Gender Roles

Gender Roles and the Division between Public and Private Space

Social relationships are required for community. For centuries an essential component of community has been face-to-face communication and participation in public life, situated in public space. Public space is a manifestation of community and a medium through which community is sustained. Public space is where community rituals are enacted and role identity performed. Identity, particularly gender identity, is manifested in public through performative acts and defined [Page 536]through community affiliation and integration. In many cultures, public space has been deemed the realm of men and private, or domestic, space the realm of women. This division between public and private space, with men alone welcome in public, has been reflected in many cultures across history such as Athens in the fifth century BCE, aristocratic Japan in the tenth century CE, and present-day Saudi Arabia. Feminine and masculine gender role behaviors often revolve around the relationship to the home or private realm. Gender-based geographic segregation of the sexes has resulted in disparity of status, power, and position in community.

Gendered access to sites or spaces of community interaction has presented disparate opportunities and barriers. The significance of gender as a restricting factor in the use of space has garnered much attention since the 1980s. At that time feminist scholars directed their attention to the ways in which gender roles control and define people's use of public space, whether it be accessing sites of entertainment or commerce or becoming part of the life of the community. Community membership has been associated with the ability to engage in public life without fear of negative judgments, harassment, or abuse, but throughout history and in most cultures, public space has been gendered to exclude women, or to include them only in limited or highly scripted roles. Historically, “public women,” those who ventured unchaperoned into public places, were viewed as fallen women, prostitutes, or unrespectable in some other way (for example, as lesbians). Women in public created risk to social order and to themselves. Fear and the threat of violence limited women's use of public spaces. Leslie Weisman, a professor of architecture at the New Jersey School of Architecture whose work focuses on socially responsible design, has argued that women, “unable to regulate their interactions with male strangers in public places, are robbed of an important privilege of urban life: their anonymity. Women learn to be constantly on the alert, both consciously and unconsciously, in order to protect vulnerable boundaries from male trespasses” (Weisman 1992, p. 69). Women feel uncomfortable in deserted places at night because they fear getting mugged or raped. Sometimes women are raised to be afraid of certain places. Yet women are not alone in their perception of risk in public places.

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