“A Feminine City? Women, Shopping Spaces, and the Creation of the late 19th Century Downtown”

Mona Domosh
Dartmouth College

Feb.3,  2005
7:30 p.m.
Willard Smith Library

Despite popular belief, women were not born to shop, but instead have been constituted as the shoppers of society for particular reasons. So too, downtowns have not always been spaces of consumption, but instead became feminized shopping spaces in the mid to late 19th century for particular reasons. In this talk Mona Domosh examines how space structures our understanding of gender. She explores why and how gendered norms were literally inscribed into the spaces of late 19th century New York City, and the ways in which those spaces reinforced Victorian notions of separate spheres.

Mona Domosh, Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College, received her PhD from Clark University. She is the author of Invented Cities: The Creation of Landscape in 19th-century New York and Boston (1996), the co-author of Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (2001), and co-editor of Handbook of Cultural Geography (2003). Mona Domosh is founding co-editor of Gender, Place and Culture: a Journal of Feminist Geography.