Abstract
Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City uses archival research and interviews to document four women-only spaces, women’s centers, bookstores, health clinics, and domestic shelters in cities across the United States. These women-only spaces were initiated in the 1970s by second-wave feminists.
The book has six chapters after the introduction. In her first chapters, Spain lays out the ways in which women were excluded from cities and public spaces and how those exclusions were reflected in society through economic, social, and health policy for women’s everyday lives. She then shows how the emergence of fast food and child care / elder care centers enabled women to enter the workforce en masse, relieving them of some household responsibilities, including meal preparation and child and elder care. In subsequent chapters, drawing on historic archives and interviews with second-wave feminists, Spain meticulously details how these feminists developed women’s centers that provided information and support for women, feminist bookstores, women’s health centers, and domestic violence shelters.
Spain is primarily concerned with second-wave feminists. While first-wave feminists were suffragists in the early twentieth century, second-wave feminists were typically liberal, radical, or socialist, typically white, and middle-class women whose heydays of activism were in the 1960s and 1970s. Third-wave feminists, who emerged in the 1990s, are more diverse in terms of class, race, and ethnicity, and focus on the state of women in terms of multiple oppressions. Third-wave feminists are considered to be more progressive than the first two waves and have critiqued second-wave feminists for their lack of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, class, and focus (see Flores (2017) for debates as to whether this framework of waves is still useful).
Spain documents how second-wave feminists established women centers, bookstores, clinics, and shelters in the 1970s, which helped women survive and thrive in cities through growing autonomy. Over time, bookstores and clinics have been mainstreamed into hospitals or online bookstores. Spain’s argument is that these second-wave feminist spaces have been important for women and cities, since women have been excluded or discriminated against in nonfeminist spaces. For example, male doctors would not take women’s health concerns seriously in mainstream hospitals. Also, it was difficult to find books for and about women in nonfeminist bookstores. Third-wave feminists have sustained some of the spaces Spain describes in the book, particularly women’s shelters. However, the number of beds in shelters has decreased because of decreases in funding despite unchanged or even increased need. Spain’s goal is to preserve the history of the trajectories of these spaces and their feminist underpinnings and suggests that society still needs these spaces as part of the continued fight for women’s equality.
This is an important book for our contemporary political context. In the era of Trump and in times of significant rollback of rights generally and for women in particular, the struggles and processes discussed in this book need to be studied and possibly repeated by students and activists. While city planners in the 1970s were often complicit in stonewalling the work of feminists, particularly those establishing clinics and shelters, I hope that today’s planners are more supportive and responsive than they were during the work Spain documents.
For a woman who was born in New York City in the 1960s, many of the stories felt familiar. The details helped reaffirm my experiences but also enraged me at times. The roadblocks put in the way of many women carrying out their everyday lives and interpretations of their value were gripping and discouraging, as things do not seem to have changed much. The most egregious affronts are in the chapter on health centers. For example, the process of establishing the Women’s Community Health Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was bundled with red tape and obvious collusion by multiple municipal, state, and federal agencies to close it down. Different administrators in the same agency demanded conflicting changes and permissions, other agencies lost paperwork, and the zoning regulations were contradictory and thus impossible to meet. Nevertheless, the women building the center persisted and were able to open and continue providing services to women. The details of these struggles—almost a how-to manual—are a testament to the possibility of producing spaces of respite.
This book is a valuable addition to introductory planning classes, enabling students to learn through realistic accounts of how these spaces came to be and their importance for city building. However, there are several shortcomings. The first limitation is, as Spain acknowledges readers may think, “[I] have been too celebratory and too uncritical . . .” of second-wave feminists and their space making (xiii). While Spain gives a nod to Kimberly Crenshaw and intersectional approaches to feminism, not many discussions within the book critically engage with the work of second-wave feminists. These feminists invited and encouraged police and the courts to get involved, in ending rape and domestic violence resulting in safety for some women, but actually increasing the violence experienced by other women, including many women of color and immigrant women. Students and scholars may supplement this book with Richie (2012), a black queer feminist who discusses the limitations of second-wave feminists in the 1970s. Richie describes how their work created what she calls “carceral feminism,” the unfortunate coupling of second-wave feminists with the police and courts in an effort to end rape and domestic violence, and how it has had negative implications for women of color, resulting in an unjust racist system with mass incarceration of men, who are in turn exposed to violence committed by other prisoners and guards. Richie describes how women of color, particularly Black women, have suffered increased violence as a result of their interactions with police (through shooting unarmed women of color, and sexual misconduct by officers), state’s attorneys (through inventing charges against women of color), courts (through racist and corrupt jurors and judges), and other state officials. These developments have intensified domestic and community violence in the context of increased involvement with the (in)justice system.
The second shortcoming is the lack of attention to feminist planners and their hard work to transform cities where women have access to safe spaces. Canadian and Australian scholars have engaged in feminist planning and inclusive methods for many years to realign cities with the needs and desires of women (Andrews 2000; Whitzman 2007).
In sum, Spain needs to be commended for the details she uncovered and for the enormous work she undertook to write this book! I learned much and was able to feel the struggles of second-wave feminists and the spaces they created. Reading about the challenges and obstructionist actions faced by women as they built safe spaces was a very visceral experience. I hope that Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City, along with the work by Andrews (2000), Flores (2017), Richie (2012), and Whitzman (2007) will be included in planning curricula to sensitize new practitioners to the errors of the past and possibilities of the future.