented in the
current natural heritage debateconservationists, the Estates, and tourists, once again
sliding between the different viewpoints, A restaurant hums on the heights and between
it and the summit Cairn Gorm grows scruffy, the very heather tatty from the scrape of
boots (too many boots, too much commotion, but then how much uplift for how many
hearts) and, The Nature Conservancy provides safe covert for bird and beast and plant
(but discourages vagabonds, of whom I have been shamelessly onea peerer into
corners) . Ecologists investigate growth patterns and problems of erosion, and re-seed
denuded slopes.
In her three chapters entitled Life (The plants; Birds, animals and insects; Man) , and
in her Foreword, Shepherd is, at times, openly critical of mans destruction of the
ecology of the mountains, but this is not as straightforward as it might initially seem. She
voices concern for the manipulation of beast and plant, [he] has driven the snow bunting
from its nesting-sites, banished the capercailzie and reintroduced it from abroad. He has
protected the grouse and all but destroyed the peregrine, but also understands the
economic basis of this process, and though the economy of the shooting estate is one for
which I have little sympathy The margin between a living and a sub-living may be
decided by the extra wage of ghillie or under-keeper (p. 69) . Shepherd presents a
subjectivity comprised of numerous parts, highlighting the complex nature of mans
relationship to the environment. Her representation of landscape centres on the under-
standing that this is a land which shapes its people as they shape it. In The Living Mountain,
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32 G. Carter
she gives the people who live there, those forceful and gnarled personalities, bred of the
bone of the mountain (p. 72) , a fuller subjectivity than her unnamed and often
ungendered companions. She shows how this is a reciprocal relationship, where each
shapes and changes the other, Yet so long as they live a life close to their wild land,
subject to its weathers, something of its own nature will permeate theirs. They will be
marked men (p. 75) . Her people on the mountain are not merely ornamental gures but
human agents living in historical time (Bohls, 1995, pp. 190192) . Through her people
on the mountain, and her own engagement with it, Shepherd shows, in Tim Ingolds
words, that through living in it, the landscape becomes a part of us, just as we are a part
of it (1993, p. 155) .
Instead of depicting a world out there, Nan Shepherd presents a world that is
meaningfully engaged with (Ingold, 1995, p. 58) . She constructs her mountains, not only
textually from her position outside the mountain, but by repeatedly walking in them,
physically enacting Michel De Certeaus assertion that History begins at ground level,
with footsteps. The motions of walking are spatial creations. They link sites one to the
other (1985, p. 129) . Throughout The Living Mountain, Shepherd locates her way of
knowing and being rmly in the body: The body is not made negligible, but
paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fullled. One is not bodiless, but essential body
(p. 93) . Her way in to the mountain is by use of all the senses (chapter XI is entirely
devoted to the senses) as well as the mental faculties, combining learned knowledge with
physical experience. At certain key points in the narrative, Shepherd places the self in the
present, showing that history is not simply located in the framed distance of the past. She
creates the Cairngorm Mountains by physically placing herself in them and, in doing so,
overturns the notion of the rural landscape as undifferentiated and ahistorical.
In the second paragraph of chapter IX, Life: Man, Shepherd shows how the
landscape is constituted as an enduring record ofand testimony tothe lives and works
of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there something
of themselves (Ingold, 1993, p. 152) . She shows how cultural memory is embedded in
the landscape, how, over time, it becomes a part of the natural landscape:
Yet as I look around me, I am touched at many points by his presence. His
presence is in the cairns, marking the summits, marking the paths, marking the
spot where a man has died, or where a river is born. It is in the paths
themselves; even over boulder and rock mans persistent passage can be seen,
as at the head of the Lairig Ghru, where the path, over brown-grey weathered
and lichened stones, shines as red as new-made rock. It is in the stepping stones
over the burns, and lower in the glens, the bridges. It is in the indicator on Ben
MacDhui, planned with patient skill, that gathers the congregation of the hills
into the hollow of ones hand; and some few feet below, in the remains of the
hut where the men who made the Ordnance Survey of the eighteen-sixties
lived for the whole of a seasonan old man has told me how down in the
valley they used to watch a light glow now from one summit, now another, as
measurements were made and checked. Mans presence too is in the map and
the compass that I carry, and in the names recorded in the map, ancient Gaelic
names that show how old is mans association with scaur and corrie: the Loch
of the Thin Mans Son, the Coire of the Cobbler, the Dairymaids Meadow,
the Lurchers Crag. It is in the hiding-holes of hunted men, Argylls Stone on
Creag Dhubh above Glen Einich, and the Cats Den, deep narrow chasm
among the Kennapol rocks; and in the Thieves Road that runs south from
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Nethy through prehistoric glacial overow gapsand somewhere on its way
the kent tree (felled now) to which the prudent landlord tied a couple of his
beasts as clearance money. It is in the sluices at the outow of the lochs, the
remnants of lime kilns by the burns, and the shepherds huts, rooess now, and
the bothies of which nothing remains but a chimney-gable; and in the Shelter
Stone above Loch Avon, reputed once to have been the den of a gang some
thirty strong, before the foundation stones that hold the immense perched rock
shifted and the space beneath was narrowed to its present dimensions: wide
enough still to hold a half-dozen sleepers, whose names, like the names of
hundreds of others, are recorded in a book wrapped in waterproof and left
within the shelter of the cave. (p. 67)
In this passage, Shepherd shows how physical traces of history are linked to cultural and
personal memory, how each part carries its own multiplicity of story. Part of the
particularity of place is conveyed through Shepherds use of history and that history is
carried, also in part, by the use of proper place names. Naming not only makes
recognisable, if not a known and familiar, at least a locatable and mapped, place, but also
invokes the history, folklore and legend associated with that place. The ancient Gaelic
names intimate centuries of human connection to that landscape, and other names
invoke the folklore and legend associated with particular places, as in the Loch of the
Thin Mans Son and the Coire of the Cobbler. But the history and the folklore also
invoke the place as in Argylls Stone and the Cats Den, the hiding holes of hunted
men, and the Shelter Stone, reputed to have been the den of a gang some thirty
strong. It is not only place names, but Shepherds use of recognisably Scottish terms,
scaur, corrie, burns, bothies, that also convey the particularity and historicity of
place.
From its very subtitle, A celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland, we know already
that The Living Mountain is located in a specic, recognisable place. Although this
landscape appears spatially xed, if only by the knowledge that we know where it is,
temporally, it slides between past, present and projected future. History, as one means
of conveying time in this text, is not chronological, but is drawn on as it relates to aspects
of the mountain, as it is physically encountered. Shepherds use of history, exemplied
in the preceding passage, comes from a number of sources: conventional local, national
and international history, anecdote (an old man has told me) , archive (the names in the
Shelter Stone book) , and geological science. Shepherd slips between past and present
with the kent tree, felled now, and the architectural remains of working life reclaimed
by the mountainsthe remnants of kiln res, the remains of a chimney gable, and the
roof-less shepherds huts. The present is linked to the past and protected with waterproof
material for the future, with the half-dozen sleepers making history as their names are
recorded with those who have gone before them. History not only disrupts the present,
history is present. It is literally a part of the landscape.
Everyday Space
In their reading of a range of twentieth-century women writers, Aviril Horner & Sue
Zlosnik have noted how an implicit recognition of the power of discursive formations to
constrain and restrict is expressed in metaphors of enclosure; a sense of self existing
beyond those constraints is expressed in metaphors of uidity and freedom from
boundaries (1990, p. 13) . Following a similar path in a specically Scottish context,
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34 G. Carter
Aileen Christianson writes that the innite possibilities of the imagination (1996, p. 126)
are mapped out in much twentieth-century Scottish womens ction through the
north-eastern landscape: It is as though the constrictions of earthly life are released
by the light and landscape of the North East into the edge of time and endless uncharted
possibilities, possibilities that were more fractured and constrained in life (p. 128) . Both
assertions are enacted throughout The Living Mountain, as structure and content.
In the nal pages of the text, Nan Shepherd describes her rst successful climb of the
Cairngorm Mountains:
Climbing Cairngorms was then for me a legendary task, which heroes, not
men, accomplished. Certainly not children. I climbed like a child stealing
apples, with a fearful look behind. The Cairngorms were forbidden country.
I could not contain myself, I jumped up and down, I laughed and shouted.
There was the whole plateau, glittering white, within reach of my ngers, an
immaculate vision, sun-struck, lifting against a sky of dazzling blue. I drank and
drank. (p. 94)
The metaphors for enclosure and freedom are embedded in the discourses of legends and
heroes. This moment is particularly a forbidden one: only heroes climb mountains,
certainly not children, or women. By deliberately going against expected behaviour, but
furtively, like a child stealing apples, with a fearful look behind, Shepherd not only
ungenders heroes to include herself, but also achieves something that not even men
accomplished and, in doing so, discovers a self that exists beyond social and cultural
constraints. The landscape, glittering white against a sky of dazzling blue, literally has
no boundaries and in the site of self dispersal lies also the site for self-empowerment
(Freeman, 1995, p. 19) .
Shepherds geographical poetics opens up these possibilities for conveying modes of
experience that exist beyond the constraints of everyday life, for it is not only the
girl-child who realises these possibilities in the light and landscape of the North-east. In
her Foreword to The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes, It was written during the latter
years of the Second War and those just after. In that disturbed and uncertain world it
was my secret place of ease, referring, somewhat ambiguously, to both the manuscript
and the mountains themselves. It is as if she has created her own elsewhere (Rose, 1993,
pp. 139, 143) in both the act of constructing the text and the landscape in which she
moves. It is an example of an elsewhere that exists beyond the constraints of daily life,
yet is still a part of daily life.
That Shepherd should need to create a secret place of ease in the context of the
Second World War, and also within the context of her own daily life, is not surprising
when we taken into account one of the rare biographical insights into her life. Vivienne
Forrests portrait of Nan Shepherd shows a woman who was a successful writer, teacher
and editor, a feminist ahead of her time, but who was bound to spending most of her
life nursing rst her invalid mother, and then the family retainer (Shepherd was 80 when
Mary Lawson died at 92) . Forrest quotes an acquaintance of Shepherds as saying, Nan
gave up all chance of leaving when her mother was taken ill with one of those mysterious
Victorian illnesses. I heard her say once to her students: I did this. dont (sic) you do the
same (1986, p. 17) . In the light of Forrests portrait of her, and as both the Foreword
and the narrative of The Living Mountain suggest, for Shepherd, the mountains and the
manuscript were an important part of her everyday space. Where the landscape in her
ction shows the possibilities for freedom for her characters, both female and male, it
does the same in The Living Mountain for the self.
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Conclusion
Implicit throughout my reading of The Living Mountain has been the idea of domestic
geography as a pathway which reads embodied experience and discursive practice as
inseparable in this text. With its focus on the authors positioning of the mountains and
the manuscript as an important part of her everyday space, domestic geography is, in
some ways, a sidetrack from Tim Ingolds dwelling perspective (1993) , privileging, as it
does, the textual representation of an everyday engagement with the natural world from the
perspective of a native dweller. If, as Ingold argues, the landscape is a story for both the
native dweller and the archaeologist (1993, p. 152) , then domestic geography provides a
means for exploring how that story is toldand retoldin and through words. With
its complex narrative arrangement, its transgression of discursive and generic boundaries,
its narrated and narrative multiplicity, and the interweaving of structure and content, The
Living Mountain is testament to Aileen Christiansons endless uncharted possibilities of the
imagination, both in the sense of the reading possibilities it opens up, and of the
landscape and light of the Northeast. For Shepherd, these endless uncharted possibilities
are like the tracks, lanes, roads and paths which pattern physical geography, enabling
location, relocation, discovery, knowledge and, nally, wisdom:
But as I grew older, and less self-sufcient, I began to discover the mountain
in itself. Everything became good to me, its contours, its colours, its waters and
rock, owers and birds. This process has taken many years, and is not yet
complete. Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that mans
experience of them enlarges rock, ower and bird. The thing to be known
grows with the knowing. (p. 94)
NOTES
[1] All page references in this paper are to the 1977 edition of the text.
[2] I have taken the term domestic geography initially from Denise Delorey, who uses it as a descriptive term
for Virginia Woolfs spatial narrative in Mrs Dalloway (1996, p. 100) . However, Delorey does not explore
its possibilities, either in relation to that specic novel or womens writing generally. Gillian Rose also uses
the term, but in a more literal sense, in her description of Marilyn Fryes parable of the limits placed on
the expression of a womans anger in the domestic spaces of kitchens and bedrooms (1993, p. 142) .
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La Donna e Mobile: Constructing the irrational woman
RUTH BANKEY, University of Edinburgh, UK
ABSTRACT This article explores the ways in which disorders that have historically been attributed
to women, and that pathologise the feminine as irrational, form an intertwined genealogy; that is, they
affect and contribute to the histories of one another. In linking the hystories of hysteria and agoraphobia,
it is argued that the image of the hysterical woman as unstable and deviant is traced within the experiences
of interview subjects diagnosed with panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA). Because of this, it is argued
that panic disorder with agoraphobia can be understood as a fear of the hysterical image, that is, the
hysterical woman. The fear of the hysterical woman is a fear of being perceived by others as excessively
feminine, out of control, and slipping into madness; therefore it is also a fear that ones experiences will
not be taken seriously and that one is acting up. This fear is described by the women interviewed as
a fear of alienation and abandonment; of losing control in front of others; of becoming a spectacle and
being gazed at; and of being perceived as hyperfeminine, for which they are disciplined and punished. The
fear of the hysterical woman is also a fear that implies that madness or deviance is rendered visible on
and through the body. Thus, PDA can be situated within a logic of visibility that has bifurcated men
and womens bodies, spheres and spaces from one another.
Women are frivolous
Women are changeable
Now they adore you,
Now they ignore you
Women are lovable
Women are dangerous
One day they kiss you,
then they dismiss you
Women are ckle
ever capricious
Truly so charming youll be deceived
Ah yes, deceived!La Donna e Mobile.
(Duke of Mantua, Rigoletto, translated from Italian)
These phrases are not merely the ravings of a forlorn lover; they succinctly address and
reinforce a mythology of the feminine which permeates Western society and in particular
Western medicine. La donna e mobile, translated from the Italian as the woman in motion,
does not refer to spatial mobility, rather, it is in reference to the instability and disorder
of womens bodies and minds. The feminine, and consequentially women, have been
Correspondence: Ruth Bankey, Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh
EH8 9XP, UK; e-mail [email protected] k.
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026316
37
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38 R. Bankey
pathologised as unstable, deceitful, naturally inferior and irrational. This is a recurring
theme within traditional Western medical culture and practice. And while twentieth-
century medical practice has attempted to dispel itself of this patriarchal legacy, traces
and ghosts of this pathology remain and are reinscribed onto contemporary subjectivities,
identities and bodies. In this article, I want to explore how this pathology is reinscribed
within the lives of contemporary women, in particular the lives of women diagnosed with
panic disorder with agoraphobia (PDA). I argue that PDA can be approached and
understood as a fear of the hysterical image, a fear of being perceived as hyperfeminine,
a fear of losing control over ones self and in front of others.
Bodies, in particular womens bodies, are reinscribed and stamped by historical and
contemporary representations of the feminine. These inscriptions further rewrite and
reproduce these bodies as sites of struggle evidenced in the daily life experiences of
individuals diagnosed with PDA. Therefore, in order to understand the PDA condition,
it is important to draw upon the histories of other disorders and diseases attributed to
women because the history of these ailments forms an intertwined genealogy; they affect
and contribute to the histories of one another (for examples see Bordo, 1993; Moss &
Dyck, 1999) . Whether we look at disorders such as PDA, hysteria, or anorexia, we nd
the body of the sufferer deeply inscribed with an ideological construction of femininity
emblematic of the period in question, the symptomatology of which reads itself as a text
laden with symbolic, cultural and gendered meanings that help to construct the irrational
woman (Bordo, 1993, p. 168) .
My writing of this article was provoked by a lack of discussion about agoraphobia in
geographical literature in spite of the potential relevance of PDA experiences for studies
of gendered experiences of space (see Bordo et al., 1998; Davidson, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c
for exceptions) . It was also provoked by a lack of geographical inquiry into hysterical
imagery (see Luckinbeal & Aiken, 1998, for exceptions) . Yet, there are many areas of
study in which a discussion of PDA would contribute and enhance gendered geograph-
ical inquiry, for example, the geographies of womens fear (Valentine, 1989; 1998;
Koskela, 1997; Pain, 1997; Day, 1999; Mehta & Bondi, 1999) . While these studies all
explore ways in which geographies reect a fear of others, a discussion of the landscapes
of fear that women with PDA experience points not only to the fear of others, but to a
fear of the self and the imagined self. In this article, I will show that the study of PDA
provides additional insights into the ways in which spaces and places are feared,
imagined and experienced.
Geographical discourses on the body are particularly pertinent to the study of PDA
because the somatic experiences of the individual are central to the construction of the
spatial patterns, subjectivities and identities of my interview subjects (Longhurst, 1995;
1997; Duncan, 1996; Pile, 1996; Nast & Pile, 1998; Callard, 1998) . The sensations of
panic for those I interviewed affects their perceptions of what their body boundaries are,
profoundly blurs the relationships between what is inside and outside of their body and
consequentially alters their perceptions of their body and its geographies.
Panic disorder with agoraphobia is also connected to issues of geography, illness and
mental health because PDA is identied within these frameworks. Clinical discourses and
practitioners dealing with PDA identify, locate and discuss PDA as an issue of mental
health and illness which then affects how those diagnosed identify and locate themselves
relative to these clinical discourses (Moss & Dyck, 1996; Parr, 1997, 1988) . In this vein,
PDA is also an issue that relates to disability/disablement because those diagnosed
experience a multitude of spatial, physical and social restrictions (Chouinard, 1997;
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1997) .
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Constructing the Irrational Woman 39
This article is informed by my research with women diagnosed with PDA conducted
over a 2-year period in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I will explore and expand on what
the hysterical image is through a discussion of relevant literatures and through an
analysis of evidence collected through interviews. It is important to note that the use of
the term hysterical is my own; it is not a term used by the women during the formal
interview process. Yet, most of the women interviewed, who were consulted after the
main interview, conrmed that my analysis of PDA as a fear of the hysterical woman/
image was appropriate and resonated with their own experiences. Some women added
that not only did they fear being perceived of as hysterical but of being thought of as
hyperfeminine and that for them the hysterical image is a female image. This article
will explore the ways in which the hysterical is oppressive for those I interviewed,
though there is evidence within my research that hysterical identities and subjectivities
are also sites of resistance and ways of re-establishing control in various contexts
for my interviewees. The hysterical can be simultaneously a site of resistance and
oppression.
In the rst section of this article, I examine and introduce various hystories of hysteria
(Showalter, 1997) , that is, how histories of hysteria intertwine with the construction of
gendered identities and madness and how clinical subjectivities, bodies and identities are
dependent on the primacy of the visual in clinical practices. The next section provides
some background information on PDA and on my research design, methodology and
context. What follows these two sections is a more specic examination of what the
hysterical woman/image (identied as one and the same) is by presenting how the
hysterical woman/image is traced within the experiences and perceptions of those I
interviewed. This discussion elaborates my central argument by examining a series of
themes evident in interview transcripts which together show how PDA can be under-
stood as a fear of alienation and abandonment; of losing control and being perceived as
an unt woman or mother; of the gaze, spectacle and the feminine; and of being
disciplined and punished for ones hyperfeminine actions. These sections will also explore
the notion that the experiences and geographies of those diagnosed with PDA can be
situated within a logic of visibility (Chow, 1992) that has bifurcated men and womens
bodies, spheres and spaces from one another and that has also led to the belief that
madness is something which is somatically visible, expressed through the body and its
actions.
Hystories of Hysteria/Images of Hysteria
I am using the image of the hysterical woman within my analysis for several reasons.
First, it serves to illustrate the ways in which imagery and representations are traced and
reinscribed onto bodies, identities and subjectivities, and how these forms are translated
into language practices. Second, I use it to explore the connections between PDA and
a larger discussion of gendered genealogies and geographies. Third, I am drawing upon
histories that connect gender, clinical practices and hysteria to show how women and the
feminine were portrayed and labelled as deviant, as well as to show the ways in which
clinical practices have been predicated on a body which makes signs of madness visible
on its surface, and thus allowed others to observe and identify specic forms of madness
(for further discussion, see Nast & Kobayashi, 1996) .
The genealogy of hysteria encapsulates the mythologising of the irrational woman.
Hysteria has been linked and conated with women in many unattering ways
(Showalter, 1985) . As Edward J. Tilt, a Victorian physician, notes in his handbook of
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40 R. Bankey
Uterine Therapeutics, mutability is characteristic of hysteria because it is characteristic
of women, thereby suggesting that hysteria was an ontology of the feminine and the
female sex (Tilt, 1881 in Showalter, 1997) . And while this theorising of women as
mutable is no longer as widespread within clinical literatures of the late twentieth
century, the term hysterical is commonly applied to womens behaviours or to evoke an
image of a woman out of control. The hysterical body is more than a metaphor for
femininity within a patriarchal society, it has become a living shadow or simulacra of
womanhood. The hysterical body has become emblematic of all the traditionally
negative characteristics considered to be feminine: duplicity, theatricality, suggestibility,
instability, weakness, passivity and excessive emotionality. The hysterical image is a
symbol of the feminine as spectacle and irrational which leads to being visually
scrutinised, judged as abnormal/deviant and punished.
Hysterical imagery and its associated literature are linked both to gender prejudices
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western society and the institutionalisation of
power over womens bodies (Gilman et al., 1993; Bronfen, 1998) . Literature and art-
work that present images of hysteria, popularised in the nineteenth century are the
primary media by which images of the hysterical body are known in contemporary
popular culture (Gilman, 1995) . These images represent the expanding inuence of
an eighteenth-and nineteenth-century medical profession whose scientic knowledge
gave it both social and political power, including power over representations of women,
where the:
otherness of women and the differences of women became transformed, under
the inuence of a male, scientic, medical profession, into a pathological
disordermadnessthat resulted in the control, connement and silencing of
women. (Prestwich, 1993, p. 114)
The lecture hall of the Salpetrie`re, located in Paris, established in 1870 by Martin
Charcot specically to study and observe hysteria, was the stage on which public displays
of hysterical behaviour were performed for Charcots students. The hall was framed by
images that both students and hysterical female patients observed (Bronfen, 1998) .
These images and representations of the hysteric present the hysterical woman as:
dramatically writhing and possessed, tearing at her clothes, often being observed by male
onlookers; as the passively willing patient of the master with no will of her own; or as
a curved, contorted body (Bronfen, 1998; p. 189) . These images of hysterical women
were designed to show how women were in need of the moral guardianship of a
rational medical or scientic system for care; they neglect to reect on the everyday lives
and experiences of the hysteric. In so doing, this medical system created an image of the
hysterical body, which becomes indistinguishable from that which it images; the image
and the lived reality of hysteria have been mistaken for one and the same thing
(Micklem, 1996; p. 90) . Subsequently, the mythologising of hysteria and its associated
static clinical representations and images are what remain to colour and inuence
popular culture.
These clinical representations and images are also situated within a logic of visibility,
that is, techniques that privilege vision as a means of revealing truths about the body,
thereby assuming that illness and madness can be read as a surface presentation of the
body. Sander Gilman (1993, p. 359) links the mythologising of the image of the hysterical
body as spectacle to the techniques for seeing women and madness within the history of
medical treatment surrounding hysteria. His argument is that the hysteric clinic and
asylum were organised primarily around the visual dominant scopic regime of the
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medical profession, itself derived from a long-standing Western medical tradition of
representing the insane. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary Western medical
practice, observation has been the primary way of identifying medical problems in the
body. Hysteria must be seen to have observable symptoms in order to be diagnosed or
classied as a disease.
To see the patient means to develop a technique for seeing, a technique that
is scientic; the patient in turn, as the object of the medical gaze becomes a
part of the process of the creation of the ontological representation of the
disease, a representation that is labelled hysteria. (Gilman, 1993, p. 353)
According to Gilman, La Salpetrie`re encapsulates the connections between the primacy
of the visual gaze in medicine and the construction of visual representations of
femininity. Charcot was the rst psychiatrist to use image material in his lectures
(Bronfen, 1998) . The majority of hysteric patients that Charcot placed on display, that
were subjected to the (male) medical gaze of his students, were women. In comparison,
the male hysterics Charcot diagnosed and observed did not warrant the same visual
scrutiny (Showalter, 1997, p. 70) . According to Prestwich, this was because Charcot
wanted to control the image of the hysteric as a young female in need of the healing
gaze of a physician, such as himself and his male students (Prestwich, 1993, p. 111) . This
healing gaze also came in the form of gazing at images of oneself. Many physicians
contemporary with Charcot, and including Charcot, believed that women hysterics could
be cured by exposing them to images and photographs of themselves.
The realism of the photograph was assumed to have a therapeutic function
because of its mode of representation Seeing ones own difference provided
the healthy aspect of the mind with the juxtaposition between the normal and
abnormal. (Gilman, 1993, p. 354)
The patients of the Salpetrie`re learnt from representations of hysteria how to appear as
hysteric and replicate a hysterical symptomatology. When Charcot presented the women
with images and photographs of other hysterical women, the photographs specically
identied the physiognomy of the hysteric such as specic facial features and expressions,
body positions, as well as a technical visualisation of the throat, eyes and mouth (Gilman,
1993, 1995) . The images and gestures of the hysterical woman that Charcot used stressed
the attributes that Charcot wanted the viewer to seethe frozen woman in an arc en
cercle (arched back) position, the fainting woman, frantic woman or woman in
convulsive, contorted hystero-epilepsie tsoften using images of other ailments, such
as tetanus and epilepsy, to represent hysteria (Gilman, 1995, p. 22) .
The image of the hysteric in the medical literature of the nineteenth century is an
essential image of deviance (Gilman, 1993, p. 362) . This image served several purposes:
it allowed other physicians to readily identify hysterical symptoms and to identify overt
female sexuality as deviant, at the same time as it allowed the hysterical woman to shape
her identity according to this imagery (Gilman, 1993, p. 367) . These images of the
hysteric always assume that there is a normal image of a productive healthy human, and
that the deviant is marked by external signs (Gilman, 1995) . These signs and movements
were often associated and conated with representations of the feminine; thus, excessive
femininity is simultaneously understood as deviant behaviour.
In effect, medical techniques for seeing and representing hysteria within the Salpetrie`re
were based on a theorising of female bodies which has classically been associated with
materiality, and with the body, as opposed to men, who were primarily dened by
their rational mastery (Butler, 1993, p. 34) . This binary tradition conned women to
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42 R. Bankey
their eshly limitations while men could transcend the realm of the body into spheres
of logic and reason (Grosz, 1997) . By extension, womens bodies and minds were not
fully normal, they naturally lack the self-control and mastery of the male mind and thus
were inferior (Russell, 1995, p. 19) . The sex of bodies is further used to explain and
justify the different, unequal social and cognitive abilities of men and women. Womens
bodies are weaker, plagued by irregularities, unpredictable and thus prone to madness
(Russell, 1995) . It was this logic and rhetoric of the female body, its unpredictabilities and
irregularities, that necessitated its study and containment within La Salpetrie`re. It is also
this logic of a weaker, unpredictable female body that my interview subjects identied as
something they constantly experienced, addressed and feared in dealing with clinical
practitioners, family members, friends and general public misconceptions of PDA.
Panic Disorder with Agoraphobiathe research context
Etymologically, agoraphobia is dened as a phobos of the agora, a fear of public places
of assembly. Agoraphobia is also often described as a fear of open spaces, market places
and public spaces. These denitions of agoraphobia are often described as inaccurate
within clinical literatures which dene agoraphobia as an avoidance behaviour, where
agoraphobia is a byproduct of panic disorder; hence the term panic disorder with
agoraphobia (PDA) (American Psychictric Association [APA] 1994; McNally, 1994;
Health Canada, 1996) . Within clinical discourses, agoraphobia is often differentiated into
panic disorder with agoraphobia and agoraphobia without panic disorder, where the
former is diagnosed as a fear of fear itself, or a fear of having a panic attack, and the
latter is dened as a reaction to the fear of various spaces (Thorpe, 1998) . While clinical
discourses argue that agoraphobia without panic is rarely seen by clinicians (Walker et al.,
1991; Rapee, 1996) , non-clinical discourses on agoraphobia, which circulate less widely,
tend to neglect a discussion of the link between panic disorder and agoraphobia (Brown,
1987; de Swaan, 1992; Bordo, 1992; 1993; Deutsche, 1996; Da Costa Meyer, 1996; but
for exceptions, see Garbowsky, 1989; Brooks-Gardener, 1994; 1995; Bordo et al., 1998;
Bankey, 1999; Davidson, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c) . My research process was informed by
both clinical and non-clinical discussions and explanations of agoraphobia because there
is much productive tension between clinical and non-clinical literatures that could inform
one another. I argue that the distinction between PDA and agoraphobia is important
because while they share various gendered and geographical histories, the two conditions
also generate different experiences, for example, through the differing clinical responses
each generates.
Panic Disorder with Agoraphobiamethodology
Because of a lack of information about agoraphobic geographies, I felt that my research,
its methodology, theoretical framework and direction, should be directly informed by the
rst-hand experiences of those who are diagnosed with PDA. Methodologies and
geographies of mental health must be approached critically with an eye to alternative
denitions and understandings that individuals and groups have of their own mental
states (Parr, 1999, p. 183) . So, as the Anxiety Disorders of Ontarios educational guide
states, with labels such as Disorder we separate ourselves from the people who need
us the most and whom we also need. We unconsciously create barriers to real support,
add to personal embarrassment and shame, and foster discrimination and isolation
(ADAO, 1999, p. 1) . Therefore, I also felt that my research should be informed by
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the experiences of those with PDA in the hopes of questioning PDA as a clinical
individualised pathology because this limits our attempts to understand PDA within its
geographical, sociocultural and gender-specic contexts.
My research focused primarily on women because various studies indicate that
upwards of 70% of those diagnosed with PDA are women (APA, 1994) . Thus, similar to
ailments such anorexia, bulimia and hysteria, agoraphobia is generally thought of as a
female disorder, linking issues of the feminine to illness and bodies (Symonds, 1973;
Chambless & Goldstein, 1992) . As a result, the methodology is informed by feminist
theories (Ferguson, 1991; Alcoff & Potter, 1993) and feminist discourse analysis, es-
pecially as developed within geography (Rose, 1993; Professional Geographer, 1994; Moss,
1995) .
There is also geographical literature, dominated by the work of feminist geographers,
on methodologies for mental health and processes of disablement which was used to
inform my methodological process (Chouinard & Grant, 1995; Dyck, 1995; Parr & Philo,
1995; Moss & Dyck, 1996, 1999; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1997; Butler
& Parr, 1999; Teather, 1999) . Within the disablement and mental health literature, there
is a particular concern for issues of embodiment, and how embodiment becomes an issue
in the absence of an able body. These issues are often discussed as a way of exploring
differences in types of disablement/mental health states and the differing ways in which
geographies, subjectivities and identities are negotiated, adopted or resisted. There is also
a consideration for how ableist knowledge production, academic practices and environ-
ments exclude and marginalise non-able-bodied individuals, but at the same time
recognising that there are dangers of essentialist representations of those lives and
identities as simply marginalised.
I conducted 10 individual, formal semi-structured interviews, 30 informal interviews
and ve focus group interviews over a period of a year in 199899. I used these various
qualitative methods to compare and contrast different knowledges and experiences of
PDA (see Women and Geography Study Group, 1997) . My analysis is directly informed
by all the information gathered, but the quotations in this article are based on the formal
semi-structured interviews. I contacted most of the formal (those who agreed to be
tape-recorded) interviews subjects through advertising within a local community group
dealing with panic, anxiety and agoraphobia. All of the women individually interviewed
identied themselves as Canadian, white, had spent the majority of their lifetime in the
Ottawa area and had been diagnosed with PDA by practitioners in the Ottawa region.
The women varied in age, marital status, employment status, and socio-economic
statusthough most women identied themselves as middle class and most were
employed at the time of the interviews. I arranged an introductory meeting with all my
interviewees where all of the women gave consent to be interviewed and all were keen
to ensure their anonymity was preserved through the research.
There were three sets of formal, semi-structured, individual interviews. Each set of
interviews was informed by the previous set to give the women interviewed the
opportunity to present me with suggestions and feedback about my analysis and research
methods and to take an active part in the interview process (see McDowell & Sharp,
1997) . The rst set of individual interviews occurred in a wide variety of locations, which
were selected based on the interviewees preference. In these interviews, the women were
asked to describe and elaborate on their personal, somatic and spatial experiences of
PDA. This allowed the women to express to me what they considered an important
starting point for discussion and help guide the research process (for examples, see Wolf,
1996; Dyck, 1999) . The second set of interviews focused on common themes
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44 R. Bankey
within the rst set of interviews and reected the more specic focus of my study. In the
third set of follow-up interviews, I approached some of those that I had interviewed in
the second set of interviews and asked for their opinions and comments on my analysis
of the fear of the hysterical woman and other theoretical issues; and it is because of the
feedback that I received from my interview subjects that an analysis of PDA as a fear of
the hysterical woman was developed. The semi-structured interviews were then tran-
scribed and thematically coded and analysed, where one of the themes identied was the
fear of the hysterical. In the interests of maintaining the womens anonymity, the names
used in this article are pseudonyms and details of their contexts is limited.
Agoraphobic (PDA) Hystories
A panic attack is an important characteristic of PDA. Panic attacks are somatic
sensations that are unexpected, that appear out of the blue, and include an overwhelm-
ing sense of fear and terror (ADAO, 1999) . The physical sensations of a panic attack
often resemble those of a heart attack. Panic attacks are characterised by heart
palpitations, increased heart rate, numbing of certain body parts, sweating, dizziness,
faintness, hot or cold ashes, shaking or trembling, terror, fear of dying or losing control,
and a sense that things either outside of the body (derealisation) , or within the body
(depersonalisation) are unreal, to name a few (APA, 1994) . There are many other fears
and experiences associated with PDA. It is experienced and internalised in as many
different ways as there are persons with panic, yet there are underlying themes which can
be traced throughout the narratives and lives of my interview subjects. Panic disorder
with agoraphobic as a fear of fear itself, a fear of panic and losing control of ones self,
is a predominant theme which emerged within panic narratives, and all the interviewees
expressed a fear of having a panic attack. But another theme within the narratives of my
interview subjects was a form or subset of the fear of fear itselfthe fear of the hysterical
woman/image. This is a fear of being seen in state of panic, a fear of being perceived
as out of control by others and by ones self. Therefore I would suggest that PDA could
also be approached as a fear of the hysterical woman/image, in other words, a fear of
the hyper femininea fear of losing control in front of others. This fear of being
perceived as out of control by others not only emerged as a theme within my research
on PDA women, but links a history of the construction of the feminine to those lives and
narratives and expands the possible insights to be gained from investigations of PDA for
women as a whole.
PDA, as a fear of the hysterical body, is linked to hysterias associated mythologised
imagery. In this respect, PDA is a fear of being thought of or thinking that one is
becoming mad. It is a fear that the sufferer will not be taken seriously, that she is just
acting up and misbehaving. This was an experience that many of the women I
interviewed described upon approaching general practitioners for treatment. Several of
the women described to me how their general practitioner assured them, after perform-
ing a routine physical examination, that there was nothing s/he could see or nd wrong
with them, that there was nothing wrong with them, it was just stress or hormones. The
women who described this sort of experience to me were left with the impression that
their doctor had not taken their complaints seriously, thereby compounding a sense of
frustration and confusion because their experiences didnt matter and werent real. As
Edward Shorter describes; by dening certain symptoms as illegitimate a culture strongly
encourages patients not to develop them or to risk being thought undeserving
individuals with no real medical problems (Shorter in Showalter, 1997, p. 15) .
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PDA is also a fear of being perceived by others as frail, out of control or vulnerable,
and this triggers a panic spiral because thinking that others perceive you as unstable is,
for many, a conrmation of that instability. Often avoidance behaviours develop from
this fear of being seen as abnormal, and the resultant restrictive spatial patterns are, in
part, a result of avoiding the gaze of others in addition to avoiding particular spaces in
which the event happened. This fear of being seen as deviant by others precipitates panic
attacks. As described by one interviewee:
this is not normal, and now that someone else knows and Im going to be found
out, I have more to worry about, and a better reason to panic.
The women I interviewed were often just as afraid of being seen in a state of panic as
of actually having the panic attack itself. This resulted in the avoidance of other people,
particularly strangers, and the spaces the strangers occupy. It is not that my interviewees
want to be isolated from others; rather, they want to be anonymous and therefore out
of public scrutiny. In fact, many of those interviewed highlighted a need for sociability
and interaction with other people. My interviewees desire a subjectivity that is auton-
omous, anonymous and that does not threaten norms of what is respectable or orderly.
I inferred that all of the interviewees expressed some fear of the hysterical woman/image
which was connected to being perceived as excessively feminine, and therefore weak and
unstable. In the following sections I will expand on how the interviewees pictured their
own psychic and bodily sensations of panic and what they believe other people see; and
then I will elaborate on the various ways in which PDA as a fear of the hysterical
woman/image is experienced by my interview subjects.
Hysterical Bodiesperceptions of panic disorder agoraphobia
The women interviewed have specic beliefs, that change throughout the course of PDA,
about their bodily appearances and behaviours and how these are visualised by others.
The women I interviewed all knew that the experience of panic was not visible to others,
except for cues such as pallor of skin, sweating, dizziness and shortness of breath.
Nevertheless, all the women described that at one point during the course of their PDA
they felt that others must be able to see that something was terribly wrong; that their
bodies could become, and often were, a screen onto which their sensations of panic could
be projected and seen or inferred by others. These panic sensations can be experienced
as depersonalisation, the feeling that one is being dissociated or detached from ones
body (Health Canada, 1996) ; derealisation, the sensation that one is being detached,
slipping away from ones environment (Health Canada, 1996) ; and an increased
awareness of external and internal sensations where the boundaries between self and
environment are blurred.
Catherine, who is in her mid-forties, married without children and works for
a university, described what she thought other people must have seen during her
depersonalisation:
I thought that people could see that I was losing control of my body, you
know, that other people would see me as unreal, that Im fading away but
sometimes I still think, I used to think what if people can see me panic and
then I get paranoid and think I must look like Im going to scream, like
everyone can see me fading out, screaming out of my body.
Derealisation is another way in which the boundaries between self and environment
become intertwined. Lisa, a single student in her late teens, who developed PDA after
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46 R. Bankey
leaving home for university, described what her thought process was during a derealisa-
tion experience and what she thought she looked like to others during derealisation:
When I go through an attack I go through the process I was thinking Im
going crazy and Im going to faint, or die or embarrass myself, Im going to
collapse right here and people will think Im crazy. I know that people cant
see, in fact that really makes it worse But I think that I used to think people
would see a woman, me, collapse, big dramatic crash, because thats what I felt
like doing.
Elizabeth, a single woman in her late twenties, who has had PDA for the past 11 years
and has been housebound for over 4 years, also described how she felt others must see
her during her panic experiences:
I know that no one can see me have a panic attack, my partner and friends
they can tell, because they know me But when I rst started having attacks
I thought everyone must know that Im about to collapse. I felt like I was
swaying back and forth and that people could see me unsteady, like I was going
to faint collapse on the pavement, big scene, I never did you know, I was
frozen to my spot.
The women had several ways of identifying themselves, and several different visions of
the hysterical woman. One is an image of a woman about to faint, frail and helpless, a
representation of passive feminine subjectivity. The other image is of a woman in
hysterical ts, a representation of the instability and inconstancy of the female subject.
These are images of women losing control, and both represent different aspects of
feminine behaviour and the presentation of femininity within Western cultures. These
images also capture different stages of the hysteric, as described by Charcot, and
alternate denitions of the hysteric. They show the variability with which negative
feminine characteristics and markers have been pathologised and the malleability of the
image of the hysterical woman to take on negative feminine characteristics, whatever
they may be. Thus, representations and memories of the hysterical woman are a part of
the way in which the women interviewed negotiate their own subjectivities, identities and
bodily sensations.
Fear of Alienation and Abandonmentthe good woman
The fear of the hysterical woman/image may be a result of a feeling of isolation and
loneliness, a fear that when one is seen to be out of control or abnormal, one will be
abandoned. This fear of abandonment is often a result of my interview subjects need to
be validated, to be told that they are normal and acting in an appropriate manner.
Several of my interviewees, rather than avoiding the gaze of other people and public
places, actively sought out spaces where people would be in order not to feel abandoned.
These women felt that their panic or abnormal behaviour would isolate them from other
people, who would then abandon them. For example, Pat, who has had PDA for about
a year, is single, in her mid-thirties and works in two demanding government jobs,
described her fears within and outside of her work context:
My fear is that Im going to be judged and Im not going to have friends
because I got angry or said nasty things. Or if I have a panic attack theyll
think Im losing control, Im not a good person to be around, or a good friend.
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Many of the women actively sought out people to keep them company and described
themselves as outgoing, extroverted persons. Being around people, strangers or friends,
as an effective strategy for relieving anxiety for these women; it reminded them that they
were not alone. Pat further stated:
The only reason I seek out people is because it makes me feel less anxious. I
dont seek them, I mean, if they are walking by, its just because it helps me
feel less alone, the idea of not having friends, being abandoned Im a very
social person.
These interview subjects are not afraid of the hysterical body because it is a visually
scrutinised body, they are afraid of the stigma that the image of the hysteric has left on
Western culture. These women are afraid that their panic episodes are not appropriate
and are offensive to others, but, unlike the majority of my interview subjects, choose to
surround themselves with strangers to avoid feeling abandoned. These interviewees
typically rely on the validation of others in order to judge the merit of their conduct.
They try to be good daughters, good wives, good friends and good mothers, but their
sense of what makes them good is judged by how others perceive and respond to their
actions. This is not only characteristic of their personalities as self-declared perfectionists,
but reects a societal norm that women must be accountable and responsible for the
welfare of others before their own (Capps & Ochs, 1995) . In seeking validation from
others, many women lose their authority to reframe their own experiences.
Fear of Losing Controlthe good mother and good worker
My interviewees desire to appear normal is not only a measure of self-protection but
is also meant to protect their children. Mothers that I interviewed expressed a fear of
creating anxiety and negative examples for their children. These women attempted to
conceal their panic not only within the public sphere, but also within their homes.
Charlottes onset of panic began when she was denied a promotion at work 5 years ago;
she is a single working mother, in her early fties. She recently retired from this
demanding job, in a male-oriented workplace, as a result of her PDA. Charlotte
described her concerns about not wanting anyone, especially her daughter, to know
about her panic:
I think, no I am, was afraid that someone would nd out, that I was losing
control, and I was mostly afraid that my daughter would nd out I
didnt want to frighten my child I also didnt want anyone else to know or
to worry about me. I wanted to take care of my daughter by myself. I didnt
want people to think I was a weak, frail, single mother who couldnt handle her
responsibilities.
Charlotte has not told her daughter about her PDA episodes. But another of the women
interviewed, Ann, who is in her early fties, works part-time for a hospital and considers
herself a full-time mother and wife, recently told her children about her PDA. Ann
decided to tell her children about her PDA when they were teenagers because of research
that she had read that her panic might be hereditary. She felt that her children would
be well advised to know that if they had panic, it was a natural, non-life-threatening
event that could be overcome. Ann told me that she tried to keep it from them when
they were little because, I didnt think they would understand what was happening to
their mommy, and that would frighten them. Whenever she could not full her role as
a normal mother, her husband would assist in chores and after-school activities, all the
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48 R. Bankey
while telling her children that mommy needs to be at home baking, to clean the house,
thats what mommies do; using the stereotypical mid-twentieth- and nineteenth-century
housewife as a way to legitimate her housebound state.
Several other women did not have the luxury of a partner to help with household
chores. For example, Jennifer, like Charlotte, is a single, full-time working mother in her
mid-fties, with one child. Jennifer has had PDA for about 10 years but because of her
need to take care of her child, she avoids areas outside of her path back and forth from
work. For fear of being seen as vulnerable, Jennifer has not mentioned that she has PDA
to anyone in her family, despite constant questioning. Not only is it pivotal for her to
remain in control for her daughters sake, but also to show others that her non-
traditional choice of single parenthood was legitimate. She was often told and reminded
of the difculties and stresses placed on single mothers and was advised against it. If
others could see her panic it would conrm her worst fearsthat she was not strong
enough to be a single parent, that single parenthood was problematic both for parent and
child.
All of the women that I interviewed were afraid of the repercussions of their PDA
within the workplace. The most common strategies for my interviewees were: a leave of
absence from work, to quit their jobs entirely and pursue employment that could be
accomplished within the house, or rely on their partners for income. In the case of
Jennifer and Charlotte, these options either did not exist or were not accessible at the
time. Jennifer, one of the only full-time female employees in her workplace, worked for
many years at the same job, slowly moving herself up the corporate ladder. She describes
her experiences within her company and the repercussions of appearing frail and needing
to take a leave of absence for a month in a world that thrives on the appearance of
invulnerability, control and strength:
The repercussions for my work the company viewed me as being weak
psychologically I had to defend my stability and the fact that I was mentally
competent and so on and forth I think they were doubting my condence
because of the time off. So there were repercussions there was that seed of
doubt planted by the time off, that wasnt forgiven and was always something
that raised caution People dont discuss these problems in this environment
because if you do youre labelled Its not spoken of, you have to be
completely competent at all times. You have be allowed not to be not fully
competent.
The discussion about workplace relations by my interviewees focused primarily on
concealing illness within the workplace. Often my interviewees felt as if others would not
believe that PDA was a legitimate reason for workplace absence because they didnt
look sick or because the PDA signalled a mental disturbance and a risk to employers.
Thus, within (and outside the workplace) many of the interviewees couched their
experiences to co-workers and employers in a language of stress, which they felt to be
much more legitimate than a mental disorder. Many of the fears and concerns about
appearances and dis-order in the workplace expressed by my interviewees are shared by
women with other dis-orders such as multiple sclerosis (see Dyck, 1999) , myalgic
encephalomyelitis (ME) (see Moss, 1999) and anorexia (see Malson, 1997) . There is a
shared concern in these conditions for the identity politics of dis-order and the ways in
which illness and disability are seen through the body and perceived by others within the
workplace. There is a shared perception of the workplace as a potential place of risk
because of the threat of not being able to perform as usual and a shared fear of the
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implications and stigma around declaring oneself as unwell. In a workplace where the
performance of a workplace identity is crucial to stability, the fear of being thought of
and marked out as hysterical, as weak or out of control, makes one acutely aware of
how often ones body is made visible to others.
Fear of the Gaze, Spectacle and the Feminine
The fear of the hysterical image is also a fear of the feminine as spectacle, of being
visually scrutinised; that somehow because one is watched, ones panic will be found
out, judged as abnormal and subsequently punished. As one woman described it:
the person who might be there while you panic is just too terrifying so you
avoid everyone as much as possible.
One of the aspects of the hysterical body is the extent to which it has placed the body,
in particular female bodies, under the watchful eye of others. Many of those interviewed
noted being especially fearful of the male gaze, of being watched by men. The list of
tactics and strategies that the women I interviewed developed to appear normal and to
prevent being gazed at is extensive and revealing (for discussions see Brooks-Gardener,
1994; Davidson, 2000b) . My interviewees internalise strategies for appearing normal.
These strategies include bringing along companions or items, such as umbrellas or
newspapers, which will conceal their bodies and facial gestures; avoiding places at
particular times of the day where other people tend to congregate or inhabit; construct-
ing elaborate walking paths to avoid being seen; and avoiding forms of transportation
that may make them visually vulnerable. Typically, my interviewees avoided spaces
during the daytime, or spaces that were not concealed from view, opposite to conven-
tional safety instructions for women in public spaces. These women were aware of the
dangers of walking alone at night or in less visible spaces, but the fear of being seen and
scrutinised in spaces seemed to outweigh the possibility of attack and danger in public
spaces at night. Elizabeth discussed:
I feel the discomfort, like what if John Doe jumps out at me and tries to assault
me But Im aware it can happen in any hour, day or night, so to me its
less of a concern walking at day or night So I like night because nobody can
see me, I feel more anonymous I just feel safer its like a blanket protecting
me. If I do get into danger there will be fewer people to help me, but I dont
think of it that way.
Catherine described her preference for spaces at night for similar reasons, but she also
described a fear of being around others for fear that they would cause her to panic, lose
control and possibility hurt someone:
I dont know why Im usually better in the evening. I think its because I can
be alone and I dont have to worry about being seen by other people, being
thought of as losing control by others. Theres this bog that I like to go to, its
peaceful and serene, and very quiet. Im more comfortable there, nobody is
watching me, and there is nobody around that I could remotely hurt.
Although avoiding places was the most common avoidance behaviour, other tactics for
moving through public spaces, such as the place or time of day in which one walked,
were just as important to conceal ones self. Fiona, a recently divorced woman in her late
twenties who had been agoraphobic, off and on, for the past 12 years, explained:
I like to be close to buildings, or behind trees, off the sidewalk, away, from the
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50 R. Bankey
trafc where I cant be seen. When walking down Carling Street where there
are houses, its hard to run from house to house, so I hide I prefer street
lamps so I can see where Im going, but in a way where people in apartment
buildings or in cars cant necessarily spot me. Because, I feel people are judging
me but I kind of imagine people and their minds picking me to pieces. It
drives me crazy. I prefer not being with somebody, in the dark.
For Fiona, an environment would be safe if she was able to easily move from one space
to another and if no one noticed her. Both of these conditions assured her that she had
control over her situation, and control over the responses of others in relation to her.
Generally, Fiona needed to have control over all of her situations and that control
involved her ability to maintain anonymity. She deplored and avoided when possible:
situations that I dont have as complete control as possible. I nd myself having
little control and Im forced to take the bus. I cant stand the bus, thinking
about taking the bus makes me worse Im worrying today about the bus ride
Ill have to take in January, so I try to block it out. I dont have a problem
driving and trafc not a problem, because I still have some control, but if I
were on a bus I dont.
Many of the women I interviewed preferred certain modes of transportation. The bus
as a form of public transportation was particularly feared because the individual neither
had control over the driving of the vehicle nor who would approach or gaze at them on
the bus. Walking was another feared form of transport because walking is a slow activity
and thus ones ability to get out of a situation could be problematic. The presence of
other people walking along the sidewalk and potentially being stopped for directions or
conversation was another drawback of walking. Car driving seemed to be a preferred
mode of transportation because it provided a protective shield against visibility and
conversation, and it allowed the driver to go wherever she wanted at the speed she
desired. It allowed these women to reclaim some sense of control. The car becomes an
effective coping strategy that allows these women to move through the city while still
remaining anonymous, a mobile home in effect (for more discussion, see Davidson,
2000a, 2000b) .
Fear of the Hyper-femininediscipline and punish
The public realm is regulated by banishing from sight behaviours that are considered
repugnant, such as madness, or deviance (Duncan, 1996) . As Tim Cresswell notes, it is
difcult to get people to recognise normative geographies until these are transgressed
the occurrence of out of place phenomena leads people to question behaviour and dene
what is and what is not appropriate for a setting (Cresswell, 1996) . Reinforcing this
statement, the public sphere is seen by those I interviewed as a place of discipline and
scrutiny, where ones identity can come to be characterised as abnormal, deviant or
transgressive if ones panic and anxiety is revealed. And while in contemporary Western
society not interacting within the public and private spaces of a culture is considered
abnormal and unhealthy, occupying public spaces and revealing ones abnormality or
deviance is considered equally if not more unhealthy. My interview subjects are faced
with a dilemma: remaining in seclusion and isolation are unhealthy activities, which they
must strive against, and yet exposing themselves to a public which might view their
bodies and actions as mad or abnormal is also taboo.
It seems logical that most people, with or without PDA, fear the hysterical body or
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being labelled as hysteric because the hysterical body is not a pleasant or positive image.
What differentiates my interview subjects from people who are not diagnosed with PDA
is that my interview subjects fear the hysterical body to the extent that they avoid the
possibility of becoming that body by restricting themselves spatially. Foucault dened this
exercise of power as the creation of a docile bodya body which is simultaneously
isolated from and connected to a society of normalised bodies. The docile body is a
powerful symbolic form, a medium onto which hierarchies and norms of a culture are
inscribed and reinforced. The docile body is also a direct locus of social control where
the movements of our daily lives are trained, shaped and impressed with prevailing
forms of identity and subjectivity (Bordo, 1993, p. 166) . One manifestation of the docile
body is the intelligible body, a body made intelligible by normalising representations and
practices of a society. The hysterical body is a specic kind of intelligible body, with its
specic histories and representations. My interview subjects discipline and consequen-
tially punish themselves geographically by self-imposing walls and boundaries. This fear
of the hysterical woman/image is reminiscent of Foucaults description of the internali-
sation of the panopticon through inducing a self-conscious and permanent state of
visibility and surveillance (Foucault, 1979) . Walls and visual barriers allow my interview
subjects to conceal the possibility of becoming a spectacle and thus these visual barriers
simultaneously become a haven and crutch. Ironically the walls and barriers that isolate
so many individuals transform themselves into my interview subjects salvation. The
prisoner needs the prison to maintain her identity.
Conclusion
I have drawn upon a specic history that links hysteria to representations of the feminine,
and that further links those representations to the lives of contemporary women
diagnosed with PDA. Within that discussion I have highlighted that when patriarchal
clinical practices, such as Charcots, construct woman as a changeable, irrational
otherLa Donna e Mobile, they are tracing a self-portrait. Similar to the Duke of
Mantuas aria, presented at the beginning of this article, the mythologising of woman,
hysteria and the feminine do more to reveal the underlying nature of masculinist medical
practices and of patriarchal structures than of any essential female nature or character-
istics. It is a mythology which attempts to make women the passive, inert objects of a
medical will to power and has some success in doing so (Foucault in Showalter, 1997,
p. 19) . This success is problematic for those that I interviewed because it further
contributes to their immobility and sense of powerlessness. The histories of hysteria I
have presented also highlight how the body was interpreted as a surface onto which
madness could be projected and then exposed and revealed to others; and how this logic
of visibility is both gendered and has contributed to my interview subjects beliefs that
their internal sensations of disorientation and panic must be visible to others in spite of
their awareness that panic is often not seen by others. This belief that others can still
discern between a healthy and unhealthy body, a normal body and an out of control
body still remains a powerful theme in their narratives.
The aim of the research was not to solve or make conclusions on the nature of PDA
or agoraphobia, but was to expand the discussion of this problem outside of clinical
circles. This research and article evolved because those that I interviewed felt and
expressed a profound alienation that their experiences did not resonate with the
experiences and histories of other women and men, and yet many of the experiences
presented within this article are shared by a wide variety of individuals. It is important
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52 R. Bankey
to discuss and explore PDA within a geographical framework because PDA experiences
directly contribute to a discussion and understanding of the intersection between gender,
illness, bodies and geography and because gendered spaces and images can be traced
within the lives of those who are diagnosed with PDA both spatially and somatically.
There is a need to further explore the PDA condition and to investigate the links between
this condition and other areas of academic inquiry. How the PDA subject resists,
negotiates, reproduces, internalises her/his lived experiences within clinical, social and
gendered constructs and contexts is an important question to ask because these experi-
ences, the PDA condition, fundamentally reveal aspects of, and have something to
contribute to, an understanding of the gendered geographies, bodies, identities and
subjectivities of men and women within Western cultures.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank, and am grateful to, Liz Bondi and Fran Klowdawsy for their help
in editing and commenting on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank
the editor of Gender, Place and Culture, Gill Valentine, and the two anonymous referees for
their useful and constructive criticism and suggestions.
NOTE
[1] The title is adapted from Esther Da Costa Meyers article, La Donna e Mobile: agoraphobia, women and
urban space.
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Hard Charger or Station Queen? Policing and the
Masculinist State
STEVE HERBERT, University of Washington, USA
ABSTRACT Gender dynamics are continually displayed in police departments. A prevailing mas-
culinism favors an aggressive patrol style and emphasizes felony arrests. By contrast, the dominant reform
model in policing, community policing, trumpets close and cooperative relations with citizens. Community
policing is thus resisted by masculinist ofcers who would rather chase bad guys than attend
neighborhood meetings. The author illustrates these gendered dynamics with eld data from observations
of the Los Angeles Police Department, and suggests that masculinism in the state works not just to uphold
patriarchy but to suppress efforts toward greater democracy.
The state is an important institution for structuring gender relationships. It regulates such
important practices as marriage, reproduction and abortion, wage discrimination and
sexual harassment, to name but a few (Allen, 1990) . Although the state allows roles for
women, these are often peripheral ones (Pateman, 1988; Tickell & Peck, 1996) .
Historically, for example, women were seen not as democracys creators but its supports;
their role was the indirect one of rearing children to become model citizens (Marshall,
1994) . By contrast, men were the economic and political stalwarts of society. In such
fashion, the state helps dene proper gendered behavior (Connell, 1987) , and does so in
a way, according to many analysts, that reproduces wider patterns of patriarchy
(MacKinnon, 1989; Allen, 1990; Walby, 1990) .
Importantly, the state is not just an impersonal institution whose practices shape the
lifeworld of the citizenry; it is also a set of processes that play out in specic work sites.
In other words, the state can be analyzed both in terms of its external relations and its
internal dynamics. To more completely understand the relationship between the state
and gender requires an analysis of how these internal dynamics reproduce and perhaps
disrupt existing gender patterns. Halford (1992, p. 120) captures this idea well:
The institutionalization of male dominance does not simply mean that state
policies and practices reect gender relations which only exist somewhere else,
i.e., in society outside the state. Rather gender relations are articulated
within state institutions. In this sense, state institutions are themselves a node in
the network of gender relations. (emphasis in original)
Thus, the state is not simply a faceless institution, but a set of often-gendered practices
(Franzway et al., 1989) .
Correspondence: Steve Herbert, Department of Geography, University of Washington, Box 353550, Seattle, WA
981953550, USA.
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026325
55
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56 S. Herbert
To analyze the state in this way forces us to consider not just patriarchy but also
masculinism. Here I follow Brittan (1989) in drawing a distinction between the two. If
patriarchy, following Walby (1986) , is a set of interrelated structures through which men
exploit women, then masculinism is, in Brittans words, the ideology that justies and
naturalizes male domination and as such is the ideology that justies and naturalizes
patriarchy (1989, p. 4) To examine how gender is accomplished within state institutions
is necessarily to examine how masculinist ideologies are mobilized and made hegemonic
in daily practice. My particular focus is the police, who like other state actors, do
gender. In particular, many police ofcers reinforce a robust form of masculinity, which
encourages them to aggressively pursue bad guys. Ofcers learn that pugnacious crime
ghting is a principal means for prestige, and many act accordingly.
These internal dynamics are instructive to study, in part because they shape the
polices external relations. For example, one consequence of this masculinism is to help
cripple a reform movement, community policing, designed to increase citizen oversight
of ofcers. Community policing implies a denition of the police role that runs counter
to the masculinist crime ghter image, and thus faces resistance from ofcers. In
community policing, ofcers are instructed to downplay their aggressive derring-do and
instead to engage in the involved and complicated process of establishing cooperative
relations with the citizenry. For many ofcers, community policing thus amounts to social
work. This is so inconsistent with their masculinist self-image that many ofcers refuse
to redene their role. Masculinism in policing thus works to disable efforts to enable
greater citizen involvement in police practice.
The principal aims of this article are therefore two: one is to reinforce an emphasis on
the state as a set of workplaces whose gendered dynamics require analysis; the other is
to suggest that masculinist practices in the state not only support patriarchy but suppress
greater democratic oversight of those very practices. To accomplish this, I focus on the
daily reproduction of masculinism in the social world of the police, and on the
relationship between masculinism and democracy. I draw upon eldwork data collected
during participant observation research in a patrol division of the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) [1], and upon numerous other ethnographic studies of policing. In
the next section, I describe the various social and spatial forms this masculinism takes
and explain its genesis and implications. The second section focuses on one of those
implicationsthe failure of community policing. I describe community policing and
explain how its capacity to threaten masculinist understandings of policing impels ofcer
resistance. The nal section explores the implications of my analysis for the study of
gender, the workplace, and the state.
On Gender and Policing
Gender is both an ongoing accomplishment and an enduring set of meanings and social
relationships. Actors constitute gender in their daily routines; they enact specic roles,
they evaluate others in terms of cultural codes that dene maleness and femaleness (West
& Zimmerman, 1987; West & Fenstermaker, 1995) . Gender is certainly a dominant
element in the culture of the police. Masculinist ideology is expressed and celebrated. For
example, ofcers in the LAPD make an important distinction between two models of
ofcershard chargers and station queens. The former manifest such characteristics
as courage and aggressiveness; they are willing to place themselves in danger. Hard
chargers like to buy hotshots: they are willing to handle the most hazardous calls. By
contrast, those labeled station queen prefer the sanctuary of the inside; they favor the
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Policing and the Masculinist State 57
dull sameness of paperwork over the unpredictable street. Importantly, such ofcers are
rendered effeminate with the term queen [2].
These contrasting terms serve as ideal types. They do not so much label individual
ofcerspolice may be brave in one context and timid in anotherbut instead convey
a cultural norm; they are expressive more than descriptive. And what they express is the
importance of brave crime-ghting. Indeed, ethnographic studies across time and space
(Skolnick, 1966; Westley, 1970; Martin, 1980; Hunt, 1984; Fielding, 1994; Watson,
1999) all document the centrality of masculinity to police work. Indeed, Smith & Gray
(1985) go so far as to describe police culture as home to a cult of masculinity.
This subcultural emphasis on masculinity is important because several comprehensive
reviews show that the chief impediment to community policing is resistance from ofcers
(Sparrow et al., 1990; Greene et al., 1994; Sadd & Grinc, 1994; Police Executive Research
Forum, 1995) . This resistance from the rank and le is lethal because they possess
considerable autonomy and discretion. Police managers, themselves former patrol
ofcers, accept this discretion as a necessity. Further, sergeants recognize that infor-
mation and cooperation from their underlings will be denied them if they exert more
control (Brown, 1981) .
This rank and le resistance to reform, I suggest, results signicantly from the fact that
community policing complicates entrenched gender dynamics. My emphasis on gender
might be disputed because it downplays other elements of police subculture, including
race. However, the burden of my analysis is to show that masculinism is particularly
critical in explaining ofcer resistance to community policing. This does not mean that
one need discount the signicance of race. In this case, gender and racial dynamics
reinforce each other. As I explore later, one expression of masculinism is the coding of
certain spaces as dangerous or anti-police, spaces where hard chargers can demon-
strate their mettle. In Los Angeles, as in other places, like London (Keith, 1993) , these
spaces are not surprisingly dominated by minorities. To enact masculinism is thus to
reinforce a racialized pattern that yields aggressive patrolling in minority-dominated
neighborhoods.
I pursue three goals in this section. First, drawing upon the Los Angeles eld data, I
describe how masculinity is reproduced by the police [3]. Second, I explain the genesis
and endurance of this masculinism. Finally, I elaborate how this masculinism affects
women ofcers and how it forms a potent source of resistance to reform.
Masculinity in Policing
The expressions of masculinism in police culture are numerous and various. Many of
these expressions revolve around the possibility of violence that attends to policing.
Training discussions at daily roll calls typically focus on the use of force, and less formal
conversations around the station house regularly involve retellings of incidents where
force was used. Ofcers frequently get together for off-duty shooting sessions, and often
discuss different gun makes and their advantages and disadvantages. This centrality of
the gun and the power it possesses was made evident to me in two initial eldwork
encounters:
I am on my rst ride-along with an LAPD sergeant. As we are exiting the parking lot, I ask
him if there is anything I need to know. I assume that he will inform me how to use the radio
in case of an emergency. Instead, he asks me, Do you know how to use a gun? When I say
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58 S. Herbert
no, I have never used a gun, the sergeant looks at me with grave disappointment, then looks
out the window and shakes his head.
On the next night, I again accompany this sergeant on a tour of duty. This time, however,
he has an additional pistol. As we are exiting the parking lot, he shows me the pistol and
explains how to operate it.
I am on my rst ride-along with another sergeant. He decides to patrol one of the more
dangerous areas of the division, a place where police ofcers sometimes encounter hostile
gunre. As we near the area, the sergeant pulls the patrol car to the side of the road. He
explains to me that the area is dangerous, and that should he be hit with gunre, I should
radio for assistance. I should also retaliate with gunre of my own. He explains that, if he
sustains injuries, he will want to learn later that I fought back. Im gonna want to see brass
all over those crime scene photos, he tells me.
In these two cases, the ofcers work to inform me of the danger of their work and the
resultant importance of coercive force. That they do this early in the encounter signies
the importance of this aspect of their work. They both construct a boundary between
themselves and what they might term civilians, and explain to me how I can cross that
boundary into the police fraternity. Only through my tacit acceptance of the need to use
rearms can I be welcomed into their social world.
Firearms, of course, are only necessary because of the inherent danger of the job. The
real test of an ofcer thus comes when he/she is confronted with a dangerous situation:
does the ofcer step forward or back down?
A group of ofcers are engaged in tactical training exercises. Some of the ofcers stage scenarios
to which other ofcers respond. One scenario involves ve ofcers posing as street gang members
at a notorious street corner. The gangsters are carrying on raucously. One is displaying a
knife, another surreptitiously carrying a gun. Ofcers are called to the scene in pairs and asked
to quiet the situation. They are challenged both to disarm the one carrying the knife and to
not be surprised by the one with the gun. Many of the ofcers fail in the challengethe gun
is regularly redand are thus roundly critiqued by the supervising sergeant. He is especially
scornful of those who, when faced with the knife, take cover behind some bushes and effectively
obscure their vision of the scene. He says that police work requires the courage these ofcers
lacked. In such situations, ofcers must stand their ground, command attention through their
voice, and maintain a vigilant posture.
In this and other situations, ofcers remind each other that the danger of their job
requires a brave and often aggressive response. This is especially true when facing street
gang members, regarded as the polices most formidable opponents. As a result, the
departments anti-gang unit is accorded considerable prestige. But initiation into the
gang unit is not required to earn the appellation of hard charger; patrol ofcers who
display courage and frequently buy hotshots are similarly well regarded.
The desire of ofcers to demonstrate their bravery often makes them overanxious to
dene situations as dangerous. On more than one occasion, I witnessed ofcers sweep
through areas, with guns drawn, attempting to locate criminal suspects who had almost
certainly long ed the areas in question. Despite evidence that the suspects were in fact
no longer around, the ofcers chose to spend considerable time and effort engaged in the
tactical exercise of clearing an area. The adventure of it all, and the possibility of the
trophy of a captured suspect, made the exercise impossible for the ofcers to resist.
The lore of the hard charger endures in oft-repeated accounts of various exploits;
ofcer conversations regularly involve recounting clashes between ofcers and suspects.
Especially entertaining are incidents that involve pursuits. Here, the athletic and
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tactical skills of ofcers are tested by elusive suspects. Ofcers who possess the vigor and
bravery to succeed in these contests are valued. And, indeed, athleticism is actively
reinforced: the department provides weight rooms in each patrol station and sponsors
various athletic teams whose exploits are recounted in the departments newspaper.
In these ways, policing is mythologized as a test of agility, strength and tenacity. Part
of this mythology is the active construction of those elements of the populace against
whom the polices prowess is demonstrated. Within the discourse of the LAPD, the term
bad guy is ubiquitous, and serves to other any suspect who threatens the peace or
challenges police authority. Such a distinction thereby helps justify any use of force the
police may employ to capture those suspects (see Herbert, 1996) . Ofcers also draw
distinctions between themselves. Detectives and administrators, for example, are regu-
larly disparaged by patrol ofcers; they are not real men because they avoid the test of
masculinity that the danger of the street presents.
For real men, incidents that do not involve action are disparaged. Calls that involve
interpersonal disputes are typically dismissed as chicken shit. One sergeant, for example,
spent several minutes shuttling between two apartments, helping to broker an agreement
about acceptable noise levels. As he moved back and forth, he complained bitterly about
the tediousness of the work. On another night, the same sergeant successfully resolved a
motherdaughter dispute after a failed attempt by a group of patrol ofcers. The
sergeant again complained about the work. Part of his complaint undoubtedly stems
from the fact that he will never be rewarded for work of this nature, even though he
demonstrated considerable tact and skill. As the police analyst Egon Bittner (1990) notes,
even if such peacekeeping efforts occupy much police work, they are never recognized
as important. This is made evident in police training, which focuses heavily on managing
violence and only lightly on resolving interpersonal disputes.
The appellation of hard charger is unlikely to be earned by female ofcers. Indeed,
female ofcers are regularly dismissed by male ofcers for allegedly lacking the physical
capability for real police work. Male ofcers fear insufcient support from female
partners in a violent situation. They also complain that the presence of women led to a
de-emphasis on physical training in the police academy. This, they argue, means that
ofcers are in inferior physical condition, and also that an important element of esprit de
corpsthat which comes from suffering through a difcult initiation riteis lost. It is
hardly surprising that discrimination and harassment against women ofcers is well
documented (Heidensohn, 1992; Holdaway & Parker, 1998) .
More could be said here about the ways in which masculinism is daily enacted by
police ofcers, but the Los Angeles eld data clearly support the consistent nding that
the reproduction of gender lies at the heart of police practice. One implication of these
gendered dynamics is the construction and attempted control of space.
Inscribing Masculinism in Space
For masculinist ofcers, the street is a male preserve, and its control the ultimate test.
The spaces of patrol are thus dened primarily in terms of their level of danger. Most
notable are those locations labeled as anti-police, areas where some residents are overtly
hostile to ofcers. By contrast, quiet, pro-police areas are deprecated and avoided by
those who seek action. Indeed, any ofcer who seeks an assignment to a quiet beat will
quickly descend in the status hierarchy.
The masculinist drive to demonstrate prowess thus translates into a social geography.
Spaces are coded in terms of the opportunities they present for facing such implacable
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60 S. Herbert
police foes as the street gang member [4]. In such an encounter, an ofcer suggested, one
must display coolness, condence and a commanding presence. It takes a particularly
courageous cop to patrol these areas, because of the fear of attack. Given this fear,
ofcers seek to maintain territorial control over such areas. This goal reduces these
spaces to a zone of tactics. These become spaces organized along the grids and axes used
to locate and control, to isolate and surround. These are not the spaces of homes and
residences, where people live and feel a sense of attachment.
Two ofcers in a helicopter respond to a call regarding a burglary in a neighborhood in South
Central Los Angeles. The pilot steers the helicopter near the reported location when a
motion-sensitive light ashes in an alleyway. The observer trains his powerful nightsun upon
the alleyway and detects the movement of a middle-aged man walking with a cane. While
the observer radios for a patrol car, he continues to train the nightsun upon the man as he
heads through the alley and onto the street. At no point does the man display any evidence
of fright or guilt; he never looks up at the helicopter nor alters his movements. Finally, the
patrol car arrives, and the ofcer enacts the familiar ritualthe suspect is talked onto his
knees and handcuffed. As the helicopter pulls off, the observer mutters, Well, he sorta matched
the description.
A lieutenant describes the new unusual occurrence training that ofcers received after the civil
unrest in 1992. What was especially exciting about his three-day training session was that
his group put their knowledge immediately to work. Just as they nished, they were summoned
to the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, where a group of Latino students
had encamped in the faculty center. He describes the rush of going code 3[5] through the
streets, the excitement of marching en masse onto campus, and the successful resolution of the
situation: the problem people were arrested, the demonstration was dispersed.
In each of these cases, police control space in a particular fashion, even if it means
running roughshod over peoples experiences. There is little regard for the lived
experience of intense police surveillance while on an evening walk, no interest in the
effects of an armed intervention on a college campus. The tactical exercises necessary for
territorial hegemony require that alternate denitions of space be downplayed. This, as
we will see later, contrasts with the spatial orientation inherent in community policing.
Explaining Masculinity in Policing
There are two ironies at work when male ofcers disparage their female and allegedly
effeminate peers. The rst is that police work rarely entails the aggressiveness celebrated
by the masculinist cop. Felony arrests are rare, uses of force rarer still (Manning, 1977;
Bittner, 1990; Geller & Toch, 1996) . Police work is not even best described as
crime-ghting, since ofcers rarely invoke the criminal code when resolving incidents.
For that reason, policing is perhaps best described as peacekeeping (Banton, 1964;
Bittner, 1967) ; what police mostly do is restore calm to disordered situations.
The second great irony is that female ofcers are as effective as males (Bloch &
Anderson, 1974; Bell, 1982; Jones, 1986; Horne, 1989; Heidensohn, 1992) . Further, men
are in no more danger with a female partner than with a male one (Fienman, 1986) .
Indeed, Martin (1980) argues that women help reduce uses of force, because they have
less to prove in encounters with hostile citizens. Male ofcers, by contrast, might believe
their masculinity to be threatened, and thus might escalate a tense encounter into
violence. For this reason, van Wormer (1981) suggests that women make superior patrol
ofcers.
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It is thus instructive that male ofcers continue to staunchly oppose women in the
force. History is signicant here. Particularly in the USA, police have long had a close
association with the military (Enloe, 1983; Miller, 1977) . Indeed, this association was
actively promoted by reformers in the early twentieth century to improve the public
image of the police; the discipline of the military contrasted with the image of
incompetence associated with most urban police departments (Fogelson, 1977) . Along
with this militaristic image came a clearer goal for the policeto be soldiers in a war
against crime (Walker, 1977) . This militarism became more pronounced in the 1960s,
when many departments developed paramilitary units for hostage takings and other
situations allegedly requiring sophisticated tactics. But one does not have to be a member
of an elite paramilitary unit to embrace the cultural role of the soldier. In the LAPD, the
term ghetto gunghter is used for those who display a willingness to use force. Others
are described as falling victim to the John Wayne syndrome, mimicking as they do the
quintessential frontier gunslinger.
Interestingly, women rst entered US police departments when the militaristic image
was developing. However, these early women occupied prototypical feminine jobs, such
as the oversight of juvenile services (Appier, 1998) . It was not until the late 1960s that
women won the right to patrol. Resistance from males was robust (Fielding, 1988;
Young, 1991) . Given that women quickly demonstrated themselves the equal of their
male counterparts (Bloch & Anderson, 1974) , this resistance must result from what
women symbolize, not from how they perform. Because the warrior image is one long
reserved for men (Gibson, 1994) , male ofcers who see themselves as soldiers against
crime are arguably threatened by women. Further, the presence of women questions the
centrality of aggressive crime-ghting to police work. Perhaps, Hunt (1984, p. 294)
argues, female ofcers help reveal the essential peacekeeping nature of the job:
Symbolically, then, [the female ofcer] reminds [the male ofcer] that he can
only achieve illusory manhood by denying and repressing the essential feminine
dimension of police work which involves social relations, paper work, and
housekeeping in the public domain. Male resistance to women can therefore be
viewed as an attempt to preserve the myth which not only legitimates police
work in the public eye, but also afrms the policemans identity as a man.
Male resistance to female ofcers, then, is best explained by the symbolic threat that
women posethey challenge the prevailing masculinist construction of the job as an
elemental battle against implacable criminal foes where physical strength and courage
determine the victor. This masculinist view of the job has a deep symbolic resonance in
American culture, where the brave soldier and the heroic Western gunslinger are
prominent icons. However, women demonstrate that policing is not fundamentally about
soldiering but about the more feminized tasks of restoring order in domestic disputes. In
the face of this contradiction, masculinist ofcers cling to their image as crime ghters,
with considerable consequences.
The Implications of Masculinist Policing
Female ofcers face ongoing resistance as they seek acceptance and respect. Indeed,
Martin (1980) suggests that female police ofcers face a difcult choiceto renounce
their gender identity and overtly embrace the masculinist ethos of the job, or to retain
a more feminine posture at the risk of ostracism and harassment. They must, in her
terms, choose between being policewomen or policewomen. This opposition, Heidensohn
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62 S. Herbert
(1992) convincingly argues, is perhaps overdrawnmost often, female ofcers lie
somewhere between these two extremesbut it does illustrate the fundamental tension
that patrolwomen confront. Those who embrace the masculinist ethos risk being labeled
as lesbians (Hunt, 1984) , those who retain a strong gender identity risk unwanted sexual
attention and harassment (Stanko, 1988) . And movement up the police hierarchy does
not necessarily make life any easier; female police managers rarely win compliance from
their subordinates (Martin & Jurik, 1996) .
Another important consequence of masculinism in policing, and the focus of the
remainder of this article, is its role in ofcer resistance to reform. If ofcers cling to the
crime ghter/gunslinger image, they resist other possible denitions of their role. In
other words, the gendered nature of the police image serves as a bulwark against change.
Reform that implies a more peacekeeping than crime-ghting job orientation is in for
considerable resistance. Again, the words of Hunt (1984, p. 294) are instructive:
Gender may be as signicant a factor in rank-and-le resistance to change as
politics and economics. Thus, men who actively negotiate masculine identity by
rejecting or repressing those behaviors and attitudes associated with femininity
may oppose certain changes because they have feminine signicance and thus
represent a violation of feminine, domestic and masculine, public realms.
Community policing represents such a change.
Community Policing and the Challenge to Masculinism
Community policing emerged as a major reform movement in the USA in the 1970s,
and picked up considerable momentum in the 1980s (Greene & Mastrofski, 1988) . It was
championed because it allegedly improved upon the previously dominant ideal of
policing, the professional model. That model cast police as experts on crime reduction
and positioned them somewhat above the citizens they served. This relationship to the
citizenry minimized corruption and reinforced the polices standing as expertsonly they
knew how best to solve crime problems (Fogelson, 1977) .
Two related aspects of the professional model, however, came under criticism. The
rst was that it alienated the police from the citizenry. This criticism was most ardently
voiced in poor and minority communities, home to widespread urban unrest in the 1960s
that was often touched off by a tense policecitizen encounter. The professional model
came under additional criticism because it did not work to reduce crime. The technologi-
cal breakthroughs that accompanied professionalismsuch as patrol cars, radios,
ngerprints, and ballisticswere expected to reduce crime by making the capture and
conviction of criminals a certainty. But the technology was oversold: patrol cars did not
arrive on the scene as quickly as advertised, detection proved less than infallible. Instead,
it became clear that what mattered most in capturing and convicting criminals was
information from the citizenry (Sherman, 1974) . If, however, the police were perceived
as an alien and aloof force, such information did not circulate.
Community policing hoped to resolve these two related problems. If the police were
more available and solicitous, if they provided opportunities for meaningful interaction
with citizens, and if they shared responsibility for crime control and community
betterment, then perhaps tensions would evaporate and lines of communication would
hum with information. Community policing thus attempts to reduce the walls between
cop and citizen erected by the professional model (Trojanowicz & Bucqueroux, 1990) .
This happens in a variety of waysfoot patrols, community substations, and greater
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numbers of block clubs and neighborhood watches, to name the most popular. Opti-
mally, ofcers actively welcome the citizenry as co-equal partners in determining police
strategies and strive toward the co-production of reduced crime and neighborhood
betterment (Skolnick & Bayley, 1986) .
Ofcers are thus to be transformed from aloof crime reduction efforts to convivial
buddies who work alongside residents to solve community problems. Importantly, these
problems are not necessarily crime-related, but might as easily involve factors of
disorder (Skogan, 1990; Kelling & Coles, 1996) such as unruly teenagers or abandoned
buildings. Police ofcers are thus expected to shed their masculinist crime-ghting image
and overtly adopt their peacekeeping mantle. They are to listen closely to and empathize
with residents, to disentangle disputes that exist within communities, and to allow
themselves to exist in deeply cooperative relationships. To succeed, in other words, an
ofcer must emphasize various activitiesto quote Hunt (1984, p. 294) again, social
relations, paper work and housekeeping in the public domainthat their masculinism
rejects.
It is not surprising to learn that despite tremendous fanfare for community policing,
few police departments can claim much success in its implementation (Zhao, 1996;
Maguire, 1997; Lyons, 1999) . Ofcers remain reluctant to embrace co-production and
work to preserve their expert status. Accordingly, they typically enlist the citizenry merely
as their junior partners in crime reduction, asking them to act as their eyes and ears;
citizens are to provide information about criminal wrongdoing, and the police as the
experts will take care of the rest (Saunders, 1997) . In most departments, community
policing remains a preserve of a small number of ofcers focused on community
relations, who may walk an occasional footbeat or work to increase neighborhood watch
groups. Wholesale reform of police departments almost never occurs (Maguire, 1997) .
There are several reasons for this failure. Part of the explanation lies with community
members, who are often reluctant to work closely with the police. Citizens may be
unaware of community policing programs, skeptical of the police, or afraid of retaliation
from gang members or others who might resent community cooperation with the police
(Grinc, 1994) . But many commentators argue that the chief impediment to community
policing is resistance from the rank and le (Sparrow et al., 1990; Greene et al., 1994;
Sadd & Grinc, 1994; Police Executive Research Forum, 1995) . This resistance emerges
because community policing requires a reorientation to patrol and a redenition of the
spaces of patrol. Neither of these is compatible with the prevalent masculinist ethos. As
Clear & Karp (1999, 18) summarize it, Community policing strategies encounter
signicant resistance from line workers [who] think of policing as ghting crime, and
tend to see community-building and problem-solving as soft. It is hard not to see soft
as synonymous with feminine.
The Feminization of Policing
Community policing acknowledges what the masculinist model denies: policing is more
akin to social work than war. It mandates that ofcers de-emphasize the thrill of the hunt
and capture, and that they instead trumpet cordial and cooperative interactions with
citizens. The valued attributes are not strength and courage, but patience and com-
passion. Police ofcers are not aloof and aggressive crime ghters, but simply one tool
among many for neighborhood improvement. They are best engaged in the peace-
keeping work that builds better communities, not the rough-and-tumble work that leads
to felony arrests. As Miller (1999, p. 197) puts it:
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64 S. Herbert
The very success of community policing rests upon developing and using
womens roles and traits, such as creating and sustaining intimate connections
and practicing a more conciliatory, nonaggressive style of policing. Thus,
macho police ofcers who disdain such traits must be convinced to appropriate
them in such a way that the stigma is dissolved.
Fundamental to community policing is a redenition of space. The masculinist model
suggests that space is to be controlled and conquered, reduced to the grids and axes that
enable coordinated efforts at capture. Everyday denitions of neighborhoods developed
by residents are rendered subordinate to the demands of apprehending dangerous
suspects. In community policing, these everyday denitions ostensibly become dominant.
Ofcers are expected to listen closely to how citizens dene their spaces and the chief
problems in those spaces. They are expected to share governance over those spaces, not
to impose their own crime-ghting strategies. Part of community policings blurring of
the boundaries between ofcer and citizen, then, is greater congruence over how space
is dened and controlled. This is true even in those anti-police areas that many ofcers
code in terms of danger. Instead, ofcers are expected to reconceive such spaces as
opportunities to reconstruct a more cooperative dynamic between themselves and the
community.
This is resisted by the ofcers. The eyes and ears strategy retains the tactical spatial
focus inherent in masculinist policing. The police preserve for themselves the right to
denote a neighborhoods problems, and instruct the citizenry how best to support
police-dened strategies to address those problems. Indeed, what citizens dene as their
principal problems do not commonly involve crime. By contrast, residents typically focus
on such order maintenance issues as derelict buildings or loud teenagers (Skogan, 1990) .
If ofcers were truly to take these concerns as their primary focus, it would in fact mean
a diminution of their crime ghting role.
But ofcers often dismiss such concerns as chicken shit, describing them as politics,
not police work. This is precisely the conclusion reached from extensive studies of
Indianapolis and St Petersburg (Parks et al., 1999) and of Madison (Miller, 1999) . In all
three departments, ofcers assigned to community policing operations largely use their
discretionary authority to conduct operations oriented toward traditional crime sup-
pression. This is also what I observed during the Los Angeles eldwork. Many of my
ride-alongs were with Senior Lead Ofcers (SLOs) , who were responsible for police
community relations. Each of the seven patrol beats in the division I observed was
assigned an SLO, whose primary task was to involve the community in police work.
These efforts focused exclusively on police-generated crime-reduction projects. The
community was given only a minimal role in dening problems, constructing solutions
and evaluating programs.
This was made evident in each of the policecommunity meetings I attended, all of
which followed the same pattern. First, the SLO would make a presentation about the
crime patterns in the neighborhood. Often the goal was to try to convince the citizens
that the crime problem was in fact severe. One ofcer even stated explicitly that he was
attempting to scare his audience. Second, the ofcer would discuss the various strategies
the LAPD was employing to address the problem. Finally, the citizens were told how
they could support those strategies. Like Saunders (1997) , I heard the term eyes and
ears frequently evoked to characterize the proper role for the citizenry. At no time did
I ever hear the ofcers ask for advice in the construction or evaluation of any police
strategy, and I never saw the ofcers reach out to any member of the community except
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those who they knew would support the polices agenda. The strategy was simply to
make the citizenry feel fearful and then to encourage their dependence upon the police.
While on patrol, the SLOs work did differ from that of regular patrol ofcers, in two
ways. First, the SLOs were free from the demands of the radio dispatcher, and thus were
able to concentrate on particular areas of concern, such as homeless encampments,
known drug sales locations, grafti, and panhandling. Second, the SLOs were able to
bring a wider range of strategies to bear on these areas of concern. For example, they
might work closely with city building inspectors to put pressure on landlords who did not
address the accumulation of grafti on their structures. Or they might ask a landlord for
authority to arrest for trespassing those whom the police suspected of selling drugs on the
landlords property. But note that the SLOs work did nothing to challenge the basic
orientation of the police toward their work or toward the communities in which they
worked; it merely extended the crime-ghting emphasis of the police. That explains the
use of neighborhood groups strictly as means to garner support for police-generated
programs. It also explains the celebratory mood with which the SLOs greeted the arrest
of any suspect whose activities they considered troublesome.
In short, those LAPD ofcers most responsible for fostering community relations
reproduced the world-view and orientation of the hard-charging crime ghter, differing
only in their tactics and daily activities. The SLOs also reinforced the masculinism
inherent in the crime-ghting image, regularly denigrating the emphasis on social
activities that was inherent in their jobs. One SLO was particularly distraught that many
of his male colleagues were being promoted to sergeant and thus would leave his ofce.
He openly feared that women would replace his departing colleagues. There will be lots
of women in here, and doing all sorts of parties, he said. Im going to want to transfer
to another patrol division and just make arrests.
Reform as Resistance
Fortunately for both patrol ofcers and police managers, community policing is not the
only popular contemporary reform movement. Two other reform movements reinforce
the tough-cop-as-expert image of policing. One is known as problem-oriented policing.
The idea here is that police ofcers should not simply bounce from one emergency call
to another but should instead devote time to unearthing the causes of crime patterns
(Goldstein, 1990; Sparrow et al., 1990) . These investigations would hopefully lead to the
eradication of criminogenic conditions. The second reform movement goes by several
namesbroken windows, order maintenance, quality of life, and zero tolerance. This
movements legacy traces to an inuential Wilson & Kelling (1982) article that argued
that broken windows and other instances of disorder are important incubators of crime.
With broken windows comes a progressive lack of resident responsibility for a neighbor-
hood, and thus a progressive growth of wrongdoing. Policing should therefore focus on
maintaining order and preserving a high quality of life (Kelling & Coles, 1996) . In New
York City, the most notable site for this model of policing, this resulted in zero tolerance
for any behavior classied as disorderly, such as the aggressive tactics of streetside
squeegie men who sought to clean windshields for cash (Burke, 1998) .
The popularity of these alternate models of reform provides political cover for ofcers
and departments who do not actually adopt community policing in practice. Even better
for police managers, these alternate reform movements are often conated with community
policing, even though they do not imply a meaningful role for the citizens in determining
police practice [6]. The nature of problems and quality of life are dened by the
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66 S. Herbert
police, not the residents. Similarly, the strategies to rectify those conditions are deter-
mined strictly by ofcers.
Thus, police departments have it both ways: they claim progress toward community
policing but actively only pursue reforms that reinforce the professional/masculinist
model. This enables them to avoid any serious reform of a police culture that resists any
seeming feminization of the occupation, a culture that thwarts community policing and
the greater potential democratic oversight it implies. This illustrates Hunts argument
that gender is the most serious impediment to police reform. Or in the more blunt words
of Graef (1990, p. 4) , Asking street hardened coppers, whose self-respect is dened by
the approval of their peers, to take on the morality and ethos of community policing is
like expecting them to police in drag.
Community Policing, Masculinism and the State
Police ofcers daily reproduce their masculinist self-image in ways that thwart greater
democratic oversight of their actions. Despite the introduction of greater numbers of
women ofcers, and despite an ostensibly popular reform movement in community
policing, masculinism helps perpetuate an aggressive mode of patrol. The success of this
resistance is explained by two factors. One is the autonomy that patrol ofcers possess,
which enables them to reproduce the past rather than create a new future. Secondly, the
symbolism of the aggressive crime ghter resonates with images from outside the police
culture. In the case of the USA, the brave solider icon is widely reproduced in popular
accounts of wars and of the settling of the western frontier. And the aggressive crime
ghter is regularly feted on contemporary television shows, which portray both actual
and ctional ofcers engaged in a brave battle against dastardly criminals (Doyle, 1998) .
Ofcers who win such battles are treated as heroes.
Importantly, the aggressive, masculine ofcer features heavily in other contemporary
reform movements in policing, some of which are often conated with community
policing. As a result, police departments can make public claims about reform while they
continue business as usual. And because crime rates are declining in US cities, police
ofcials can claim credit for effectiveness even if they have not adopted community
policing practices. In New York City, for example, police ofcials refuse to apologize for
their failure to fully implement community policing. After announcing another in a series
of crime rate declines, the police chief, Howard Sar, said, Im not going to be bullied
by community activists who say, We want feel-good cops. The bottom line is crime
reduction (Cooper, 1998) .
To examine how gender is enacted in the daily operations of the police or any other
state institution is to implicitly accept the notion of the state as an arena and not a
monolith. The state is a site of competing, conicting, and often contradicting impulses,
demands, and discourses; it is a set of bureaucratic workplaces, not a faceless institution
(Clegg, 1989; Savage & Witz, 1992) . It is, of course, difcult to talk about the state,
because governing institutions vary in their size, scope and mandate. These mandates
might differ, and thus tensions and contradictions might emerge within and across
agencies. The spaces created by these contradictions can be spaces open to reform
(Pringle & Watson, 1990; Westwood, 1996) .
The presence of women ofcers certainly reveals a fundamental contradiction in
modern policing between the overwrought image of crime ghting and the more
common everyday reality of peacekeeping. But this contradiction works less to promote
change than to intensify resistance. Masculinist ofcers literally run roughshod over this
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contradiction, sprinting out to dangerous calls to preserve their warrior image.
They disparage the chicken shit outreach and public relations efforts endorsed by
community policing, and preserve their aloof, expert and aggressive status vis-a`-vis the
citizenry.
Thus, even if the state is best described as a site of competing and contradictory
discourses, it is not necessarily ripe for reform. The gradual increase of women in the
police profession serves to promote little organizational change (cf. Kanter, 1977) . If
anything, masculinism becomes more robust in response, and the principal net effect is
to create serious challenges for women ofcers who must negotiate a path between their
professional identity and their self-image as women. Instead, masculinism remains strong,
and works to thwart the acceptance of both women ofcers and a wider reform
movement to create more democratically-accountable police practices.
Although it is clearly important, for both analytical and political reasons, to analyze
the state as an arena in which struggles are daily enacted, the case of the stillbirth of
community policing teaches us that this is not sufcient. The wider cultural arena in
which the state operates importantly structures how gender roles and relations are
understood. The police draw upon this prevailing culture to reinforce their masculinist
self-construction and devastate community policing as a consequence. The state is an
arena, but it is one arena among many. And although gender roles and relations must
be reproduced in daily action, and thus are perpetually contestable, they are simul-
taneously read against a more inert cultural backdrop. Police ofcers read each others
behavior against this backdrop, and render judgements accordingly. In so doing, they
reinforce a prevailing masculinism that greater numbers of women ofcers fail to
effectively challenge.
To reform policing, then, and by extension to reform the state, one must do more than
simply alter its personnel, or even champion a presumably popular reform effort such as
community policing. One must continue to challenge the wider cultural codes by which
masculinity and femininity are dened, and by which daily behavior is made meaningful.
The more permanent these cultural codes, the more they determine individual behavior.
In this case, the continued presence of masculinism in policing reinforces daily aggressive
action, and thus reduces the chance for any increase in democratic policecitizen
interaction.
Conclusion
Most discussions of gender and the state focus on the question of patriarchy. Many argue
that the state is best described as patriarchal (MacKinnon, 1989; Allen, 1990; Walby,
1990) , given that it supports male privilege. Others suggest that the state is best described
as principally capitalist and secondarily patriarchal (McIntosh, 1978, Barrett, 1980) ,
while some suggest that capitalism and patriarchy are dual systems that often overlap
around and through the state (Eisenstein, 1981, 1984) . Yet others argue that the adjective
patriarchal misdescribes the state as uniform and monolithic. Better, then, to see the
state as a series of arenas in which patriarchy may or may not be reproduced, given the
particular dynamics at play (Pringle & Watson, 1989) .
These important debates help illuminate the relationship between the state and
broader patterns of gender relations. My goal here is to augment these discussions in two
ways. One is to recognize the state as both institution and process, and thus to examine
how daily practices within state institutions help to perpetuate gendered differences. The
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68 S. Herbert
second is to indicate that these gendered practices can work not just to uphold patriarchy
but to minimize efforts toward greater democratic oversight of state actions.
Signicantly, the denition and control of space is central here. The desire to become
a hard charger, to enact the masculinist form of policing, motivates ofcers to dene and
approach the spaces of patrol with the aim of ensuring tactical control. The hard charger
ideal denigrates such activities as public meetings or idle chatter with neighborhood
residents, and discourages ofcers from reconciling their view of the spaces of patrol
with the views of the people who inhabit them. The spatial strategies of community
policing are simply too effeminate to win broad support from those ofcers who seek
cultural refuge in images of the triumphant warrior. Many ofcers therefore use their
discretionary authority to ignore the mandates of community policing.
Thus, this instance of masculinism in the state reproduces patriarchy and, just as
importantly, diminishes a move toward enhanced democracy by crippling citizen
oversight. This failure at reform might not be consequential were it not for the power
and symbolic standing of the police. The police are the most visible and pervasive
presence of the state and its capacity for coercive force (Bittner, 1990; Loader, 1997) .
They also gure prominently in many public efforts to rebuild devastated and troubled
neighborhoods (Kelling & Coles, 1996; Skogan & Hartnett, 1997) . For that reason,
public oversight of the polices priorities and practices seems essential in any society
labeling itself as democratic.
The important point to note here is that police masculinism works not just to suppress
the interests of women, but of all citizens. While patriarchy works to the benet of men,
masculinism may not. This is not just to suggest that hegemonic notions of masculinity
often work to suppress the men who are culturally compelled to enact them (Jackson,
1991) , but to note that masculinism in the state denies an active role for citizen oversight.
Patriarchy presumably entails a public role for men in government. But masculinism in
the state denies this civic role. Masculinist cops resist cooperation with any citizen, male
or female, particularly any citizen who challenges police authority. The denial of
democracy inherent in masculinist policing thus works to the detriment of both men and
women.
Police reformers thus face the same dilemma confronting feministsthey need the
state in order to push through necessary changes, but yet the state reproduces many of
the practices and ideologies most in need of change (Halford, 1992) . This challenge is
especially daunting because state actors are drawing upon wider cultural images in
constructing and justifying their social role. One must then challenge both state action
and the wider cultural codes that make that action meaningful. In this case, one must
challenge the type of policing idealized in the hard charger icon and the wider cultural
denition of manhood that icon represents. The reproduction of gender roles and
relationships, the cultural codes against which behavior is read as either masculine or
feminine, works in this case both to uphold patriarchy and to cripple democracy.
There is, of course, no singular masculinity (Jackson, 1991; Connell, 1995) ; the
cultural codes through which social action is read allow contrasting and even contradic-
tory means of expressing gender. But in the world of the police, one version of
masculinity is widely celebrated, and works to uphold the crime ghter role, not the
peacekeeper. This leads to more tense encounters with any who challenge police
authority and thus to greater violence (Werthman & Piliavan, 1967; van Wormer, 1981) .
It also means the residents of urban neighborhoods can expect too few opportunities to
work closely with the police, and too many observations of ofcers charging past seeking
to establish territorial hegemony.
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NOTES
[1] Data on the Los Angeles Police Department come from 8 months of participant observation of a single
patrol division in 199394. The eldwork consisted of 35 ride-alongs with patrol sergeants, 20 ride-alongs
with Senior Lead Ofcers (responsible for policecommunity relations) , and single observations of
numerous other specialized units, including vice, narcotics, gang, and helicopter patrol (see Herbert, 1997) .
[2] The term queen also obviously reveals a homophobic reaction against ofcers perceived as insufciently
masculine.
[3] Los Angeles may seem a curious place to search for generalizations about the police, given the unique
nature of the metropolis and given much recent publicity that might suggest that the LAPD is an unusually
aggressive and racist organization. However, it is important to remember that the LAPD once possessed
the status of an exemplar, particularly in terms of the institutionalization of the professional model of policing
(Fogelson, 1977; Uchida, 1989) . Because many police departments in the USA emulated the LAPD in
adopting the professional model, they are likely to face the same difculties in making the transition to a
new model.
[4] This social geography, as mentioned earlier, is racialized: anti-police areas invariably possess high
concentrations of minorities.
[5] Going code 3 means driving with lights ashing and siren blaring.
[6] In the same period of ostensible adoption of community policing, American police departments have
dramatically increased the size and use of paramilitary units. Once reserved for hostage situations and
other extreme emergencies, these units are now sometimes incorporated into routine patrol strategies, often
in the name of community policing. These units, police managers argue, are necessary to take back
crime-ridden neighborhoods before community efforts can successfully take hold (Kraska & Kappeler,
1997) .
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WESTLEY, WILLIAM (1970) Violence and the Police (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press).
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ZHAO, JIHONG (1996) Why Police Organizations Change (Washington, DC, Police Executive Research Forum) .
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Exclusive Visions? Representations of Family, Work and
Gender in the Work of the British Social Exclusion Unit
EUAN HAGUE, Syracuse University, USA
CHRIS THOMAS & STEPHEN WILLIAMS, Staffordshire University, UK
ABSTRACT The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) of the British Government is a recent and innovative
response to social problems in the UK. Through an examination of selected publications of the SEU, the
article highlights some of the representations of family, work and gender which provide the discursive
context in which the SEU operates and to which it, in turn, contributes. The article suggests that
perspectives found in the post-1945 welfare state continue to inuence approaches to problems of
exclusion. Whilst there are areas in which current political thinking shows evidence of sensitivity to the
social recomposition that has attended economic restructuring since 1970, it is argued that there remain
tendencies within SEU discussions which reinforce a more nostalgic constitution of work, family and
gender relations. Consequently, the article concludes that the potential of the social exclusion debate to
grasp fundamental issues is yet to be fully realised.
Introduction: from poverty to social exclusion
Since the election of the British Labour Party to government in 1997, the concept of
social exclusion has become a signicant inuence upon the political agenda in the UK.
This reects a return to the politics of social justice with which the Labour Party has
been associated historically, as well as a shift in European debates about poverty to
embrace notions of exclusion. In Britain, social exclusion is dened as a shorthand label
for what can happen when individuals or areas suffer from a combination of linked
problems such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, poor housing, high crime
environments, bad health and family breakdown (Social Exclusion Unit [SEU], 1997) .
This is a welcome recognition of a concept that has prompted an understanding of
poverty as a relational dynamic (Williams & Pillinger, 1996, p. 9) and challenges the idea
that poverty is not only about access to material resources, it is about the social relations
of power and control, the processes of marginalisation and exclusion (Williams &
Pillinger, 1996, p. 10) . This change of emphasis from outcome (poverty) to process
(exclusion) is valuable in itself, but has also had immediate policy impacts. From
December 1997, the SEU has been charged with the task of initiating policy aimed at
addressing these problems and a series of major reports has been published (SEU, 1998a,
1998b, 1998c, 1999a, 1999b) . Critical reading of the discourse within these reports
suggests, however, that there exist evident tensions between traditional British welfare
approaches, the growing inuence of European and American attitudes to social policy,
Correspondence: Euan Hague, Geography Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 132441020,
USA.
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026334
73
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74 Viewpoint
and a genuine desire to nd new solutions to what are persistent problems for society and
governance.
In this article, we aim to highlight some of these tensions through a consideration of
how the SEU represents social exclusion in relation to family, work and gender and the
extent to which such representations mark a signicant departure from policies shaped
within the welfare state. In this context, issues related to family, work and especially
gender are indicators of substantive shifts in approach, primarily because the construc-
tion of the welfare state after Beveridge was built around particular masculinist notions
of family and gender, and their relationship to work. To date, SEU output suggests that
political analysis of social problems requires a heightened sensitivity to gender issues
(amongst others) , yet many representations in SEU discourse simultaneously appear not
to evidence such a change in sensibility. This can be seen both in the ideological
background to the initiative and in the gender assumptions of policy itself.
This article considers, therefore, whether the SEU will contribute to the development
of genuinely inclusive social relations, and to further this discussion, we pose a simple
question. Can the SEUs publications be understood as indicators of innovative political
response, or are they constrained by extant, dominant ideologies of family, work and the
welfare state which have been foundations of British social policy since 1945?
Family, Work and Gender in the UK Welfare State
As the principal architects of the welfare state, it is understandable that the Labour Party
in governmenteven under the guise of New Labourshould be sensitive to the
traditions and objectives of state welfare. Indeed, the Prime Minister has signalled that
current political strategies to confront social exclusion may be seen as direct descendants
of the Beveridge welfare state system:
we now face a task of reconstruction as intense as the one that faced the
post-war Labour government and thats why we need an anti-poverty strategy
of the same ambition and breadth. (Tony Blair, speech in Shefeld, 30 January
1998; quoted in Howarth et al., 1998, p. 11)
Yet, the Britain that the Labour Party governs at the turn of the twenty-rst century is
a different place from the Britain which elected a landslide Labour government in 1945.
According to Young (1999) , we have moved from an inclusive society (which was an ideal
central to the modernist paradigm of social relations that emerged after 1945) to an
exclusive society (which is more representative of a late modernist paradigm of the last
third of the twentieth century) . Young (1999, p. vi) characterises this latter phase as a
time of massive structural change: where there have been fundamental changes in the
primary and secondary labour markets, where the employment patterns of women have
rapidly changed, and all accompanied by cultural changes no less dramatic.
The social, political and economic ideologies underlying the various incarnations of
the British welfare state have been identied by many authors (e.g. Clarke et al., 1987) .
Some of the most pertinent critiques of British social policy post-1945 have emerged
from a feminist perspective, which has sought to reveal the embedded assumptions about
gender roles and social relations within welfare state legislation. In particular, feminist
critiques of the welfare state have argued that the ideology and discourse of the British
system are patriarchal and paternalistic in their interpretation of the family, employment
and the division of society into public and private spheres (e.g. Wilson, 1977; Land,
1999) . The founding assumption of the UK welfare state, writes Pascall (1997, p. ix) ,
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Viewpoint 75
was that womens place and security lay in the familya structure that was normatively
dened as a married couple and children living together in a nuclear family. Beveridges
welfare state assumed that the role of a woman was as a housewife supported by her
working husbands income. Consequently, the construction of a welfare system centred
on national benets (particularly unemployment and child) , health care provision and
public housing, became structured around this familial model and, in practice, defended
this model of family life (Pascall, 1997) .
Family, Work and Gender in Blairs Britain
However, the inclusive society envisaged by the proponents of the welfare state, where
inclusion was based on an ideal of full male employment and an absolutist social order
in which institutions such as work and the family were accepted much without question
(Young, 1999, p. 4) , is no longer extant. Yet, as Lister (1997, p. 15) points out, the
ideology of the family wage runs deep despite womens increased labour market
participation and the growth in the number of female headed households. Such
persistent ideological grounds are problematic for any new agenda for social inclusion,
especially when confronted by what Morris (1998, p. 239) terms a breakdown in the
family/work/welfare nexus or by the increasingly dynamic nature of the family as a
social unit. As Table I illustrates, over the last four decades of the twentieth century,
substantial and inuential shifts occurred in a range of indicators of family structure: in
the incidence of lone parenthood and births outside marriage; in the proportion of
single-person households and the average size of households; and in the numbers of
marriages and the rates of divorce. Whilst silent on the causes and meanings of such
change, these statistics suggest signicant recomposition of the nature of the family unit
in the post-1960 period, even though the policy rhetoric of the family is still frequently
biased towards a nostalgic, normative construct of biological father/mother/children.
If the family has undergone signicant structural change, then so has the world of
work (Brown, 1997; Walby, 1999) . Since 1980, global economic restructuring has
prompted a range of locational and operational changes as well as associated shifts in
employment patterns and the constitution of labour markets. This has prompted a
conspicuous contraction in the number of jobs in heavy industry and, to a lesser degree,
in manufacturing, whilst employment in the service sector has expanded inexorably
(Table II) .
Increase in the number of service sector jobs lled by women is especially striking,
although the aggregate gures obscure some key dimensions of work in Blairs Britain,
TABLE I. Selected indices of change in family structure in the UK, 196199
1961 1971 1999
Lone parents 7% 22%
Births outside marriage (per year) 65,700 241,900
Single-person households 11% 29%
Average size of households (persons) 3.18 2.43
Number of rst marriages (per year) 339,398 181,135
Number of divorces (per year) 27,152 161,087
Source: www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/[1].
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76 Viewpoint
TABLE II. Aggregate changes in employment in key economic sectors in the UK, 19792000
(in 000s)
1979 2000 % change
Men Women Men Women Men Women
Energy and water 628 87 158 46
2
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47.1
(including mining)
Manufacturing 4774 2050 2868 1099
2
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46.4
Services 6799 8139 7481 10499 1 10.0 1 29.0
Source: www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/.
especially the growing incidence of part-time jobs. Although the ratio of male to female
employment is close to parity, females in part-time work outnumber males by nearly four
to one. There is also an emerging and sustained critique that highlights a continuing
failure of government to recognise the role of unpaid work in the economy, an area of
work that also makes disproportionate use of female labour (Crompton, 1997) .
Thus, in what may be seen as a new full-employment economy, the work is both
quantitatively and qualitatively different from the work of the inclusive society of the
mid-twentieth century. However, despite this transformation of the social and employ-
ment structures of the UK, Pascall (1997) nds clear evidence that the political and
institutional systems that remain in place fail to question consistently the patriarchal
assumptions of family life and lifetime employment.
Social Exclusion, Family and Gender
The SEU reports that have been produced to date are unanimous in asserting the pivotal
role of the family in the maintenance of social and economic relations. There also
remains some emphasis on traditional patterns of dependency within families. Stable
family life is promoted as a cornerstone for addressing a cross-section of social problems
including teenage pregnancy, school truancy and rough sleeping (i.e. homeless people
sleeping on the streets). For example, problems with familial relationships are identied
as the major cause of rough sleeping in Britain (SEU, 1998b) . In his introduction to this
report, Prime Minister Blair explains that many start rough sleeping when family
relationships break down (SEU, 1998b, p. 1) , either with parents or partner and amongst
older rough sleepers through widowhood. Elsewhere in its analysis, the SEU recognises
that a young person who has been in local authority care is more likely to be sleeping
rough than if they have been in a parental home.
The role of the family is further emphasised within the SEU report on teenage
pregnancies (SEU, 1999a) . This report reveals quite strongly the tensions between, on the
one hand, a desire to frame a set of policies that are more reective of contemporary
social realities and, on the other, the moderating inuence of some rather conventional
thinking on gender roles within the family. In the latter context, the report repeatedly
stresses the responsibility of men as fathers to provide nancially for their children. The
idea that men are responsible for the nancial upkeep of homes, wives and children has
long been embedded in social policy, social security practice and the ideology of the
welfare state (Wilson, 1977; Campbell, 1985) , but it emerges with particular clarity in
situations where parents are separated. Perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that the SEU
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Viewpoint 77
states that the Child Support Agency will target fathers of children of under 18 year old
mothers for early child support action (SEU, 1999a, p. 10) .
We do not challenge the necessity of putting into place appropriate guidelines to
ensure nancial provision for young parents and their children. We do, however,
question the gendered constructions placed both explicitly and implicitly upon this
problem by the SEU. We are concerned that the SEU encourages a very specic type
of child support that pays little attention to the provision of emotional support for the
child. Later, the report allows tacit recognition that many young fathers often want to
stay in touch with their children and play a proper part in their upbringing (SEU,
1999a, p. 66) . Yet, rather than articulating ways in which such paternal involvement
might be promoted, the SEU tends only to reassert the bread-winning father model of
the family with the woman as the carer, the man as provider; and where the childrens
emotional needs are met by one and their economic needs met by the other. Similarly,
the SEU has relatively little to say on the role of childcare systems, although the
Government has under consideration proposals for a National Childcare Strategy that
may, if implemented, begin to address this problem. Such provision is essential if young
mothers are to nd paid employment for themselves (as the SEU intends) and, hence, be
released from traditional malefemale dependencies. So, although motivated by a
genuine desire to assist young mothers in particular, the SEU tends to reinforce
traditional assumptions that women cannot be independent individuals; rather, women
who have babies must depend on men (Pascall, 1997, p. 229) .
Similar concerns are raised in SEU discussions of the levels of independence to be
afforded to teenage mothers. Despite the fact that 16 years is the minimum legal age for
marriage and conception in the UK, the SEU argues that young women who have had
a child should not be treated as adults: the solution for 16 and 17 year old mothers who
cannot live with parents or a partner must be supervised semi-independent housing with
support, not a tenancy on their own (SEU, 1999a, p. 10) . This is perhaps a justiable
social response to the pressures of individual home management for young people with
young children, but suggests that these young mothers are to be semi dependent either
on their own familial relationships or will be taken into supervised housing. This creates
an ambivalent position in which the mothers enjoy neither the benets of dependency
nor full independence.
These discussions reect a specic concern for the problems of young parents, but the
implicit gender relations are also mirrored in discussions of the role of more mature
families. In particular, the understanding that the male family wage remains the critical
commitment of the father to his children is reasserted by examples given elsewhere in
SEU literature. In Bringing Britain Together (SEU, 1998c) , the possibility of a woman
working and contributing to her familys income is again hidden behind the husband-
as-breadwinner representation of family life. A quotation from a section of the report
concerned with housing benets is instructive in stating that a married man with two
children on an average council rent would have to command a salary of 220 a week,
to be beyond the housing benet taper (SEU, 1998c, p. 24) . This statement hides or
disregards the sexual division of labour and income within the family. The male
wage-earner is identied as married and it is he who both brings in the income from
paid employment and is the potential recipient of any state housing benet. His wife
is not referred to as an income-generating member of the family. This construc-
tion identies the fathers role in supporting his family as primarily an economic one,
and subsumes the unpaid and unofcial economic contribution of (female) domestic
labour.
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78 Viewpoint
Social Exclusion and Work
In arguing for a gender audit of the New Deal programmes [2], Rake (2000, p. 107)
suggests that in both paid and unpaid work, differences in the level and nature of
womens and mens participation remains a striking, if not dening feature. Levitas
(1998) identies the link between social exclusion and unemployment as a central feature
of the SEUs construction of inclusion, explaining that Labour understands social
inclusion primarily in terms of participation in paid work (1998, p. 128) . Indeed, we nd
an unambiguous statement in a Government Annual Report that work is the surest
route out of poverty (Her Majestys Government, 1999, p. 26) . That said, the Govern-
ment has stated that its reforms of welfare are therefore based on the principle of work
for those who can, and security for those who cannot (Her Majestys Government, 1999,
p. 26) . The issue of low pay has also been approached through the introduction of both
the minimum wage and Working Families Tax Credit (Her Majestys Government,
2000) . The result of such policies and rhetoric built around the principle of work is that
the individual becomes obliged to work for their social inclusion. Yet, the question of
exclusion through work is ultimately addressed through the provision not of jobs, but
of employment opportunities (Levitas, 1998, p. 156) . This is a crucial difference,
especially when we consider the make-up and focus of the workforce at the turn of the
century.
Each of the ve main SEU publications centres on the provision of job opportunities
as a major route to social inclusion. The opening statement of Bridging the Gap is typical
in commenting that the best defence against social exclusion is having a job (SEU,
1999b, p. 6) . Similarly, the rst aim of the national strategy for neighbourhood renewal
is getting the people to work (SEU, 1998c, p. 57) . Even in policy areas where getting
a job is perhaps not one of the major concerns of an individual, issues of employment
still gure prominently. Thus, in addressing problems of teenage pregnancy, the SEU
aims not only to reduce the incidence of the problem, but also to get more teenage
parents into education, training or employment, to reduce the risk of long term social
exclusion (SEU, 1999a, p. 8) . Similarly, the SEU states that rough sleepers need to be
rehoused and given accommodation, a primary reason being that someone with an
address has more chance of getting a job (SEU, 1998b, p. 10) .
Understandable though this emphasis on work may be, both as a traditional economic
response and as ideological justication (it is, after all, the Labour Party) , various authors
have pointed out the problematic nature of such a model of work-based inclusivity. Lister
(2000) , for example, notes that whilst paid work is important, it does not necessarily spell
genuine social inclusion for those trapped in the many dead-end jobs that the exible
labour markets often produce. An economy centred upon a exible labour market with
signicant proportions of the workforce in part-time or short-contract forms of employ-
ment differs fundamentally from the inclusive economy of post-1945 reconstruction. The
SEU recognises the shortcomings of such restructured employment (see SEU, 1999b,
p. 18) and outlines a commitment to create real, sustainable jobs (Her Majestys
Government, 2000, p. 11) . However, the SEU claim (SEU, 1999b, p. 6) that jobs are
now based more on knowledge and that there will be ever fewer unskilled jobs in the
future seems curiously blind to burgeoning demand for labour in low-skill areas such as
retailing and tourism. This emphasis is evidence of what Lister (2000) criticises as the
fetishism attached to paid work and the consequent but implicit undervaluation of other
forms of (largely female) workin community and voluntary work and unpaid care in the
home.
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The gendered nature of traditional governmental understandings of work and unem-
ployment is well established. Unemployment, explains Pascall (1997, p. 212) , is a male
concept that implies that without paid work there is only idleness. Campbell (1993) is
not alone in arguing that not only is unemployment a masculine construction, it is
fundamentally associated with the construction of male identity through labour, so that
loss of a job is equated with loss of identity. Throughout much of the twentieth century,
(un) employment was an issue central to practically every governments social policy
agenda, although the focus tended to fall upon issues of male employment and a loss of
paid work. In this, and other ways, we can identify an inherent gender bias in ofcial
counts of unemployment that has often rendered invisible the problems of female
unemployment or the role of women in unpaid work (Gazeley & Thane, 1998, p. 183) .
Given this inbuilt imbalance, the centrality of paid work in SEU discourse is notable.
It also emphasises some important shifts in government thinking. In particular, govern-
ment programmes such as the New Deal demonstrate a greater susceptibility to the
philosophies of the New Right and to American attitudes to the presumed evils of welfare
dependency. Under successive Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s,
welfare benets were consciously trimmed to minimal levels and the homeless and the
unemployed coerced into a raft of programmes aimed at getting people off the streets
and/or into work. This was achieved through making receipt of many of the benets
conditional upon participation in such programmes. The process has been continued,
albeit with a more social focus, by the current Labour administration.
Yet, as Rake (2000, p. 108) argues, whilst the New Deals are apparently neutral, open
to all and operating through an employment service committed to the promotion of
equal opportunities, their design results in a signicant gender imbalance. The New
Deals which have had the most money directed through them are both concerned with
employment (the New Deal for the Long Term Unemployed [NDLTU] and the New
Deal for Young People [NDYP]) and participants are required to be either medium-term
or long-term claimants of benets. But, as Rake (2000, p. 108) points out, women,
especially those in couples, are less likely to claim Job Seekers Allowance, and where they
do they are more likely to claim for a short period. Up until the last quarter of 1999,
only 16% of participants in the NDLTU and 27% of participants in the NDYP were
women. Critically, however, this is a reection of the gender of claimants onlynot a
reection of the gender balance of the unemployed population or those in paid/unpaid
work in Britain today. Thus, whilst the New Deal builds the problem of long-term male
unemployment into the solution to social exclusion, this response also contributes to the
broader problem of social exclusion, as there is no attempt to counter the underrepresen-
tation of potential female claimants. Instead, the New Deal tends to perpetuate inequality
and the gender imbalance in its treatment of paid and, especially, unpaid work. In this
way, Rake (2000, p. 108) suggests, the New Deal threatens to ignore work that creates
the very social fabric upon which the economy depends, and upon which, we might
presume, genuine social inclusion also depends.
Conclusions
In shaping new policies and programmes, the attempt to focus attention on the processes
that lead to social exclusion has achieved much in a short space of time. Key initiatives
have included, for example, a 500 million programme aimed at the reduction of
truancy and school exclusions; an allocation of 145 million to reduce rough sleeping to
a third of the current level by 2002; the establishment of a Youth Support Service to
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80 Viewpoint
assist young people into educational and training programmes; and a new programme
aimed at halving teenage pregnancies by 2010. Neighbourhood renewal has also been
targeted through the 800 million New Deal for Communities programme, one of a
range of area-focused initiatives. The New Deals for the unemployed (assisted by the
buoyant state of the UK economy) have helped around 200,000 young people into jobs
(Her Majestys Government, 2000) .
However, the intimate and complex relationships between work, the family and social
relations that lie at the heart of most of the proposed solutions to the problems of social
exclusion remain, in our view, incomplete in their articulation and development. There
are evident tensions between the different discourses that Levitas (1998) has identied
within the SEU analyses and which shape the world-view in its reports. For example, in
its discussions of teenage pregnancy (SEU, 1999a) , the SEU wavers between condemning
the breakdown and collapse of the family, advocacy of a return to work or education for
young mothers, and a sympathetic recognition of the relationship between early mother-
hood and poverty. Similarly, discourses surrounding employment for rough sleepers are
mixed with moralistic assertions, for example, that the explicit intention of the policy is
to deliver clear streets (SEU, 1998b, p. 20) , to free businesses and tourism from the
blight of rough sleeping (SEU, 1998b, p. 1) . The SEU also remains particularly
inconsistent in its treatment of gender. Although the reports strive to be gender-neutral
in their use of language, much of the thinking within SEU policies is, as we have
attempted to illustrate, strongly gendered and traditional in many of its assumptions and
evaluations. The Unit continues to evidence assumptions about gender roles and,
consequently, not all commentators are as condent as the Government about the
measures implemented so far. Morris (1998, p. 241) , for example, states categorically that
womens rights to social inclusion can only be achieved by a fundamental and
far-reaching review of many taken-for-granted aspects of social life. Watson (1999, p. 2)
concurs, commenting that despite decades of feminist activism on issues like poverty and
the welfare state, there remains an urgent need to rmly reintroduce and re-emphasise
the importance of gender to the social policy debate. The Governments discursive
constructions of women and men inuence how policies are targeted at, and affect, both
women and men in their everyday lives. Rake (2000, p. 109) suggests that the concrete
example of the New Deal illustrates that gender bias may, however unwittingly, be
written into the design of government policy and may present a considerable barrier to
the Governments objectives.
Here is the crux. We are in no doubt that there is considerable commitment to policies
which tackle social exclusion; but doubt remains as to whether this is driven by a
progressive or a nostalgic vision of an inclusive society. The SEU is a welcome and
overdue innovation which demonstrates an admirable ability to think outside the boxes
of traditional governance, challenging extant departmentalities both in Westminster and
Whitehall. We should both welcome this and maintain a sceptical distance. On reading
the SEUs representation of social exclusion, we are convinced of the genuine desire to
construct an inclusive society; as yet, however, we remain unconvinced that the new
thinking behind and within the SEU suggests any seismic shift in the ideological bedrocks
of family, work and gender upon which current models of social inclusion are built.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our thanks to colleagues at Staffordshire University and
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particularly to the anonymous referees for their useful and constructive critical comments
on this article.
NOTES
[1] All statistics in this section have been sourced from www.statistics.gov.uk, accessed in June/July 2000.
Some gures have been calculated from published data.
[2] The New Deal is a raft of government programmes aimed especially at investment in urban regeneration
and tackling problems of both long-term adult and youth unemployment. The programme has been
inuenced signicantly by the work of the SEU.
REFERENCES
BROWN, RICHARD K. (Ed.) (1997) The Changing Shape of Work (Basingstoke, Macmillan) .
CAMPBELL, BEATRIX (1985) Wigan Pier Revisited: poverty and politics in the 80s (London, Virago) .
CAMPBELL, BEATRIX (1993) Goliath: Britains dangerous places (London, Methuen) .
CLARKE, JOHN, COCHRANE, ALLAN & SMART, CAROL (1987) Ideologies of Welfare: from dreams to disillusion
(London, Hutchinson).
CROMPTON, ROSEMARY (1997) Women and Work in Modern Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
GAZELEY, IAN & THANE, PAT (1998) Patterns of visibility: unemployment in Britain during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, in: GAIL LEWIS (Ed.) Forming Nation, Framing Welfare, pp. 181226 (London, Routledge, in
association with the Open University).
HER MAJESTYS GOVERNMENT (1999) The Governments Annual Report, 19981999 (London, The Stationary
Ofce) .
HER MAJESTYS GOVERNMENT (2000) The Governments Annual Report, 19992000 (London, The Stationary
Ofce) .
HOWARTH, CATHERINE, KENWAY, PETER, PALMER, GUY & STREET, CATHY (1998) Monitoring Poverty and Social
Exclusion: Labours inheritance (York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation).
LAND, HILARY (1999) The changing worlds of work and families, in: SOPHIE WATSON & LESLEY DOYAL (Eds)
Engendering Social Policy, pp. 1229 (Buckingham, Open University Press).
LEVITAS, RUTH (1998) The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour (Basingstoke, Macmillan) .
LISTER, RUTH (1997) Tracing the contours of womens citizenship, in: CLARE UNGERSON & MARY KEMBER
(Eds) Women and Social Policy: a reader, pp. 1324 (Basingstoke, Macmillan) . (Originally published in Policy and
Politics, 21, [1993].)
LISTER, RUTH (2000) Gender and the analysis of social policy, in: GAIL LEWIS, SHARON GEWIRTZ & JOHN
CLARKE (Eds.) Rethinking Social Policy, pp. 2336 (London, Sage) .
MORRIS, LYDIA (1998) Legitimate membership of the welfare community, in: MARY LANGAN (Ed.) Welfare: needs,
rights and risks, pp. 215257 (London, Routledge, in association with the Open University).
PASCALL, GILLIAN (1997) Social Policy: a new feminist analysis, 2nd edn (London, Routledge) .
RAKE, KATHERINE (2000) Into the mainstream? Why gender audit is an essential tool for policymakers, New
Economy, 7, pp. 107110.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1997) Social Exclusion Unit: purpose, work priorities and working methods (London, Cabinet
Ofce) .
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1998a) Truancy and School Exclusion (London, The Stationary Ofce) .
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1998b) Rough Sleeping (London, The Stationary Ofce) .
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1998c) Bringing Britain Together: a strategy for neighbourhood renewal (London, The
Stationary Ofce) .
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1999a) Teenage Pregnancy (London, The Stationary Ofce) .
SOCIAL EXCLUSION UNIT (1999b) Bridging the Gap: new opportunities for 1618 year olds not in education, employment or
training (London, The Stationary Ofce) .
WALBY, SYLVIA (1999) Transformations of the gendered political economy: changes in womens employment
in the United Kingdom, New Political Economy, 4, pp. 195213.
WATSON, SOPHIE (1999) Introduction, in: SOPHIE WATSON & LESLEY DOYAL (Eds) Engendering Social Policy,
pp. 111 (Buckingham, Open University Press).
WILSON, ELIZABETH (1977) Women and the Welfare State (London, Tavistock) .
WILLIAMS, FIONA & PILLINGER, JANE (1996) New thinking on social policy research into inequality, social
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exclusion and poverty, in: JANE MILLAR & JONATHON BRADSHAW (Eds) Social Welfare Systems: towards a research
agenda, pp. 132 (Bath, Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy).
www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase (2000) Various statistical datasets (accessed June/July 2000) .
YOUNG, JOCK (1999) The Exclusive Society (London, Sage) .
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Book Reviews
Geographies of New Femininities
NINA LAURIE, CLAIRE DWYER, SARAH HOLLOWAY & FIONA SMITH, 1999
New York, Pearson Education
225 pp., 16.99 $27.53 paperback
ISBN 0582320240
What kind of stories, positions and theories constitute British feminist geography in the
contemporary period? How are they related to the theoretical and real-world transitions
explored by human geographers over the last few years? And what kind of feminist
politics do they reect and inspire? Geographies of New Femininities engages very well with
the rst of those two questions; it is less good on politics and inspiration.
The book takes as its starting point current media hype about changes in gender roles
and expectations as symbolised by successful, strong and sexy women who apparently
have it all. The less spoken aspects of the social and economic changes which provide
the context of this success are the interest of what follows. In order to address these
aspects, the authors attempt to bring together some of the current geographical thinking
on globalisation with more cultural literatures on contemporary identity formation. By
engaging these two areas of thought, their intention is to arrive at a more sophisticated
understanding of what it means to be female in the contemporary period, and unsurpris-
ingly, there is no one account of that position. The notion of new femininities is duly
presented as the way to think about how women are differently female within particular
times and places; as racialised, sexualised, classed subjects; and as fractured, complex,
contradictory selves. This conceptualisation is clearly geographical, its basic premise
being that location makes a fundamental difference to how we are female. The book uses
a schematic framework to explain the relationship between geography and female
identity: different geographies of femininity are produced within different places; through
spaces, sites and networks of social relations; and through cultural discourses on femininity. In
that framework, femininities and geographies are not just related, they are mutually
constituting. In other words, our different ways of being female are closely bound to
where we are and where we are from, and those places/spaces/sites/discourses are in
turn shaped by the ways in which we perform our femininity within them
With this conceptual groundwork laid out, the book proceeds to explore the relation-
ship between new femininities and new geographies via four case studies, each constitut-
ing a separate chapter (employment-creating workfare schemes in Lima, Peru; mothering
and childcare practices in Shefeld, Britain; neighbourhood activism in Leipzig, East
Germany following German reunication; and identity negotiations of British born South
Asian Muslims in London, Britain) . Before those case studies are detailed, there are two
intermediary chapters. The rst outlines their shared context of social and economic
change in substantive terms. Neo-liberal restructuring, the collapse of Communism,
and globalising cultures and politics are problematised as overly monolithic accounts of
DOI: 10.1080/09663690120026343
83
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84 Book Reviews
change, the importance of attention to particular pathways of change is highlighted, and
a more nuanced problems and possibilities approach suggested. This approach is
helpfully related to changes in the way that gender has been theorised within feminist
geography over the past two decades. The second intermediary chapter will be particu-
larly useful for undergraduates interested in doing feminist research as it deliberates on
the practice of writing the book and carrying out the research as feminists. However, it
leaves unaddressed some more difcult questions about the contemporary nature of
feminist geographical research which it might be useful to reect upon.
The last two chapters of the book are positioned to draw together the four case studies
by making connections with the bigger world picture of economic restructuring and the
feminisation of labour, and to the bigger theoretical picture of post-colonial and
post-structuralist thought. In my mind this is where the book disappoints, mainly because
it attempts to have it all/ways. The problem can be gauged in the repeated assertion
that new femininities are complex, contradictory and negotiated. These words are
heavily overused throughout the book, the conclusions of each chapter are geared to
make the same point, and the closing chapters continue the theme. What we have here
is a book-length exemplication of a particular paradigm of thought, a conventionalised
way of regarding the geographies of identity formation in modern times. This is not to
say that such interpretations are entirely wrong-headed, only that nods to other
interpretations (for example, interpretations that are more pointedly focused on power
relations, social conict and contradiction, incommensurable differences, class interests)
need to be more thoroughly engaged with. Saying gender and class are mutually
constitutive is the easy bit; whether that intersection separates women politically is a
more difcult question and one that is not properly considered. For example, Smiths
chapter on neighbourhood activism in post-unication Germany notes that neighbour-
hood alliances between women and men are stronger than any female agenda; and
Dwyer notes that the appropriate ways of being female for working-class Muslim girls
(in many domestic and cultural practices) have more in common with white working-
class girls than with their middle-class counterparts. Those kind of insights are too often
left hanging, disconnected from class-based social theories which would give them
alternative meaning. Similarly, Laurie concentrates on the deconstruction of mother/
worker binaries in Limas workfare programme, over and above the class politics of such
programmes; and Holloway works with notions of choice and constraint in childcare
practices rather than the way that the imperatives of capitalist restructuring reproduce
unequal access to full-time mothering and different kinds of work between unequally
classed mothers. Here the problem is not the scale of interpretationthe intentional
focus on pathways rather than thoroughfaresit is rather the selectivity of the interpre-
tations themselves, geared as they are to female alliances and communities. Perhaps this
is what makes these stories feminist, as opposed to socialist or socialist feminist, but given
the subject matter (workfare, childcare, neighbourhood activism, social identity-making) ,
the sidelining of more class-based interpretations would seem to be a lack. The politics
of these stories are clearly in keeping with the liberal-sounding conception of feminist
politics expressed by the authors:
The purpose of feminism as a political movement is not to reject all tra-
ditional understandings of femininity and suggest one single more enlight-
ened version; rather it is to empower a diversity of women to make their own
choices about their lives, recognising that the choices that women make will
differ. (p. 195)
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Book Reviews 85
This predominant language of difference and choice is the hallmark of a middle-class
feminism which continues to deny analytical and political priority to issues of equality
and social justice. The idea that post-structuralist epistemologies and methodologies can
only lead to a politics of difference and choice is one that has started to be challenged
by a re-engaged socialist feminism (see Phillips, 1999) . The reason why such a political
imaginary nds no place in this book is open to questionmight current undergraduate
audiences be alienated by such an engagement? Is political ambivalence a better
reection of new and uncertain times? Or, is this simply a reection of the classed
positionalities of the publishers, authors and anticipated audiences in whose everyday,
situated lives such a politics nds no resonance? If that is the case, then there is nothing
new about this particular kind of feminism.
CHRIS HAYLETT, University of Birmingham, UK
REFERENCE
PHILLIPS, ANNE (1999) Which Equalities Matter? (Cambridge, Polity Press).
Homeworkers in Global PerspectiveInvisible no more
BORIS, EILEEN & PRU
GL, ELISABETH (Eds), 1996

New York, Routledge
327 pp, 14.99/$20.99 paperback
ISBN 0415910072
Home-based paid work is predominantly female. Across the globe, womens homework
accounts for the lions share of unregulated and unprotected economic activity. As with
debates concerning the supplementary nature of womens part-time employment in the
formal economy, homeworking attracts both censure and praise: censure for its appalling
record of exploitation; praise for apparently providing workers with greater exibility to
balance home, work and family life (OReilly & Fagan, 1998, pp. 24) . Disregard and
inertia stem from this ambivalence, conditions particularly discomting to those pressing
for the protection and organisation of low-paid, home-based workers. It is consequently
a call for action and greater awareness of the diverse nature and circumstance of
home-based enterprise which underpins this edited collection. Drawing on feminist
theory, international case studies, action research and recent experience of political
organisation, Boris & Pru gl provide a platform on which to draw homeworkers in from
the margins. Each of the 14 contributors examines the experience of homeworkers from
a household perspective, situating individual workers within broader structures of
production, reproduction, consumption and culturally specic transformations of patri-
archy (p. 91) . By taking the household as the essential setting and recognising that
homework often represents one aspect of multiple income earning (p. 188) , this book
contributes to a growing body of literature contesting the false dichotomy of work versus
employment. A whole economy approach in effect recognises a continuum of paid,
unpaid, informal and non-material activities and offers a particularly constructive shared
space in which First and Third World feminist research can be seen to overlap (Smith
& Wallerstein, 1998; Williams & Windebank, 1998) .
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86 Book Reviews
Many women homeworkers are essential breadwinners yet their paid work is typically
discounted, not least because it frequently replicates (behind the scenes of the formal,
public, economic stage) domestic skills and tasks of nimble ngered assembly naturalised
as given feminine attributes. Where homework involves the production of clothing, ne
embroidery and woven carpets, for instance, the aesthetic qualities of the nished articles
frequently mask repetitive and physically demanding labour, reconstructing this instead
as an artistic pursuit historically undertaken by women in the home. Here, women
homeworkers speak of the rich colours and ne feel of the fabrics and clothing they
produceitems which they themselves can rarely afford to consume. By including
case-study material which examines the spatial modications that occur in homes
accommodating economic activity (chapter 4) as well as the sociocultural construction of
homework (chapters 6 and 7) , this volume provides a useful cross-disciplinary perspective
to key social science debates. It brings into sharp relief the interdependence of home and
work, production and reproductionthe blurring of private and public realms. While
the contributors largely focus on the everyday lived experience of women, we are
reminded that homework is gendered rather than entirely feminised. In the Midwestern
USA, for instance, when husbands and wives both work at home assembling auto parts,
men assume the heavier tasks andmost candidlywhenever power tools [are] used
men are more likely to participate (p. 187) .
The book is structured in three parts to reect theory, practice and policy contribu-
tions. It draws on a developing international network of homework advocates, with case
studies from most regions of the world where homeworking is taking place. The editors
rst set the scene by suggesting a new era in the prole of home-based work, one in
which women homeworkers feature centre stage. This renewed awareness of home-
worker issues emerges out of a 1990 conference held in the Netherlands. The core aim
is to expose the diverse voices of homeworkers balancing home, work and gender
relations in specic local contexts of global market restructuring. In chapter 2, Eileen
Boris provides a historical overview of homework in the industrialised world. This
highlights the current vacuum concerning the regulation, protection and organisation of
home-based workers. Pru gl then concludes part one with a theoretical overview of
gender and development models. In the second part, the everyday lived experience of
homework is brought to life through case studies from Mexico (Faranak Miraftab) ,
Lahore (Anita M. Wiess) , Brazil (Alice Rangel de Paiva Abreu & Bila Sorj) , Iran (Zohreh
Ghavamshahidi) , Java (Dewi Haryani Susilastuti) and Finland (Minna Salmi) . Each
chapter sets out culturally-specic constructions of homework relations. This global
perspective points to some profound contradictions between the oldest form of home-
work, clothing [and] the newest form, telecommuting (p. 248) . Disappointingly, space is
not afforded to the close examination of this paradoxthat homeworking is favoured for
environmental reasons in advanced industrial economies (heralding a return to pre-
industrial forms of working which harness post-industrial telecommunications technol-
ogy) , while in less developed countries homeworking represents a necessary response to
structural adjustment. The book moves on to look at state policies and the organisation
of homeworkers, drawing on case material from India (Jeanne Hahn) , Canada (Alexan-
dra Dagg) and the Philippines (Lucita Lazo) . In addition, Christina Gringeri questions
the extent to which homeworking can be seen to constitute development, Prugl exposes
the contradictory manner in which states deal with homeworkers in labor law and Jane
Tate concludes by mapping the growth of homeworker networks internationally.
The message at the heart of this book is an important onethat the time has come
to move beyond a static portrait of homeworkers as always powerless and oppressed with
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Book Reviews 87
little room for individual decision-making, and furthermore, that a key role exists for
increased dialogue between First and Third World feminist research and debate. Rather
than being an anachronistic remnant of earlier modes of production (p. 211) , homework
is growing in number and scope. As a consequence, it is no longer possible or acceptable
to consign homeworkers to invisibility in either academic or political communities.
HELEN JARVIS, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
REFERENCES
OREILLY, JACQUELINE & FAGAN, COLETTE (Eds) (1998) Part-time Prospects: an international comparison of part-time
work in Europe, North America and the Pacic Rim (London, Routledge) .
SMITH, JOAN & WALLERSTEIN, IMMANUEL (1992) Creating and Transforming Households: the constraints of the
world-economy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).
WILLIAMS, COLIN & WINDEBANK, JAN (1998) Informal Employment in the Advanced Economies: implications for work and
welfare (London, Routledge) .
Utopian Bodies and the Politics of Transgression
LUCY SARGISSON, 2000
London, Routledge
170 pp., 55.00/$90 hardback, 16.99/$27.99 paperback
ISBN 0415214629 hardback, 0415214637 paperback
The terms utopia and ethics have great and justied currency in geography at the
moment, as witnessed by the recent publication of such books as David Harveys Spaces
of Hope (2000) and Proctor & Smiths collection, Geography and Ethics (1999) . Lucy
Sargissons interdisciplinary book, with its feminist approach to questions of ecology and
utopia, therefore promises a welcome contribution to geographical debates from one
located in the discipline of politics. Sargisson describes Utopian Bodies as an attempt at a
new approach to thinking about theory (p. 5)one that considers transgressive
utopianism central in addressing the problematic and difculties characterising current
political life. Her transgressive utopianism uses theoretical literatures (feminist, utopian,
deconstructive and ecological) and research, predominantly qualitative, in ecologically-
oriented intentional (i.e. planned) communities in order to argue for a paradigm shift in
consciousness (p. 3) that will transform how we relate to others and to the world around
us and produce new conceptual spaces. Indebted to various strands of post-humanism
circling academic discourse, she argues that many contemporary feminist utopias and
historical utopias ought not to be understood as blueprints for the perfect society, and
thus that a transgressive utopianism must constantly eschew closure in favour of an open
multiplicity that works to transform existing frameworks of thought and action (pp. 23) .
The book comprises a consideration of the relationships between the bodies of theory
with which she works; descriptions of and commentaries on the British intentional
communities she has researched (including the famous Findhorn Foundation in Scot-
land) ; a reformulation, inspired by the results of her qualitative research, of the
public/private dichotomy and of property; and a rumination on SelfOther relations.
How to think through the articulation between feminist, utopian and ecological
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88 Book Reviews
theories is an urgent project, and Sargissons desire to open up this theoretical terrain will
undoubtedly have the sympathy of readers of Gender, Place and Culture. The book itself,
however, manifests signicant problems. Utopian Bodies builds closelyI would say too
closelyon Sargissons earlier book, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (1996) . Despite the
authors long-standing interest in the theoretical texts she works with in both books, her
arguments display a skimpy and often sloppy engagement with literature, particularly
deconstruction and psychoanalysis, that she seems not fully to have mastered. Seriously
misunderstandings and opaque lines of argumentation occur. At one point, Sargisson
describes a trend in ecofeminism that, she writes, shares certain features with post-
structuralism and takes what is claimed to be a non-essentialist (metaphysical?) approach
to sex and gender differences (p. 21) . Sargisson seems at sea in terms of what the
relationship between non-essentialism, post-structuralism and metaphysics might bea
grave problem given the books commitment to exploring precisely these kinds of
relations. In addition, Sargisson makes rapid and unjustiable moves between her
informants voices and philosophical contentions: having quoted a Findhorn community
members decision not to point out to other members that they are burning the soup (so
that they can learn to take responsibility for their actions) , Sargisson follows with the
bizarrely incongruous sentence, Letting go is a key characteristic of what, in deconstruc-
tive theory, is called a feminine or Gift economy (p. 111) . While I understand her wish
to analyse her informants non-disciplining behaviour through a post-structuralist lens,
she neither adequately analyses her informants statement nor justies her move from
statement to theoretical judgement. Indeed, throughout the book the frequent invoca-
tion of theoretical terms tends to substitute for serious consideration of the framework
from which they emerge and the challenges that their use poses.
One might want to rebut my comments by arguing that Sargisson is more interested
in opening up a dialogue with those engaged in ecological and utopian politics than in
providing new philosophical readings of, say, Cixous or Levinas (two of her valorized
authors). But what makes it difcult to take this slant is the odd sense of discomfort the
text manifests when discussing the views espoused by these intentional communities.
Despite Sargissons sympathies with those involved with intentional communities, she
often shies away from whole-hearted engagement with their ideas. In response to an
erstwhile member of Findhorn, who now believes that voluntary work is actually
self-exploitation, she simply says, This is a challenging view (p. 99) ; after a description
of what she maintains is an uneconomic system of food production on Findhorn, she
states, Without wishing to particularly endorse these systems, I should like to suggest that
they do represent some fairly complex paradigm shifts on consciousness regarding work,
labour and value (p. 89) . While I am certainly not claiming that Sargisson should agree
with her informants statements, it is surely a cop-out to call beliefs challenging, or fairly
complex but not endorsable, without going on to wrestle substantively with the ideas
advanced. Similar frustrations arise in the sections where Sargisson quotes from her
in-depth interviews with members of intentional communities: I longed for Sargisson to
be able to read their responses better. For Sargissons laudable desire to honour her
interlocutors seems to result in stymieing her at the level of taking their words literally.
She therefore passes by the opportunity to grapple with the fascinating and contradictory
combination of idealism, political strategizing, disavowal, fantasy and acute insight
layered within their comments.
Indeed, both the theoretical and the eldwork-based sections of the book would have
gained much from a greater consideration of the inconsistencies and absences coursing
through these ecologicalutopian narratives. (For example, Sargisson provides no real
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Book Reviews 89
analysis of how the intentional communities organize and imagine sexual difference.) Any
critical engagement with the term utopianism cannot but rub up against the problem of
how to narrate the relationship between the present and the anticipatedhowever
fantasticallyfuture. For Sargisson to aver, therefore, that utopian spaces are free from
constraint, limited only by imagination (p. 153) disavows both the difculty of theorizing
what imagination might mean, and the fact that utopias cannot so easily escape from
the social and symbolic frames of the present. In addition, given that Sargisson frequently
emphasizes the force of bodies of people in mobilizing a transgressive utopianism, it is
surprising that she does not extend her comments on philosophical ideas about subjec-
tivity and the other into a lengthier discussion of how the kind of transgressive
utopianism that these intentional communities perform works to produce certain kinds
of subjectivity and sociality. A more ethnographically-oriented form of participant
observation would have provided more of a sense of how the communities operate qua
communities; instead, because Sargisson tends to engage members individually, we are
given little sense of how the social dynamics of the communities are produced and
transformed.
Sargissons clunky writing style exacerbates all of the problems I have identied. The
gamut of one-clause sentences in particular produces an insistent narrative tenor and,
unfortunately, several bathetic comments. (For example, in a passage discussing Thomas
Mores Utopia, there is the unfortunate sentence, Utopia is subtle [p. 8]) . This is the
moment to lament, once again, the inadequate levels of copy-editing and proof-reading
in much of todays academic publishing; a more adequate editorial process would not
only have reworked many of Sargissons individual sentences but would have shortened
or amalgamated many of the sections that repeat earlier material.
If one manages temporarily to lay aside ones irritation with the books style,
organization, and analytical weaknesses, Sargisson does advance some important ideas
that merit our attention and further consideration. I am thinking in particular of her
argument about how New Age conceptualizations of SelfOther relations are a strange
combination of holism and individualism (p. 145) , and her exemplication of the
important place that excrementand ones proximity to or alienation from itholds in
organizing sociality and community (see pp. 6364) . But here, as elsewhere, her
arguments need to move much more slowly, and to provide measured commentary on
all those crucial termssuch as individualism, New Age, citizen, interdisciplinarity,
transgression and ethicsthat Sargisson likes so much to use.
Sargissons book is clearly colored by a tendency currently sweeping the humanities
and social sciences: the desire to be accessible. Sargisson claims that her book seeks an
approach that is appropriate to diversity and complexity but does not plunge into the
abyss of cerebral incomprehensibility (p. 153) . And here lies one of her biggest problems.
Sargisson claims she wants accessibility to combat the alienating tenor of much of the
theory she uses: the difculty is that her arguments are not clear or precise enough to
succeed for a student or lay readership, and not developed enough to contribute to the
theoretical literature concerning utopian, ecological and feminist theory. Thus, while the
project to which Sargisson is dedicated is a valuable one, the book in many ways reads
like an unnished draft. Sargissons excitement with her favoured texts is palpable, but
she does not manage to convince her readers that she knows either how to represent the
complex theoretical concepts that they contain or to put these concepts to work to
produce new insights.
FELICITY CALLARD, Johns Hopkins University, USA
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REFERENCES
HARVEY, DAVID (2000) Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press).
PROCTOR, JAMES D. & SMITH, DAVID M. (Eds) (1999) Geography and Ethics: journeys in a moral terrain (London,
Routledge) .
SARGISSON, LUCY (1996) Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (London, Routledge) .
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: beauty pageants and national identity
SARAH BANET-WEISER, 1999
Berkeley, CA, University of California Press
280 pp., $48.00/30 hardback, $17.95/11.50 paperback
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World presents a nuanced study of the cultural politics of
beauty pageants. Focusing mainly on the Miss America pageant, Banet-Weiser illustrates
how, in the USA, beauty contests are important sites for the (re) production of feminine
and national identities. The author argues that the Miss America pageant is not merely
about pageantry or kitsch culture, it is also a complex amalgam of civic ritual and
commodied mass-mediated spectacle where the political construction and performance
of American femininity takes place. Miss America is not simply a beauty pageant; rather,
it is an institution through which national identities are constructed and reconstructed in
order to produce a symbolic representation of American virtues and values.
There can be little doubt, though, that Miss America occupies a controversial position
within American society. Feminists argue that the contest represents a celebration of an
oppressive patriarchal society, whilst conservative ideologists herald it as a productive
means through which young women learn self-esteem and condence. Banet-Weiser
critiques the assumed exclusivity of these positions on the basis of her own empirical
research on beauty pageants, which explores how the contestants themselves regard their
own position within these events. Drawing on a number of interesting interviews with
pageant contestants, the author illustrates how, in the cultural and political context of
1990s USA, pageants promote aspects of contemporary liberal feminism (which
encourages individual achievement, self-determination and civic responsibility) , whilst
simultaneously promoting socially and culturally specic notions of beauty, femininity
and female citizenship.
Banet-Weiser begins her work by explaining how Miss America has evolved from a
bathing beauty contest into a civic event that is about respectable femininity and
typical American beauty and morality (p. 26) . Here the author argues that Miss
America ofcials promote respectable femininity by regulating contestants social behav-
iour. Strategies employed include chaperoning contestants and a strict no-alcohol policy.
In addition, the pageant also promotes specic notions of individual achievement and
self-determination by insisting that all contestants are either enrolled or are preparing to
enrol in a college or university. To support this commitment to education, the pageant
offers educational scholarships to contestant winners at the local, state and national
levels.
Once Miss Americas rationale of respectability, morality and education has been
established, the author moves on to explore how and what kinds of feminine subjectivities
are performed during the pageant. The author concentrates on three areas of the
competition: the swimsuit contest, the interview and the talent contest. Banet-Weiser
regards the swimsuit contest as both a commodication of gender and a display of
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physical and moral discipline. This argument is illustrated through a discussion of the
ways in which the contestants swimsuit-clad body is regarded as a site where specic,
morally and socially acceptable notions of American femininity are played out.
Miss America does not only expect its contestants to physically perform/conform in
certain ways, it also expects certain kinds of performance in the interview and talent
sections of the competition. Here the author highlights the importance of the self-
construction of contestants as modern, liberal thinking, cultured political subjects.
Contestants have to demonstrate that they would not only be worthy of being a physical
representation of the people, but that they would also be a worthy political and cultural
representative of the nation. Banet-Weiser illustrates how, through coaching participants
for the interview contest, Miss America ofcials inuence the kind of political and
cultural representative that is produced by encouraging contestants to respond to
questions with non-political responses that celebrate the values of liberal education,
multiculturalism, a commitment to heterosexuality, family and individualism. These are
all issues that are considered by Miss America ofcials to be representative of contempor-
ary American values.
With regard to the talent section, Banet-Weiser argues that the choice of talent not
only communicates a commitment to social taste and culture, but it also reects the
gendered role of women as cultural gatekeepers of the nation. This leads to appropriate
performances being regarded as those that are civilising, so high cultural forms such as
singing and dancing are valued above lower forms such as stand-up comedy. Perhaps
more importantly though, the author argues that the talent competition is a racialised
event where every talent (even those performed by non-white women) is socially and
culturally coded as white. This, argues Banet-Weiser, is a reection of the pageants
long-standing history of racial exclusion.
Issues of race are explored more fully in chapter 4. Here Banet-Weiser focuses on the
story of Vanessa Williams who, in 1983, became the rst African-American Miss
America. The author explores how Williamss achievement proved that the USA was
truly both a multicultural society and a land of opportunity. However, 10 months into
her reign Williams was forced to resign when Penthouse magazine published photographs
that depicted her performing sexual acts with a white woman. According to the author,
Williamss fall from grace highlights clearly how the Miss America pageant presents a
performance of feminine subjectivity that manages and disciplines any threat posed to
national culture by subversive racial and sexual codes.
Banet-Weiser then goes on to present the stories of two other extraordinary Miss
Americas (who did not fall from grace) ; Bess Meyerson (1945) and Heather Whitestone
(1995) . Here it is argued that both were crowned because they assuaged fears about
ambivalent denitions of who and what a nation should be. Therefore it appears that the
kind of Miss America that is chosen depends very much on the political climate in which
the contest is held. Meyerson was the rst (and only) Jewish Miss America and
Whitestone was the rst Miss America with a disability (albeit invisible, as she is deaf) .
This book provides a well argued and convincing case for using popular cultural
forms, such as beauty pageants, as a vehicle for studying idealised, gendered notions of
national identity. One small criticism of Banet-Weisers work is that, for me at least, she
fails to clearly establish the links in her introduction between notions of femininity and
their importance to gendered notions of national identity. Perhaps a consideration of
some of the work by feminist scholars whose work engages with theories of nations and
nationalism (such as Nira Yuval-Davis) would have been of use here. Despite this
criticism though, the authors use of her own empirical research offers an interesting and
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92 Book Reviews
informative way of exploring the complexities and ambivalent nature of beauty pageants
as sites where notions of American femininity are (re) created. What is particularly
refreshing is the way in which Banet-Weiser, as a feminist scholar herself, uses the voices
of the contestants that she interviewed to critique the popular feminist opposition against
beauty pageants. As the author argues, these women are not simply victims of an
oppressive patriarchal society, but rather are agents within complex processes of gender
formation that are inuenced by both patriarchal notions of femininity, and contempor-
ary liberal feminism. It is how these women try to resolve the tensions that are produced
by patriarchy and feminism that is of interest in Banet-Weisers study.
NICHOLA WOOD, University of Edinburgh, UK
The Diary of Annie Elliott Perrin: soliloquy of a farmers wife
DALE B.J. RANDALL (Ed.) , 1999
Athens, OH, Ohio University Press
416 pp., $39.95 hardback, $19.95 paperback
The farmer sees nothing/but the needs of the farm,
And in robbing his wife/He sees no harm.
As the years roll by,/With toil and strife,
This good wife tires/Of this sort of life
These lines, taken from Soliloquy of a Farmers Wife, a poem written by an anonymous
farm woman in 1918, helped to inspire the title of Dale B.J. Randalls edited volume of
his grandmothers diary. The diary of Annie Eliott Perrin is a daily record of her life for
the entire year of 1918, and 3 weeks of 1917. In her small diary, titled Lest We Forget,
she records a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Florida, as well as the daily struggles, triumphs
and tragedies of life on a family farm in the Midwest during the last year of World War
I and the height of the Spanish inuenza epidemic. Randall has transcribed the diary,
added footnotes for many and various historical details, written an introduction, provided
background information on Annies family, and included several letters written by Annie
and her children. This rich text reveals much about Annie Perrins life and times, and
is a landmark work in the history of family farming and the everyday lives of farming
women in the early twentieth century.
A preface and introduction precede the sections where the diary is transcribed and a
postscript follows them. There are four appendices, several pages of research sources and
an excellent index. The preface gives the reader some background information to the
project, the authors relationships to the people and the place, and where Randall
describes the book as no lament for things lost nor a sentimental remembrance of
things past. On the contrary I have attempted to place Annies present (p. xx) . The
introduction provides background on Annies entire family, the area in which she lived,
and much information that the reader would not nd in the diary. This, along with the
family letters and the postscript, give the reader a context for understanding what Annie
chose to put down in her little diary. The size of the book only allowed for 50100 words
per entry, so we are only allowed a small, fragmented view of Annies life through the
diary. Randalls research and attention to detail allow the reader to see a much larger
and more complete picture of her life.
Randall divides the diary into four sections, which reect the seasonal changes in farm
life, as well as major events in the Perrins family life. The rst section: Our Trip to
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Florida, records Annies trip with her husband and youngest son to Florida in search of
farmland. This section ends when the Perrins return to their farm in Ohio and resume
farming. From Early Spring to Early Summer records daily life on the farm in Ohio
during the spring planting season and the departure of the oldest Perrin son, Henry, for
military training. From Henrys Furlough to Harvest Time depicts the activities of
farming in mid-summer, events in the War, and Henrys leave from training to help with
farm work. From First Frost to Years End describes the outbreak of Spanish Inuenza,
the end of the War as well as the farm work taking place at the end of the year. Images
of sheet music, advertisements, political cartoons, war propaganda and a treasury of family
photographs all work to place the reader in the story of Annie Perrins life. In addition
to the images, the parallel text of footnotes on the subjects, people, places and events in
Annies diary give the reader perhaps more information about Annies times and places
than even she had access to!
As much as this poignant depiction of everyday life on a farm in Ohio appeals to me,
I am disturbed by the fact that this book perpetuates the image and identity of farm
women as the wives of farmers. This monolithic paradigm persisted throughout the
twentieth century, and has worked to deny recognition of womens contributions to farm
operations. It is doubly ironic that Annie Perrin should be given the identity of a farmers
wife in this volume, when she herself gives ample evidence that she contributed more to
the farm than simply being the wife of the farmer. Having said that, Annie herself may
have identied as a farmers wife, but rather than shore up this worn-out image, this book
could have worked to emphasize how women contributed to the entire farm operation,
not only managing the entire household, but producing food for the family and for friends
and neighbors, as well as helping out with productive farm tasks in times of need.
The poem, from which the title comes, while oversimplifying the issue, addresses the
fact that womens work on farms was, and often still is, unvalorised, unwaged and
unrecognized. Therefore, I am puzzled why Randall chose to emphasize Annie Perrins
status as a wife of a farmer, not her role as a producer of food on a family farm. I hope
this decision has to do with setting the historical context for the book, for Annies work
was unwaged and unvalorized in her time. But I am reluctant to wax nostalgic about this
aspect of the history of family farming.
Overall, this book shines with the sensitive, poignant description of Annies life and
experiences. The almost loving detail reects and conveys the editors relationship to the
places and the people of Annies diary. This book will become another excellent resource
for research on women in agriculture, the history of womens lives in the USA, and will
allow for the voices of women from the past to be heard in the present, so we can write
herstory back into history.
AMY K. TRAUGER, Pennsylvania State University, USA
Detective Agency: women rewriting the hard-boiled tradition
PRISCILLA L. WALTON & MANINA JONES, 1999
Berkeley, CA, University of California Press
315 pp., $45/28.50 hardback, $16.95/10.50 paperback
ISBN 0520215087 paperback, 0520215079 hardback
Is genre ction a suitable vehicle for feminist enquiry? Can it succeed in popularising and
furthering a politics marginalised by the backlash conservativism of the Reagan and
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94 Book Reviews
Thatcher years? According to Priscilla Walton & Manina Jones, it can and does. Detective
Agency is an unashamedly optimistic account of feminist detective ction that argues
consistently and persistently for the radical potential of genre narrative. Walton & Jones
take issue with the assumption that the misogynist roots of hard-boiled narrative preclude
its reclamation by feminist writers, and assert that it is possible not merely to invert but
actually to revise the stereotypes of the formula. They argue that genre exists not simply
as an abstract, complete, and unchanging set of rules for behaviour, but rather as a set
of related performances through which agency is possible (1999, p. 84) . The authors
belief in feminist detective agency sets them against the trend of much current criticism
of the genre, but they pursue their case with conviction, and in the process have
constructed a wide-ranging and readable account of the phenomenal success of the
female hard-boiled investigator.
Walton & Jones begin with a discussion of the increased recognition of women as
consumers by the popular ction market place. However, the rise of the feminist
consumer is set against the political hostility faced by feminism since the late 1970s.
Feminist politics retreat toor invasion ofthe realm of popular ction is fraught with
contradictions and the authors are well aware of the ironies of such a transition. The
mass economic validation of a potentially subversive literary form is just one of many
paradoxes identied by the bookwhich is at its best when it brings such tensions to the
fore. By arguing that the conditions of production applying to genre ction change the
nature of the relationship between reader and text, Walton & Jones suggest that the
crime novels disposability encourages the reader to become an active producer or user
of the resource. The lack of originality characteristic of the generic textual product
encourages not passive immersion, but innovative interaction: crime ction should be
conceived as a space of negotiation in which communities of readers and writers, far
from being passive reproducers or consumers of pre-existent forms and values, can
exercise a kind of collective agency (1999, p. 46) .
So far, so good, for feminisms appropriation of the mainstream. But the book is not
without its problems, and depends too often on unsubstantiated claims of likely reader
responses. Although Walton & Jones set out in the tradition of Janice Radway and Tania
Modleski to examine the desires and responses of an active readership, the basis for
much of their analysis is, by their own admission, anecdotal, and is based upon a very
small survey of Internet users. Consequently, the book feels more convincing, and is
certainly more stimulating, when it supports its claims through recourse to such theorists
as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis. Murder mysteries, argue the
authors suggestively, repeatedly dramatize, address, and renegotiate fantasies, fears, and
conicts in the lives of their readers. Through reverse discourse, with its performative
gender possibilities, these texts can both inscribe an empowered female subject and
rework the conventions of subjectivity that make that position problematic (p. 113) . Yet,
although these ideas are mobilised, they are not examined in depth. Butler, in particular,
is adopted, adapted and abandoned in short order, and the result, although enticing, is
not wholly satisfying.
Walton & Jones are more effective on the subjectivity and narrative implications of the
female private eye/I. Central to their construction of agency is the connection they
posit between the discourses of autobiography and hard-boiled ction. The intimacy of
the rst person voice enables the detective to narrate herself (p. 156) , shifting the
emphasis away from investigative closure to the ongoing and unresolved story of the
detectives personal life. To insert a womans life into a narrative subject position
traditionally associated with male agency does not necessarily invite collusion or compro-
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Book Reviews 95
mise. Rather, it opens up the possibility of a renegotiation of structures of knowledge,
and a reconsideration of the power invested in oppressive social and political systems.
Both women and detectives have traditionally been outsiders, and this afnity makes
what is supercially a very masculine position ideal for feminist recuperation.
Nonetheless, Detective Agency begs a number of questions. The authors arguments are
largely based not on a sustained analysis of some key ctional examples, but rather on
a series of convenient sound-bites. The reader is presented with countless enticing
fragments that emphasise radical potentialities, but whose meanings are rendered
uncertain by their decontextualisation. These brief examples indeed suggest self-
referentiality and the performativity of genderbut to what extent do the novels as a
whole sustain these critical positions? Walton & Jones would argue that the crucial point
is that readers interact with the text, negotiating and constructing for themselves a text
of female agency. To a certain extent, such a claim is incontrovertible, but it must
equally be acknowledged that the construction of these texts as sites of feminist agency
is itself unstable, and these ctions retain the possibility of a conservative reformulation.
The nal chapter of Detective Agency turns a sharply critical eye upon Hollywoods refusal
of the agency opened up by genre ction, offering relatively extensive accounts of lms
such as The Silence of the Lambs and V. I. Warshawski. This level of analysis would have
been welcome in the earlier chapters of the book, which are often in danger of dancing
around, rather than engaging with, the actual texts of female detection.
Detective Agency makes a welcome addition to the critical debate surrounding feminist
crime ction, and provides a valuable counterbalance to Sally Munts (1994) more
pessimistic appraisal of the genre in Murder by the Book? However, it is in the end a
somewhat frustrating account, seeming to represent the tip of a critical and textual
iceberg. It would have been good to have seen a little more of the substance beneath the
sea, and to have been given a clearer sense of how these ctions work as narrative
wholes, rather than as resources providing isolated incidents in support of Walton &
Joness remorseless argument for female detective agency.
GILL PLAIN, University of St Andrews, UK
REFERENCE
MURT, SALLY (1994) Murder by the Book (London, Routledge) .
Children and the Politics of Culture
SHARON STEPHENS (Ed.) , 1995
Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press
352 pp., $69.50/44.00 hardback, $20.95/13.50 paperback
One of the contemporary frustrations of doing research on young peoples geographies
is that no matter how the work is framed, it is often viewed as second place to the larger
processes of economic, political and social re/production: the activities of young people,
the social conditions and circumstances of their lives, are read as the heartfelt postscript
to other, more momentous and important issues.
The ideal of a modern youth and childhood speaks, then, to two conditionsboth an
(increasingly unachievable) vision of how childhood ought to be, and a testimony to the
commonly held, if unspoken, belief that most young people live everyday lives removed
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96 Book Reviews
from larger societal issues. To do work on youth and childhood risks appearing to engage
in a secondary politics that runs behind, not ahead of critical engagements with larger
social processes.
Much of the now prolic and insightful work on the geographies of young people
unwittingly colludes in this imaginary, focusing on momentary appropriations of space
and place, subjective expressive elements of youth culture, and micro-scale conicts over
space in and outside the home. Partly, this work makes the important assertion that these
are signicant struggles in their own right. Partly, of course, this narrowing of focus arises
out of a proper insistence that any politics of identity is necessarily uid, complex, and
continually renegotiated, demanding an ethnographic sensibility that cannot be simply
read off, or abstracted against, economic structures or institutional frameworks. But, with
some exceptions, the ways in which these stories might feed back into larger social
processes often get lost.
Set against this work, Children and the Politics of Culture is a rare nd. It provides a
wonderful bridge to this divide and it does so in a manner that raises new and salient
questions, not only about the structures of social reproduction affecting youth and
childhood but also the nature of global economic restructuring, and the breakdown of
tenacious precepts of modernity.
The insights and contribution of this book owe a large part to its editor and author
of the introductory chapter, Sharon Stephens who, sadly, died over a year ago. Her
introduction makes the book read as far more than simply the sum of its parts. Stephens
argues that the hardening of divisions between adult and child, male and female,
underscore the logic of many features which formed the basis of modern capitalist
society, including divisions between a public and a private sphere, consumption and
production and objective and subjective needs. If these distinctions have been a salient
basis for building modern capitalism, what then becomes of them as capital restructures
in a new round of development and underdevelopment we currently label globalisation?
It is in raising these questions that Stephens forces us to rethink the social reproduction
of youth and childhood, not as a byproduct of new rounds of global economic restructuring
but intrinsic to its very core, indeed, foreshadowing the social forms of new globalisms.
In doing so, she provides considerable food for thought, not only for those in the eld
of youth and child studies but, perhaps more importantly, for those addressing issues of
economic growth and change.
As Stephens argues, the restructuring of youth and childhood must be thought about
in relation to and in conjunction with a movement from nationally-based to globally-
organised capitalism and from modernity to postmodernity. In this transition, however,
societies are not pre-tted with the right social subjects, and Stephenss work forces us
to think productively about the slippage between the social reproduction of young people
today and the imagined futures of globalisation tomorrow. The process of social
reproduction and struggles around the hope, aspirations, hearts and minds of young
people are not an addendum to this process; indeed, in preguring it, they should be
thought at its very core.
By raising questions about the intersection between these processes, Stephens reopens
in new and insightful ways an analytical borderland between economics and its tendency
towards abstracted models and sociology, more often concerned with the messy ca-
caphony of daily life. The introduction is worth the read on its own for Stephenss
provocative framing, but each of the articles as well has much to offer.
The book is divided into four sections addressing childhood at risk, cultural identity
and the state, minority culture, and the recovery and reconstruction of childhood. Each
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Book Reviews 97
section weaves back into the larger theme and growing premonition that something
about modern childhood has changed in fundamental ways. Chapters by Field and Cho,
for example, explore how intense schooling practices (education as endless labour
p. 53) have eroded modern childhood, and another by Ivy addresses the ways in which
the appropriation of discourses of child abuse and violence by adults addressing their
inner child has had a similar effect. Others consider how young people (especially recent
immigrants) negotiate complex and multiple cultural identities against the United
Nationss imaging of their rights to a singular culture (Hall, Mandel), childrens struggles
with and against state policies concerning their proper socialisation (John, Shiraishi) ,
explicit (and gendered) dictates concerning population policy (Wee) , the destruction of
childrens cultures through direct acts of colonisation (Da Chuna) or indirect impacts of
environmental disaster (Stephens) , and nally, childrens involvement in acts of war,
including the necessity of recovering some of the lost innocence of modern childhood
(Ndebele, Reynolds) .
It is rare to nd a book that challenges ones thinking on so many levels, and I would
recommend it highly. That said, as an entry into a new way of thinking, the book leaves
many tantalising issues unexplored. First while the theme of globalisation is introduced
early on, this is only intermittently addressed in many of the chapters, most focusing
more specically on the political nature of cultural engagements. Future research might
address more extensively the recursive nature of discourse about youth and childhood in
Western and non-Western settings, the role of non-governmental organisations in the
face of privatisation and the reasons for increasingly Balkanised strategies (between North
and South, nations, and regions) of social reproduction. Nevertheless, Children and the
Politics of Culture represents an important shift in the way we conceptualise the lives of
young people, a direction which one can only hope will be emulated in subsequent
works.
SUE RUDDICK, University of Toronto, Canada
Cultural Geography: a critical introduction
D. MITCHELL, 2000
Oxford, Blackwell
325 pp, $59/55 hardback, $2695/1599 paperback
Given that only six years ago Don Mitchell was declaring his belief that Theres no such
thing as culture (1995, pp. 102) , he may, at rst, appear a somewhat unlikely candidate
to have produced this critical introduction to cultural geography. However, in many
ways, Mitchell is perhaps an ideal candidate. He takes as his starting point the premise
that we live in a world dened by continuous culture wars (p. xiii) and one might
consider that he is well qualied to comment, having direct experience of at least two
different types of culture wars: those waged over the production of identities, commodi-
ties and public spaces along with those equally contentious, if not nearly so bloody or
signicant, subdisciplinary wars over what constitutes culture and of how it might be
understood and studied. Mitchell has fought a particular position in relation to the latter,
adopting a critical stance towards what he sees as the continued reication of culture
arguing that cultureeven the socially constructed culture of new cultural geogra-
phycannot be understood as an ontological construct with explanatory or causative
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98 Book Reviews
powers but rather, a struggled over set of social relations shot through with structures
of power dominance and subordination (p. xiv) . He remains committed to the notion of
culture as ideology, inherently linked to and inseparable from the wider political
economy, and thus to addressing, from a broadly materialist/Marxist position, the
central question (as he sees it) of who makes culture and to what end. The arguments
found in his earlier work are here rened to provide a nuanced, sophisticated, articulate
and thoroughly political conceptualisation of cultural production and cultural change.
Mitchell has lost none of his feistinessthis is a man who declares at the outset that he
is not only out to make an argument about cultural geography but also to win it.
Although arguably masculinist in tenor, I found Mitchells conviction entirely refreshing
and a welcome respite from the relativism that has plagued so much recent work in
cultural studies.
The book is divided into three parts. The rst provides a historical review of the
principle theories and debates that have informed cultural geography since its inception.
It moves smoothly from the foundational work of Carl Sauer through the rejection of
superorganicism to the rise of new cultural geography before concluding with a
summation of Mitchells critique of the reication of culture and the promotion of his
alternative framework of a political economy of culture (p. 78) . This section was
extremely well developed and will undoubtedly prove a valuable resource and reference
for those teaching undergraduate cultural geography. My only reservation was that more
attention was not given to other theoretical developments such as post-structuralism,
postmodernism and post-colonialism that have played a pivotal role in shaping cultural
geography. It is surely not coincidental that they are all the much maligned post words
and unsurprisingly, Mitchell defends his silence on the basis that much of this theorising
is diversionary, self-referential, raried, obscurantist and theory for theorys sake, acting
only to deect the researcher from the main gamethat of enacting what Harvey
(1984, p. 9) once referred to as an applied peoples geography, Mitchell argues rmly
that geography should recommit itself to the analysis of, and intervention in, social and
political struggles and not waste time with too much academic over-intellectualising
(p. xvii) . Sympathetic as I am to that view, I am not as convinced as Mitchell that this
goal and the understanding and application of, for example, post-colonial theory, are so
mutually exclusive. He might, for example, have drawn more extensively on the work of
Dyer (1997) , Koybayashi & Peake (1994) or Spivak (1999) in order to develop a more
robust theoretical underpinning to his chapter on race.
The second part focuses on that most traditional object of research in cultural
geographythe landscape. These chapters draw on a number of case studies (Johnstown,
Pennsylvania; Vancouvers Chinatown and the Sacre Coeur basilica in Paris) that might
seem overly familiar to many, although admittedly, not those (undergraduates for
example,) as yet unfamiliar with the canonical texts of new cultural geography. Although
synthetic, this section also works well in bringing together and explicating for the
uninitiated the complex and sometimes opaque literature on landscapes as systems of
social reproduction, as forms of regulation and as ideological representations.
The nal part of the book comprises ve chapters that explore different aspects of
cultural politics, including: Political actions and strategies of resistance (Tiananmen) ; Sex
and sexuality (gay spaces and the politics of AIDS) ; Feminism and cultural change
(gendered divisions of space) ; Cultural geographies of race (racial stereotyping, apart-
heid) ; and Geographies of belonging and exclusion (nationalisms and identity) . By
Mitchells own admission (and in keeping with a long tradition in cultural geography) ,
the book is largely Eurocentric and this is nowhere more evident than in the choice of
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Book Reviews 99
case studies used to illustrate these chapters. Mitchells explanation for the absence of any
chapter focusing on the developing worldthat he felt incompetent to write on an area
outside the realm of his experienceseemed rather reminiscent of Cloke et al.s
justication for not including a chapter on feminist geography in Approaching Human
Geography (1991 p. xi) ; ergo, that they thought it best to leave it to others better qualied.
Thankfully such concerns have not prevented Mitchell from writing an accessible and
informative chapter on feminism and cultural change in this workI remain curious as
to why it should have prevented him writing an equally engaging chapter on some aspect
of development and cultural changeone that perhaps might have linked into his
broader concerns on cultural rights and justice.
There is of course, only so much that can be squeezed into a word limit and it would
be curmudgeonly of me to grumble about what remains unexplored in what is otherwise
an extremely enjoyable, informative and meaty text. I am certain that the vigour of the
work will appeal greatly to students of cultural geography everywhere, as will the
grounded and contemporary nature of the empirical examples. I found the book
challenging and refreshing and I would recommend it to all those with an interest in the
future of cultural geography.
BRONWYN PARRY, University of Cambridge, UK
REFERENCES
CLOKE, PAUL, PHILO, CHRIS & SADLER, DAVID, (1991) Approaching Human Geography: an introduction to contemporary
theoretical debates (London, Paul Chapman) .
DYER, RICHARD (1997) White (London, Routledge) .
HARVEY, DAVID (1984) On the history and present condition of geography: an historical materialist manifesto,
Professional Geographer, 36, pp. 111.
KOBAYASHI, AUDREY & PEAKE, LINDA (1994) Unnatural discourse: race and gender in geography, Gender, Place
and Culture, 1, pp. 225243.
MITCHELL, DON (1995) Theres no such thing as culture: towards a reconceptualization of the idea of culture
in geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20, pp. 102116.
SPIVAK, GAYATRI (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: toward a history of the vanishing present (Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press).
Leisure/Tourism Geographies: practices and geographical knowledge
DAVID CROUCH (Ed.) , 1999
London, Routledge
299 pp., 18.99/$31.99 paperback, 55/$90.00 hardback
ISBN 0415181097 paperback, 0415181089 hardback
This edited collection aims to bring together new research on leisure and tourism. As
such, it broadly presents leisure/tourism as an encounter between people and space.
Crouch suggests that the subject plays an imaginative, reexive and semi-detached role,
and that in the end the subject holds fractured multiple knowledges that are closer to our
lived practice. However, I am not convinced by this argument, but rather believe that
individuals engaged in tourism/leisure practices do not always recognise or even want to
acknowledge the overt and subtle ways in which our knowledges of other cultures and
spaces are constructed. Nevertheless, the collection certainly covers a very broad range
of leisure/tourism practices, from yachting (Laurier, pp. 195214) to the uidity of
work/leisure boundaries in sports stadia (Bale, pp. 4658) and the leisure practices of
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100 Book Reviews
caravanners and allotment keepers (Crouch, pp. 257276) . The range of the book is
ambitious, but it does contain some fascinating case studies of leisure/tourism practices
and knowledges. The style of the book then reects this theme in that the cases present
a kaleidoscope of knowledge, or, as Crouch puts it, a series of mutually inected and
uid images rather than a map (p. 12) . Overall, the individual chapters deal with the
broad themes of space, knowledge and embodiment.
The book provides clear and concise case studies of leisure/tourism practices and
knowledges, which draw on fascinating material and on diverse theoretical approaches.
Of particular interest to me were three chapters that related to the politics of tourism.
Aitchisons contribution (pp. 5973) on the gendered representation of Stirlings heritage
draws attention to the politics of imagery and tourism. The chapter demonstrates how
Braveheart Country is a gendered landscape that has to be contextualised in terms of
its performances of power. Likewise, Warrens chapter (pp. 109125) indicates how the
operation of Disneyland Paris replicates colonial relationships more commonly found in
the links between Western nations and the developing world. His chapter provides an
insightful analysis of how Disney behaved in a colonial manner in its dealings with
Europe. The chapter also demonstrates how local Parisian workers attempted to resist
Disney dominance through, for example, claiming the right to wear red lipstick and
black pantyhose at work, since that most famous of Disney icons, Minnie Mouse, wore
just such items. In this way, Warrens chapter neatly intersects with the contribution on
theme parks by Philips (pp. 91108) . Whereas theme parks claim to expand our
knowledge as tourists, they only serve to conrm the knowledge we arrived at the park
with. He cites the examples of theme parks based on the American wild west which seek
to conrm and entrench visitors existing ideas about that time and place. My own
experience of theme parks and traditional village tourist attractions resonates with this
chapter. In Xcaret in Mexico, tourists are encouraged in their stereotypes of indigenous
Mayan peoples with displays of corn grinding and bloody sacricial rites, and of Ladino
Mexicans as sombrero wearing, dancing and drinking muchachos. Likewise, Ndebele
village attractions in Zimbabwe and South Africa present the Western visitor with men
dressed in animal skins and women wearing intricate beadwork outts.
It is in this arena that the book could have placed more emphasis on the interaction
between leisure/tourist practitioner and host. The collection generally concentrates on
the subject doing the leisure/tourism activity. In this way, not enough attention is
focused on the kinds of social, political, environmental and economic effects that are
visited on individuals, communities, countries and regions. The collection indicates at the
outset that tourism/leisure is about an interaction between people and between people
and space. Consequently, the book would have beneted from a few contributions that
specically dealt with the impacts of choosing a particular leisure/tourism activity on the
hosts. In addition, the collection lacks an overall conclusion at the end of the individual
contributions to draw together the common themes. Nevertheless, Leisure/Tourism
Geographies: practices and geographical knowledge is a fascinating book that provides excellent
case studies and offers a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives on
leisure/tourism issues. The collection covers a number of disciplines which any student
of leisure, politics, geography, sociology and womens studies will nd very useful.
ROSALEEN DUFFY, Lancaster University UK
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