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.

Out for Glamour in Africa critically reflects on how Black women utilized Drum magazine, a leading publication in Africa during the era of independence, for political empowerment and constructing notions of Black femininity. Wanjirũ G. Mbure terms the concept of femme urbAfricana, a model of Black femininity depicted as urban, political, fashionable, paradoxically Afrocentric, heteronormative, and transnational. Foregrounding stories of the women who embodied these traits and the social, political, and economic forces that shaped their presence in Drum, Mbure argues that these representations of Black women from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States produced a novel form of Black urban femininity. Utilizing a breadth of archival materials from cover girl photographs, advertisements, and columns, to readers’ comments, Mbure reveals the complex relationship between the Black urban woman and the era’s contested ideals within a transnational matrix.