Gendered Spaces - Softcover

Spain, Daphne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807820121 ISBN 13: 9780807820124

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992

Synopsis

In hundreds of businesses, secretaries — usually women — do clerical work in “open floor” settings while managers — usually men — work and make decisions behind closed doors. According to Daphne Spain, this arrangement is but one example of the ways in which physical segregation has reinforced women’s inequality. In this important new book, Spain shows how the physical and symbolic barriers that separate women and men in the office, at home, and at school block women’s access to the socially valued knowledge that enhances status.

Spain looks at first at how nonindustrial societies have separated or integrated men and women. Focusing then on one major advanced industrial society, the United States, Spain examines changes in spatial arrangements that have taken place since the mid–nineteenth century and considers the ways in which women’s status is associated with those changes. As divisions within the middle–class home have diminished, for example, women have gained the right to vote and control property. At colleges and universities, the progressive integration of the sexes has given women students greater access to resources and thus more career options. In the workplace, however, the traditional patterns of segregation still predominate.

Illustrated with floor plans and apt pictures of homes, schools, and work sites, and replete with historical examples, Gendered Spaces exposes the previously invisible spaces in which daily gender segregation has occurred — and still occurs.

About this title

About the Author

Daphne Spain is James M. Page Professor and Chair, Department of Urban & Environmental Planning in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. She is author of How Women Saved the City.

Reviews

How does the organization of spaces--exterior locales and interiors for living, work and worship--reflect and determine gender relations? Spain (coauthor of American Women in Transition ) takes a cross-cultural, historical approach in answering this question. Among New Guinea's Wogeo Indians ceremonial men's huts serve as storehouses for flutes associated with supernatural powers; their geographic inaccessibility to women "facilitates preservation of musical knowledge for men," which they use as a form of control over women. In contemporary offices women tend to be set pk "together in one place (the secretarial 'pool') that removes them from . . . input into the decision-making processes of the organization." For Spain then, gender-segregated spaces reinforce "status differences between women and men" to women's disadvantage. Spain details this fascinating topic with an impressive variety of examples, tables and interpretations of popular documents such as back issues of House Beautiful . She neglects, however, the relation of aesthetics to gendered spaces and manages a merely functional, charmless prose style.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

By using male measures of status--control of labor and property and participation in public life--Spain postulates that gender-based spatial segregation results in lower status and restricted access to knowledge for women. Studying nonindustrial societies and 19th- and 20th-century America, she examines the interior designs of space within the home, school, and workplace. In nonindustrial societies, Spain shows how the division of space within the home indicated a degree of political power. Physical access to schools created "gendered spaces" because of male-dominated educational systems. In the workplace, traditional women's jobs were physically segregated, impeding women's access to knowledge and status. Her synthesis and examination of current scholarship are truly unique. Because of the industrial/nonindustrial examination, the volume is a bit disconnected until the final chapter. Too often Spain strays from her concept of space into the concept of women's sphere. Recommended for all academic and large public libraries.
- Jenny Presnell, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807820121
• ISBN 13: 9780807820124
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 314