A history of the activism that made public spaces in American cities more accessible to women.

From the closing years of the nineteenth century, women received subtle—and not so subtle—messages that they shouldn’t be in public. Or, if they were, that they were not safe. Breaking the Gender Code tells the story of both this danger narrative and the resistance to it.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts. In doing so, Hickey explores how gender segregation intertwined with other systems of social control, as well as how class, race, and sexuality shaped activists' agendas and women's experiences of urban space. Drawing connections between the vulnerability of women in public spaces, real and presumed, and contemporary debates surrounding rape culture, bathroom bills, and domestic violence, Hickey unveils both the strikingly successful and the incomplete initiatives of activists who worked to open up public space to women.

A field-defining collection of new voices on gender, feminism, and geography.

Feminist Geography Unbound is a call to action—to expand imaginations and to read and travel more widely and carefully through terrains that have been cast as niche, including Indigenous and decolonial feminisms, Black geographies, and trans geographies. The original essays in this collection center three themes to unbind and enable different feminist futures: discomfort as a site where differences generate both productive and immobilizing frictions, gendered and racialized bodies as sites of political struggle, and the embodied work of building the future.

Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a range of field sites, contributors consider how race, gender, citizenship, and class often determine who feels comfort and who is tasked with producing it. They work through bodies as terrains of struggle that make claims to space and enact political change, and they ask how these politics prefigure the futures that we fear or desire. The book also champions feminist geography as practice, through interviews with feminist scholars and interludes in which feminist collectives speak to their experience inhabiting and transforming academic spaces. Feminist Geography Unbound is grounded in a feminist geography that has long forced the discipline to grapple with the production of difference, the unequal politics of knowledge production, and gender’s constitutive role in shaping social life.