Introduction: minorities and gender in contested urban spaces special issue

ABSTRACT

While studies on urban minorities have interested scholars in history, sociology, ethnography and geography for a full century, ‘minorities within minorities’ are more often than not absent. Gendered groups within ethnic or religious minorities in the modern metropolis experienced doubled- or even tripled marginalisation in the urban landscape. This introduction provides an overview of the scholarly work that has been done on ethnic/religious and gendered minorities in the modern era (1750-1950). It points out the strengths and promises of the current field, but more importantly, shows that due to lack of traditional sources, the field needs to push methodological boundaries and find new ways to bring back these voices into scholarly research. Mediating on some possible avenues, the introduction introduces the three articles and how these articles push the field forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• gender
• city
• urban space
• minorities

In Wayne Wang’s 2002 film, Maid in Manhattan, Jennifer Lopez’s Marisa travels to and from work in New York every day. She travels by subway from the Bronx to Manhattan, from her home to the upmarket hotel that she cleans rooms in. While scholars have focused on representations of the ‘domestication’ of Latina women through domestic service,¹ it is the ways in which Marisa moves around the city that interests us. While Marisa is working, she bypasses the imagined Manhattan – the New York conjured in the minds of tourists and postcards – glimpsing it through the train window. It is only when she is courted by Chris, a wealthy and powerful white guest at the hotel, that she moves within these famed spaces of the imagined New York. Maid in Manhattan may not make the rank of a ‘classic’ film but it highlights some of the themes of this special issue, particularly how ‘minorities within minorities’ navigate urban spaces and when their presence is acknowledged. In particular, Marisa’s declaration to Chris that working-class, Latina women like her are either stereotyped by or invisible to the white guests of the Manhattan hotel surely resonates with today’s gendered and ethnic, religious or migrant minorities. The dangerous consequences of the invisibility of, and injustice against, women and transwomen of colour in urban spaces have been brought into sharp relief in the consciousness of white majority societies. The apparent media and police disinterest in the murders of Blessing Olusegun, Sarmistha Sen and Diamond Kyree Sanders, among countless others, are especially noticeable in contrast to the response that the murders of white women have elicited in the last few years.² But the urban marginalisation of minorities within minorities is not a new phenomenon. Alongside a push for ‘modernity’ in the nineteenth century, came an obsession with entertainment and hierarchies: those who were to be ‘protected’ and those who were to be exhibited.³ And so, at the same time that a reform movement was established to combat a ‘white slave’ trade, real or imagined,⁴ urban spectators were invited to gaze at the remains of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman trafficked as a curiosity from the Dutch Cape Colony to Europe in the late eighteenth century. A full cast of her naked body remained on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris until the 1970s. ⁵ Marginalisation, and the intersections of oppression, have always, and continue to, shape the experiences of those who inhabit urban spaces. With this in mind, we wonder what we might learn about everyday life in the city when we apply concerns of today’s metropolis onto historical settings, considering them securely within their specific temporal and societal contexts.

Spurred by today’s social movements, such as Take Back The Night, Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, that highlight experiences of women of ethnic or religious minorities and their double – or even triple, since women are far more likely than men to have a low income – marginalisation in urban landscapes, this special issue aims to incorporate this contemporary criticism into historical work. Studies on urban minorities have interested scholars in history, sociology, ethnography and geography for a full century. However, while women have been the focus of many studies on migration, particularly related to trafficking and the sex trade,⁶ more general studies on migration and migratory groups have tended to refer to ‘migrants’ or ‘minorities’ as being primarily men, or ungendered subjects.⁷ As a result, migration is represented as a story of men and mobilities, rendering these minorities within minorities absent.⁸ We are writing at an opportune time, as research over the last 10 years has highlighted new methods that expediate excavations of historical urban minorities within minorities.⁹ As such, we believe that it is time to develop our collective understanding of the embedded continuity of gendered and minority marginalisation in the modern metropolis. This special issue, and particularly this introduction, seeks to explore how female identities were constructed, and how these expectations of gender were complicated or supported by additional expectations of being a migrant or minority within a specific urban context.

Crucially, this special issue is interested in how we as historians can find agency in urban marginality in particular historical contexts.¹⁰ Rather than replicating gendered and ethnic, religious or migrant minorities as victims of the authoritative view of the city that historical sources created by white, male, upper class and Christian men visualise, we want to find and analyse how footprints by minorities within minorities became daily subversions of the official grid. What emerges across the articles is the sense that different groups occupy different cities, spatially and imagined, even when they are physically in the same or connected spaces. As Ross Perlin explores in relation to language and the immigrant city, while there’s ‘no money or power to make these names stick, [...] each is a story wrapped in a pun and sealed with a wink, a message of belonging both to the city and to a distant homeland’.¹¹ While this has previously been separated into private and public space,¹² or the cite and ville, it is our contention that people occupy different imagined spaces and, as a result, there is always contestation over the use of public space. These different spaces are then layered upon each other, and it is only when there is a clear intersection with the dominant narrative or imagined space that they are brought into the visible symbolic landscape. As Katherine McKittrick notes in relation to Black women’s worlds, the ‘connections, across the seeable and unseeable, the geographic and the seemingly ungeographic, and the struggles that indicate that the material world is assessed and produced by subaltern communities’ need to be interrogated.¹³ Essentially, we consider which methodologies could be used to increase the visibility of different ‘cities’ and bring them into conversation with each other.

The authors in this special issue have been encouraged to think about how gendered minorities occupied, resisted, and were recognised within public spaces over two centuries. We have chosen the time period 1750 to 1950 as it represents a crucial time in the development of modern urban spaces due to the onset of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. We decided to end in 1950 due to the shifts in societal roles brought about by the end of the Second World War, increased numbers of slum clearances and the growth of the suburbs which changed the make up of the ‘inner city’.¹⁴ Much has been written on this post-war period, leaving an interesting space for comparison across cities in flux during an earlier time. For the articles featured, ‘gendered minorities’ has been interpreted to mean women within ethnic minorities or women who have migrated, regionally or internationally, into new spaces. These women may not have been minorities in terms of proportion – in some migration groups such as the post-Famine Irish, female migrants outnumbered their male compatriots, particularly in urban settings¹⁵ – but they remained minorities were in terms of position in society and power. We note that each of these minorities within minorities could be further complicated by considering disability, minority language status, and sexuality. And while it would be futile to present all the literature on gender and urban history, we want to use this introduction to consider some of the intersections between gender, urban spaces, and visibility in the city and urban record. We then engage with some of the theories and methodologies that are currently being used, in this special issue and elsewhere, to investigate how the lives and loves of minorities within minorities in urban history are being highlighted by colleagues across different disciplines. Throughout the special issue, we hope to explore the ways that expectations of gender were shaped and subverted by movement through the city, whether through what was viewed on the pedestals of Budapest, the neutrality of the spaces between home and work, and some of the ways that we, as urban historians, can situate spatial and experiential diversity in historical space.

Women and gender in the city

While what constituted ‘the city’ has shifted over time, the constitution and contestation of urban space on gendered lines has been present since at least 3,500 BCE.¹⁶ From the mid-eighteenth century, rapid population growth in urban centres, prompted largely by increased industrialisation and migration from rural areas, led to a further reshaping of these spaces. Boundaries, often gendered and frequently racialised and classed, were imposed, pushed at and, at times, surpassed. For men and women, the city offered new opportunities and possibilities, in terms of financial power, gender expectation, sexuality, and excitement.¹⁷ However, there remained a tension between the city as a ‘space of liberation and the city as a space of danger’.¹⁸ The city as a space of danger was both reality and representation, and women were frequently the target of such worries. They were accused of being out of place and ‘the source or sign of urban problems’.¹⁹ Women on and in the streets risked association with ‘public women’ and ‘street walkers’, euphemisms for sex workers. In some cities, this implied connection with impropriety held an additional legislative threat. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869, inspired by French regulation, allowed British and Irish police officers to arrest any woman that they suspected of prostitution (broadly defined), subject them to physical examinations for venereal disease, and forcibly detain any found to be infected.²⁰ At the same time, the urban space provided more opportunities to push back against these attempts at control of where women should and should not be seen. While the city has been portrayed as a masculine space, in contrast to the feminised domestic space, historians since the 1980s have emphasised the ways that women resisted confinement to the private sphere, through choice and through necessity. The twin blade of hyper visibility and invisibility, combined with some economic freedom – especially for working single women and girls – allowed for organising and, particularly as the nineteenth century progressed, organised responses to threats to their safety and freedom.²¹ Through engagement with, and in, the public space, women were able to ‘reshape the city and its social relations, often by creating liminal spaces in the community where women had more power and authority than they did in either the home or the workplace’.²² It was through movements in the urban fabric, in-between these two places, that women had most freedom to act upon their agency.

But, who is expected in a space frequently impacts who is found. While the city has traditionally been understood as a masculine space, in opposition to rural, feminised, ‘metaphorical “wild zones”’, it was particularly in urban public spaces that this construction of what it was to be a man or woman was played out.²³ Engaging with ‘gendered cartographies of viewing’²⁴ allows us to explore the ways that women saw and shaped their worlds and the boundaries that others sought to place upon them. Urban spaces are often presented as frenetic, constantly in movement, both in terms of physicality and progress. The place of migration and mobility – frequently understood as a transformative process – therefore adds an important lens to this research into gender and the urban space.²⁵ As people moved into and around the city, opportunities for cross-class encounters were increased, presenting additional interactions for contesting and enforcing gendered expectations.²⁶ Domestic service, for example, so often bound to the home and women’s place in it, was a highly mobile occupation, requiring staff to inhabit the urban space and ‘embedded them within local communities’.²⁷ For many of the women studied in this special issue – those who migrated to urban spaces, either across national borders or from rural areas – these cartographies of viewing were further complicated by religious and ethnic identities which risked conflict with the dominant power structures of the space they were entering. As women were already ‘out of place’ in a masculine space, the ways that they brought these different parts of their identity together provide intriguing opportunities for understanding the ways that the urban space acted as a stage for gender performance, and for considering how the represented city reflects the realities of minorities, gender, and the city.

Everyday practices and the right to the city

To find and study the imagined and real cities of these minorities within minorities, we turn to activist and feminist approaches to the city. As briefly mentioned above, the unfolding of Me Too, the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter, Stop Asian Hate and the Fridays for Future climate action forced our societies to confront the inaccessibility, inequality, and danger of public spaces for non-white groups and those not identifying as men, and thus especially gendered ethnic minorities. The city’s inability to cater for the diversity of its population is not new. As it developed and redeveloped during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, municipal powers and city planners’ spatially authoritative processes often erased areas inhabited by lower classes and ethnic minorities, perceiving them as disordered, unhealthy, immoral, uncivil, odorous, loud and dangerous.²⁸ In their stead, an urban grid that favoured material manifestations of political ideals, commercial values and national identities emerged.²⁹ Henri Lefebvre argues that this spatial manipulation and exploitation at the hands of the capitalistic nation-state ‘flattens the social and cultural spheres. It enforces a logic that puts an end to conflicts and contradictions’.³⁰ To ensure this logic, poor and migrant people were often removed from their homes and forced to relocate into unknown areas, making space for institutions and buildings that adhered to new urban standards. The Haussmannisation of the modern city, which imposed straight and wide boulevards upon the narrow mazes of medieval quarters, radically changed Europe’s urban faces – physically and socially. Professions like peddling and street crying disappeared as the deodorisation of Paris removed urban milieus that carried their sounds.³¹ Animal markets and butcheries were relocated into the suburbs of Copenhagen, quarantining the sight and odour of animals, blood and raw meat.³² With the introduction of the automobile, the main part of the street was assigned to vehicles, leaving a grid of pavements and crossings for people to use to navigate the city. From the eighteenth century onward, urban populations had to deal with constant and unjust infrastructural changes that imposed dislocation, disorientation, and order on, above all, the poorest and newest inhabitants.

But public space was not only an arena for authorities to shape according to their ideals in order to control citizens. Demonstrations, strikes, coup d’états and revolts carried potential for political and social change, while also filling streets and squares with other and opposite meanings.³³ Likewise, prostitution, vagrancy and children playing challenged the organisational function of public space.³⁴ Even the mundanity of everyday life contested a city’s ordered logic: the city of the official map was constantly subverted through local practices from below.³⁵ Addressing the wide motorways planned in lower Manhattan in the 1950s, Jane Jacobs famously emphasised the disconnection between urban authorities and the communities that inhabited the area, arguing that the plan did not consider the needs and desires of the people that used the city on an everyday basis.³⁶ In refusing to move, linger, and act according to prescribed patterns, activists like Jacobs reminded authorities of the diversity of the urban population and rendered the different faces of the city visible. Many of those engaging in these visibility raising activities were not politically motivated. They were just trying to survive another day in the city. Nonetheless, the city of mundane and everyday practices has been understood to contest the narrative imposed by its authorities. Michel de Certeau emphasises that ordinary people are

walkers, Wandersmänner [and, might we add, Wandersfrauen], whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write … […] The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.³⁷

He argues that bodily movements through a city, despite the imposed urban structure they inhabit, are neither rational nor planned but belong to the various, obscure, and other intentions of the masses. These intentions are not only original and inventive expressions, but also compromise and contradict the homogeneous ideals of authorities. The physical exertions belonging to the masses refuse to be collected and inserted into any one organised ‘story’ – or city, to use our introductory image of layered imaginative understandings of urban space. People’s movements are ‘microbe-like, singular and plural practices’,³⁸ fragmented and individual, negating administration and suppression. Believing in individuality and agency, de Certeau’s turns our gaze from representational and oppressive urban systems towards everyday people and their ‘everyday practices, […] lived space [and] disquieting familiarity of the city’.³⁹

In a similar spirit, and as a response to student protests in Paris at the end of the 1960s, Lefebvre advocates for people’s ‘right to the city’. While he, counter to de Certeau, argues that the logic of the city can only be subverted through revolutions,⁴⁰ the urban, mundane, everyday life is likewise conceptualised as the true city. Lefebvre juxtaposes these everyday practices with the imposed capitalistic structure, arguing that the city should be used rather than valued. To Lefebvre, a revolution that restructures the city according to everyday practices upends capitalism’s grip on urban societies – stuck as they are in producing and exchanging⁴¹ – and turns the city into a work of art, accomplished together by its diverse inhabitants.⁴² Crucially, people’s right to the city is not only a political goal but also a cultural revolution. As such, it holds potential to both heal segregation and allow the city to enter a state of becoming, constantly changing meaning according to people’s needs and desires.⁴³ Building upon Lefebvre’s notion, Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air praises the role of culture in connecting inhabitants in the contradictory mixture of dizziness, agitation, turbulence, and possibility that is modernity.⁴⁴

While Lefebvre and Berman both viewed people’s right to the city as a call for action to renew the urban order of their contemporary societies, as historians, we approach their activist (and Marxist) ideas as theoretical entry points into the urban past. Inspired by their celebration of the ordinary and the social power they deposit in everyday activities, the right to the city provides a lens through which we can view minorities within minorities in the modern city as agents of their own lives and co-creators of the urban environment they lived in. This way, everyday practices – representing new experiential layers of the city – not only reflect the struggles of urban survival but also count as silent contestations against urban authorities. The ways that people travelled around these urban spaces, the modalities of movement, often had an impact on how identities were constructed, understood, and performed. While the image of the flâneur, wandering the streets, has been sustained in a romantic way,⁴⁵ in the time period that we explore, public transport became both a symbol of modernity in the city and a way of bringing these diverse layers of inhabiting ‘the city’ together. Despite various modalities of movement in the different urban spaces of Lisbon, Budapest and Gothenburg, the minorities within minorities explored in this special issue all performed their identities as clear contestations against authoritative representations of the city.

‘Minorities within minorities’ in urban history

Methodologically, the cities of minorities within minorities of the modern world are neither easy nor straightforward to excavate. As cultural constructions of the original collector and the institution’s archival process itself,⁴⁶ archives are prejudiced against the social worlds they do not originate from. Illiterate, poor, migrant, and female individuals seldom had the time or capacity to create, gather, and safekeep documents or objects from their own lives. At the same time, urban and state institutions, and people from the upper strata, saw little importance in recording the everyday lives and loves of those ‘below’ them, beyond administrative tasks linked to jurisdiction, taxation, and population records. Naturally, exceptions existed. Charles Booth’s empirical and spatial investigation of London’s poorest neighbourhoods towards the end of the nineteenth century produced strong evidence against his society’s judgement that moral failure was the main cause of poverty. Collecting data on income, which he then categorised into social classes, Booth’s mapping projects inspired both contemporary social workers and scholars in the twentieth century to gather and visualise data on urban settlement patterns.⁴⁷ At the same time, journalists, flâneurs and flâneuses voyaged into and reported from this urban ‘darkness’ leading to the city’s poor became a common leitmotif in modern literature and popular culture.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, while the social reality of urban poverty was increasingly reproduced in statistical, observational, and imagined forms, the voices of those experiencing it were seldom captured. To be sure, racialised, fetishised, and sexualised stereotypes of gendered minorities within minorities – the beautiful Jewess, the wild Irishwoman, to name just two – flourished in literature and the press, hiding the cities experienced by double or triple marginalised minorities from the general urban narrative.

Still, tracing twentieth-century scholarship in urban studies from Booth through Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel to the Chicago School and today’s migration studies, Nikolas Rose and Des Fitzgerald argue for a red thread that focuses on links between urban space and social injustice towards and the comparably low health of urban migrants.⁴⁹ Building on this tradition, and with help from Digital Humanities and the approach of HGIS (Historical Geographic Information Systems), scholars of historic migrant populations have created and visualised geodatabases – spatialised, statistical data – to unravel the relationship between ethnicity and segregation in the modern city. We only need to mention the East End of London or Hell’s Kitchen in New York to underline the fact that memories of the ‘ethnic’ character of modern urban districts persist to this day. For example, studies of Montreal and New York show that ethnic groups tended to live not only in the same neighbourhoods but also in the same tenements, with landlords privileging individuals with the same background.⁵⁰ On the other hand, others argue for tenements in Vienna as sites of everyday co-mingling between Jews and non-Jews, contradicting the idea of secluded Jewish quarters.⁵¹ While the proposed or real segregation of ethnic groups surely impacted the perception of different districts and the health of urban minorities, its (non-)development should also be understood as a migrant strategy for finding a sense of belonging in a new and unknown environment. These strategies, and how they have been understood in terms of minorities within minorities, are reflected in scholarship into labour practices, and resistance, in the city, where industrial relations scholars have tended to reflect an accepted sexual division of labour or ignored the role of ethnic organising.⁵² Spatial practices were another strategy used by minority groups to imbue the material fabric with their own meanings. Public toilets and parks turned into hotspots for queer encounters during the night, transforming sites developed for a clean and healthy city into both social free ports and morally tainted areas, depending on the view.⁵³ Similarly, funerals or celebrations temporarily infused public space with the religious and cultural characteristics of ethnic groups.⁵⁴ Thus using quantitative and digital methods, as well as textual analysis of public records, to explore how urban minorities attached their lifestyle and culture to the physical terrain of the city, urban historians aim to both reconstruct and analyse the agency of minority groups. In so doing, they have found an abundance of everyday and temporary moments of aversions of the urban organisation implemented by city planners. While emphasising the urban system they existed in, as well as the choices they made within it, common for many studies is a disregard for the gendered aspect of these spatial practices.

But creative and imaginative methods have emerged to approach the archival biases and silences that so often hinder gendered analysis. Experiential methods have developed from such a variety of fields that they almost defy fragmentation. Thus, even though gender history, focusing on constructions of gender and the power behind it, has been practiced since the 1980s,⁵⁵ the methods available to its practitioners are both limited and sprawling, putting high demands on a proficiency in multidisciplinarity. For example, using data shaped by South Africa’s white supremacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians have performed quantitative analysis of records of baptism and marriage to gain insight into the everyday life of its Black and female population.⁵⁶ Approaching the lack of archival records linked to women among New York’s Jewish migrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Laura Arnold Leibman reads the silence as telling of socio-economic and gendered realities and instead turns to material objects. Particularly poignant is her exploration of the painting technique used for ivory miniatures, which, she argues, effectively veiled the mulatto identity of a Sephardi woman from Barbados.⁵⁷ Saidiya Hartman’s methods are by now renowned for delivering the everyday hardships of often unnamed, Black slaves from the brutally silent wombs of archives. While Arnold Leibman analyses archival silences, Hartman, on the other hand, moves further into the archival void, allowing her imagination to reconstruct the horrors enslaved Black women lived through and died from.⁵⁸ Her methods have been tested,⁵⁹ as well as praised for linking the rigour of the historical profession with the empathy that practicing historians tend (and want) to use as they approach primary material linked to colonial slavery.⁶⁰ As Marissa Fuentes underlines in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, this kind of work not only liberates historical subjectivities from their imposed silence but also demonstrates our discipline’s ‘ethical implications’ in illuminating past and present violence produced by hegemonic systems.⁶¹ Heavily leaned on for the exploration of new ways to read records and material objects (not) collected by societies marked by male, rich, and white hierarchies, creativity and imagination have emerged as vital instruments in the historical toolbox of those that strive to highlight and challenge injustices of the past.

Despite the increasing influence of these approaches, their methodological successes have only slowly been incorporated into urban history. Fuentes’s historical reconstruction of the urban environment of Barbados in the eighteenth century foregrounds the utility of such a cross-pollination. Lacking sources that explicitly reveal how enslaved, Black women navigated and experienced the public spaces of modern Bridgetown, Fuentes turns to topography. She highlights how urban space was constructed to survey, control, and punish the enslaved population. Through her work, the Caribbean city emerges as a maze of violent areas and buildings that Black women seldom could avoid. Imaginatively placing Jane, a scarred run-away, in this reconstructed material reality of Bridgetown, Fuentes visualises the historical experience of enslaved individuals living in an environment aggressively designed to cage their bodies. Simultaneously, and in line with her ethical concerns, the historical commodification and objectification of the enslaved is not reproduced but challenged.⁶² Fuentes’s innovative insertion of imaginative methods into urban history not only reinforces the controlling mechanisms that guided the modern urban landscape but powerfully reinserts the everyday practices of its violently victimised Black, female and enslaved population. While their movements in life were cowed by colonial discourse, Fuentes lifts them out of archival abuse, forcing us to acknowledge the ‘pain’ that the city installed on those deemed less than human.⁶³

Inspired by her work, we have suggested in earlier work that a historical reconstruction of urban topography also should include the affective element. Taking the example of Catholic churches constructed by Irish diasporic communities in the United States, temporary objects introduced by women provide insight into how emotional experiences beyond the managed atmosphere of a fear of God, induced by the bishop, were attached to the space. As part of constructing a feeling of ‘belonging’ to the new locale, Irish female migrants brought lace veils and shamrocks in flower arrangements into the church ‘to make buildings more welcoming’ to fellow Irish people.⁶⁴ In decoding the atmospheres that migrant women temporarily imbued male-dominated spaces with, we attempt to reinstall their agency, not by finding moments of resistance but, in the spirit of both de Certeau and Fuentes,⁶⁵ reconstructing how actions were strategized within the system. As we see it, this critical archival approach, topped with tools for the historical reconstruction of urban topographies, is uniquely designed to destabilise historically curated representations of the modern city and unlock the everyday lives of its marginalised and archivally silenced urban groups. It forces us to question urban narratives and helps us ‘prioritise […] fragments, the temporary, and the multitude’.⁶⁶ The question is, what do we learn about the modern city when we turn our gaze towards those doubly – or triply – marginalised?

Overview of special issue

The articles in this special issue provide three examples of methodological approaches that invigorate studies of the intimate, subjective experience of gendered minorities and migrants in modern urban worlds. As cross-fertilisations between urban history, gendered history, and minority studies, they highlight methods, primary sources, and approaches that inform understandings of gendered marginalisation, as well as advocacy and agency among doubly marginalised groups, in times of global urban transformations. Together, they probe which urban spaces were within the reach of minorities within minorities, and what limitations these individuals came across as they settled, lived, and represented themselves in new urban environments. How did these people wield their agency, contest their place in, and shape, the modern city? Bringing together articles on enslaved, Black women in eighteenth-century Lisbon, Jewish monuments in nineteenth-century Budapest, and public and private sites of gendered migrants in interwar Gothenburg, this special issue explores strategies used by ethnic, racial, and gendered minorities to find a place within the modern city. In placing articles on diverse temporal and geographic contexts together, it highlights original applications of methodologies that may be standard in some area studies but missed in others. Considering the, often multi-layered, construction of ‘minority’ or ‘migrant’ within urban spaces across the modern period, the three articles together showcase how the search for people’s right to the city demands an innovative approach to sources and methods.

Selina Patel Nascimento takes us to a Lisbon reconstructed according to modern and imperial standards after the earthquake in 1755. As part of an increase of public areas that enhanced secular authorities, the square of Rossio was transformed from a space shared among common people, the Catholic church, and royal power into an arena for state-sanctioned violence. Street-vendors that had previously worked in the Rossio were guided into designated markets, which, however, banned slaves and women from selling their wares at the premises. Since the square had more than any other area been used by Black, enslaved, and female street-vendors before the earthquake, Patel Nascimento argues that the urban reorganisation of the Rossio was a hidden way to attack gendered and racialised minorities and limit their presence in the city. Turning to micro-history, Patel Nascimento provides biographies of Black, enslaved women who defied the new spatial order of the Rossio by reintroducing ‘traditional’ practices. First, they continued to sell their wares, and second, they used the Office for the Inquisition and its council against religious crimes to testify about their slave owners’ unfair treatments. In the article, we meet Grácia Luzia do Evangelho, Marcelina Maria, Leonor Mendes, Joana do Rego de Souza and Teresa de Jesus, as well as their friends Maria, Antonia, Izabel and Anna, all part of Lisbon’s Black enslaved population, who had different experiences of the Rossio. Some were taken into the white, Catholic, and masculinised space of the Estaus Palace for inquisitions about blasphemy or pacts with the devil. Blaming abuse in slavery, some were released once they could prove their devotion to the catechism. Others were punished or sentenced to death for various crimes, their decapitated heads embellishing the square. Using the Rossio as an entrance point into the micro-histories of Lisbon’s gendered and racial minority, Patel Nascimento highlights the spatial immobilisation imposed on Black women and their subsequent spatial practices that pushed against marginalisation and redefined their right to belong to urban space.

The second article, penned by Borbála Klacsmann and Andrea Petö, takes us to Budapest at the end of the nineteenth century. Klacsmann and Petö enter a discussion on contestations of the Hungarian capital’s symbolic space through eight statues or plaques of Jewish personalities set up before the Second World War. Reminding us that data on minorities within minorities is not always straightforward to find and mine, especially after a genocide, the authors recount the painstaking method of going through handwritten library cards and newspaper clips to find information about the few statues linked to the Jewish minority that no longer exist in urban space. They conceptualise these statues to ‘write a Jewish text into the city’, celebrating the scientific achievements and the charity work of Jewish men and women, as well as Jewish First World War veterans. In highlighting Jewish contribution to the culture and society of the Hungarian nation, the statues added a script that argued for Jewish belonging. Nevertheless, Klacsmann and Petö argue that antisemitism, weaponised into the Holocaust, rendered this urban text – their imagined city – invisible. Placed on plots related to Jewish spaces, the eight statues and plaques in question were rejected and removed during the Second World War – either destroyed or safeguarded in archives. The text they were meant to add to Budapest’s urban space ‘could not be read […] because the space where they wanted to belong, the multicultural, inclusive, and secular public space, did not exist’. Crucially, the article underlines how gendered representations of minorities in the modern urban fabric were not accepted as part of the general narrative, but regarded as topics of contestations over definitions of who belonged to the national community.

In our third article, Christina Reimann explores the port city of Gothenburg as a space of movement and opportunity for women and girls in the early twentieth century. For Reimann, the transient nature of gendered labour allowed for flexibility in where women and girls chose to live and work, encouraging movement between countryside and city, in contrast to their male counterparts who were dependent on the more static position of the engineering and manufacturing industries. Reimann uses written-down memories of urban daily life collected during the second half of the twentieth century to read women and girls back into their own cityscapes. In doing so, she emphasises the agency held and wielded by women and girls in an urban landscape so often represented as dominated by male power and strength. Moving the focus from the factories to the trams and courtyards, Reimann recreates the various communities that were built between migrant and migratory women, girls, and family units. The communities sometimes replicated the rural ‘fishing villages’ of their inhabitants, others were more securely metropolitan, but all existed within the same city. By emphasising these distinct areas of the same ‘city’, Riemann engages with the heart of this introduction: that each person has their own symbolic landscape, sometimes inspired by their occupation or their gender, which contributes to how they view ‘the city’. These individual or community representations can feed into its wider representation, but not always. By using different sources or applying new frameworks, these distinct understandings of how people move, and have moved, through urban spaces can be deepened.

In her study of the hopeful but ill-fated Lydia Harvey, who first migrated by small-town New Zealand to the (relative) bright lights of Wellington, before being trafficked to Buenos Aires and on to London at the start of the twentieth century, Julia Laite notes that Lydia took a risk ‘in the name of luxury and adventure’. While this was ‘the kind of decision that many people made, and a courageous one; but because she was poor, and young, and alone, and a woman, this risk-taking was significantly more likely to have dire consequences’.⁶⁷ In this special issue, we look to those who navigated urban spaces and in doing so, navigated their own minority or minoritized status in a rapidly modernising time period. At times, these gendered minorities found freedom in their movement, at others, the urban space allowed for their representation and remembrance, however short lived. They worked within boundaries, physical and social, and at times crossed them, just as Marisa does in Maid in Manhattan. The following three articles allow us to consider the moments in which those who occupied the spaces at the margins or at the ‘in between’s became dominant, or at least visible, in three different cities and in three different time periods. It is hoped that this issue will prompt more questions and case studies into the ways that gendered minorities inhabited and contested urban spaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Padilla, “Domesticating,” 41–59.

2. McShane, “The world paid attention to Sarah Everard’s killing.”

3. McClintock, Imperial.

4. Devereux, “The Maiden Tribute,”; Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia, 124–29.

5. Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’,” 233–57.

6. Stauter-Halsted, “The Devil’s Chain: 1885–1935”; Laite, “Traffickers and pimps in the era of white slavery,” 237–69.

7. Philzacklea, “Gendered Actors in Migration,” 23–38. There have been efforts to complicate this narrative, including Manuela Martini & Sumita Mukherjee’s “special issue of Gender & History, introduction,” 531–44.

8. Farrell, McCormick & Redmond, “Exploring the ordinary: migration, sexuality and crime, and the progression of the ‘Agenda’“ 338–55; Green, “Changing paradigms in migration studies: From men to women to gender,” 782–98.

9. Some examples include Tara Zahra, The Great Departure; Farrell & McCormick, Bad.

10. This subject has been explored in a special issue on contemporary ethnographies by Ana Aceska, Barbara Heer & Andrea Kaiser-Grolimund, “Doing the city from the margins: Critical perspectives on urban marginality,” 1–11.

11. Perlin, Language City, 128.

12. Vickery, “Golden age to separate spheres?” 383–414.

13. McKittrick, Demonic xii.

14. Boughton, Municipal Dreams

15. Cooper, Forging Identities in the Irish World 31.

16. Foxhall & Neher, “Introduction,” 1–19.

17. Deutsch, Women and the City 4.

18. Kern, Feminist City 70.

19. Kern, Feminist City, 5.

20. Versions of the Contagious Diseases Act were rolled out across the British empire reflecting the primary goal of “protecting” the British armed forces from venereal disease. James Keating, ‘”The defection of women”: the New Zealand Contagious Diseases Act repeal campaign and transnational feminist dialogue in the late nineteenth century,’ Women’s History Review, 25:2 (2016), 187–206; Daly, “’Syphilis is given over to sentimentalists:’” 399–416.

21. For example, Santangelo, Suffrage and the.

22. Maksudyan (ed.), Women and the City, 2.

23. McIlvanney & Cheallaigh (eds), Women and the City in French Literature and Culture 1.

24. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis.

25. Martini & Mukherjee, “Introduction.”

26. Davidoff, “Class and gender in Victorian England,” 61.

27. Mansell, “Beyond the,” 24–49.

28. Ladd, The Streets of Europe; Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, 255–354.

29. Therborn, “Monumental Europe,” 26–47.

30. Lefebvre, “The Production of Space,” 23.

31. Boutin, City of Noise (Urbana/Chicago/Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 61–81.

32. Thelle, “The Meat City,” 233–52.

33. Jerram, Streetlife.

34. Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space.

35. Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds, 92–142.

36. Jacobs, The Life and Death.

37. Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the city,” 128.

38. Ibid.,130–31.

39. Ibid., 131.

40. Lefebvre, “Space and the State (1978),” 233–34; Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 23, 56.

41. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference.

42. Lefebvre, Production of Space.

43. Millington, “The right to the city (if you want it),” 177–85.

44. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

45. While frequently constructed as a male wanderer, more recent work has complicated this to present the female flâneuse. Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse.

46. Decker & McKinlay, “Archival ethnography,” 17–33.

47. Vaughan, Mapping Society, 61–128.

48. For just two examples of these, often serialised, publications: Gaskell, North and South (1854–55); Riis, How the Other Half Lives.

49. Rose & Fitzgerald, The Urban Brain.

50. Gilliland, Olson & Gauvreau, “Did segregation increase as the city expanded?” 1881–01, 465–503; Schlichting, “Kleindeutschland,” 271–98.

51. Hultman & Korbel, “Jewish/non-Jewish encounters in corridors and staircases.“

52. Anitha, Pearson & McDowell, “Striking,” 754–75; Newton, Ryan & Walkowitz, ‘Editors’ Introduction in Idem (eds), Sex and class in women’s history 2.

53. Houlbrook, “On the emptiness of the glory hole, and other non-problems,”; Tom Hulme, “Queering family history and the lives of Irish men before gay liberation.”

54. Goren, “Sacred and secular,” 269–305; Francois Guesnet, “From community to metropolis: the Jews of Warsaw, 1850–80,” 128–53.

55. Scott, “Gender,” 1053–1075.

56. Richardson & Kok, “Bridal pregnancy in the Mother City, 1900–60,” 33–62.

57. Leibman, The Art of the Jewish Family, 88–132.

58. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” 1–14.

59. Connolly & Fuentes (eds.), “Special issue.”

60. Fox, “Archival Intimacies,” 24.

61. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives 6.

62. Ibid.,13–45.

63. Ibid., 146.

64. Hultman & Cooper, “Revisiting space and emotion,” 6.

65. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives, 68.

66. Hultman & Cooper, “Revisiting space and emotion,” 10.

67. Laite, The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, 42.