Gendered Spaces

by Daphne Spain

In hundreds of businesses, secretaries -- usually women -- do clerical work in "open floor" settings while managers -- usually men -- work and make decisions behind closed doors. According to Daphne Spain, this arrangement is but one example of the ways in which physical segregation has reinforced women's inequality. In this important new book, Spain shows how the physical and symbolic barriers that separate women and men in the office, at home, and at school block women's access to the socially valued knowledge that enhances status.

Spain looks at first at how nonindustrial societies have separated or integrated men and women. Focusing then on one major advanced industrial society, the United States, Spain examines changes in spatial arrangements that have taken place since the mid-nineteenth century and considers the ways in which women's status is associated with those changes. As divisions within the middle-class home have diminished, for example, women have gained the right to vote and control property. At colleges and universities, the progressive integration of the sexes has given women students greater access to resources and thus more career options. In the workplace, however, the traditional patterns of segregation still predominate.

Illustrated with floor plans and apt pictures of homes, schools, and work sites, and replete with historical examples, Gendered Spaces exposes the previously invisible spaces in which daily gender segregation has occurred -- and still occurs.

Genres: Gender, Theory

314 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Daphne Spain is an American academic who studies urban and environmental planning. Ms. Spain's scholarship addresses the relationship between the built environment and social structure, with an emphasis on gender. A long-term research interest is the way in which groups of women change the urban environment. Her books include Constructive Feminism: Building Women's Rights into the City, Gendered Spaces, and How Women Saved the City.

Reviews

[Parlei · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has a lot of insightful tools for conceptualizing space and how space and social relations can be considered as interdependent and interactive systems. In practice, however, the way the social relations are considered are problematic, often relying on outdated or erroneous scholarship. The chapter on "Nonindustrial Societies" in particular contributes to perpetuating stereotypes about societies for which it is clear not enough research was done. For example, Bourdieu's article "The Kabyle House" was written back in 1970 and even he returned to it for correction (see Silverstein, “Of Rooting and Uprooting: Kabyle Habitus, Domesticity, and Structural Nostalgia”) I also think this work relies too much on a dichotomy of men = in power and women = not in power, which is a tenuous and unstable position to have for such a complex subject and reduces women to the victim position more than is necessary or even reality.

[mahatmanto · Rating 2 out of 5]

gak terlalu bagus.
tidak menuntun ke jurusan baru dari diskursus tentang gender dalam arsitektur.