“Downtown- No Finer Place For Sure” (If you’re a woman, that is…)
Alison Isenberg’s Downtown America brought up a lot of interesting points regarding the development and redevelopment of downtown spaces in America. However, I found the notion of the feminization of downtowns and its connection to the resistance to the feminization movement both interesting and unsettling. Isenberg describes the growing discontent and restlessness many housewives experienced after WWII and the concern over the possibility of woman working that arose as a result of these sentiments. The redevelopment of the downtown was then geared to draw white middle-class woman back into the cities to shop and spend their days so that they would no longer be discontent and pent up in their houses all day.
Executives worked to make cities “desirable for my wife your wife and your neighbor’s wife to go downtown and shop” and they focused on details such as parking, aesthetics, and carry-out services at stores to attract housewives to spend their days in the downtowns. Luckily for the Woman’s Movement, this redevelopment failed in its mission to keep women housewives and women were able to break free of their roles as housewives regardless of how enticing the downtown shopping areas were and of how pervasive advertisements were for women to spend all of their husband’s money and come home with an empty purse. However, it is interesting to see the efforts to which downtowns went to in an attempt to “keep them housewives” as well as to better understand the connection between policies for redevelopment and cultural concerns over gender roles.
As mentioned before, downtowns focused on details such as parking and aesthetics to create a calming atmosphere for white, middle-class housewives to go and spend a pleasant day shopping, dining, and relaxing. Working woman and women of color were not considered when making plans for the downtown areas because they were not considered a threat to the established structure where men made the money and woman spent it. In addition, cities also ignored the consumer potential in African Americans and other ethnic groups who lived in the city and were nearby to downtowns because they viewed these people as “poor customers.” They didn’t want the presence of these people in downtowns to disturb the aesthetic ideal they had created for housewives or to create a “lower-class ethnic island” to which housewives and other “upper-crust” customers would be disinclined to visit and commerce.
However, in limiting the clientele that they sought to attract, cities ran the risk of losing business because they had a very narrow vision of who was acceptable in their downtowns. If women chose not to shop downtown and, instead, went to the nearby malls in the suburbs, then the city would not have as many potential customers as they might have had they aimed their redevelopment towards a wider array of groups and people. The decline of downtowns could actually be linked to this oversight of other potential consumers because with the Women’s Movement many women did leave home to get jobs and, as a result, the cities lost a large portion of their customers. Downtowns reacted with the implementation of bargain basements to attract customers from nearby slums; however, clearly downtown developers had failed in their mission to create a “playground” for women as they had hoped to. In addition, they had failed to create a sense of satisfaction and contentment for housewives with the attraction of shopping as a way to spend a day.
In class today we discussed numerous qualities we believed a downtown area should possess including public transportation to the downtown space that was then connected to the rest of the city, walkable areas (potentially a pedestrian street), street vendors, easy parking, mixed-use and mixed-income, and green space, among others. In light of the development of cities after WWII which was designed to attract middle class, white women and, in particular, housewives, one must wonder who the ideal city we have created in class is designed to attract. It seems that every development plan for downtowns must have some sort of target group and this has been supported historically as we can see through the feminization of downtowns.
The idea of a space for professional youths or youths in general was mentioned, however, how would this group change the dynamics of downtown spaces? Currently, there is a pervasive nostalgia for downtowns that many elderly people possess so my question is how can this nostalgia be reconciled with the infantilizing (or efforts to attract younger people) of downtowns to create spaces that are not designed merely for one group but that are attractive to a variety of people? After all, isn’t the diversity of downtown one of its greatest assets? In addition, how can the creation of our ideal downtown eliminate many of the problems the feminized downtowns faced back in the 1950’s and 60’s? What does our city offer that theirs didn’t?