Moving from the mid-seventeenth century to the near present, this book marks physical and conceptual changes across European towns and how gender was implicated and imbricated in those changes.
The first book to look at gender as a specific subject in urban history across Europe
A great overview of a very broad timespan
Will be of interested to gender historians as well as urban historians
'Exploring gender in the European town, Deborah Simonton provides essential reading for everyone interested in the many dimensions of urban life.'
Dag Lindstrom, Uppsala University, Sweden
'Gender in the European Town offers a cutting-edge and nuanced survey of how gender informs the urban experience, during a critical period of expansion and evolution. Highlighting the complex interplays of identity, politics, space, belonging, economy and society in small towns and large cities across the breadth of Europe, this volume will be a core text for students and scholars that wish to understand the important role of towns in shaping everyday life and processes of historical change. A remarkable achievement by a leader in the field.'
Katie Barclay, University of Adelaide, Australia
Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor, emerita, at the University of Southern Denmark, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Visiting Professor in Cultural History, University of Turku, author of A History of European Women's Work and Women in European Culture and Society: A Sourcebook, and General Editor of Routledge History Handbook on Gender and the Urban Experience.
Introduction 1. Absolutism and Enlightenment: Urban Belonging 2. Urban Economies 3. Civic identity and Governance 4. Places and Spaces 5. Bourgeois Century: Shifting Parameters, Shifting Meanings 6. The Transformative Urban Economy 7. Politics and Civic identity 8. Shaping Towns 9. Streets, Sociability and Consuming the Town 10. Re-imaging the City in the Twentieth Century 11. Civic Impulses 12. Work in the modern town 13. Living in Towns 14. Navigating Urban spaces 15. Coda: Imagining the Town, Past and Present