Krista Cowman - Gender in Urban Europe: Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship, 1750-1900

In Europe today, most of the population lives in towns and women still make up the majority; thus the relationships between men and women and an understanding of masculinity and femininity are central to the idea of the city. As women constituted a significant majority in most towns, which were governed by men of a certain social order, the cultural dynamics of gender were and remain important. Towns were central to migratory patterns and crucial in the transmission of ideas across what came to be seen as the idea of Europe. Europe was identified as a place in the minds eye, but boundaries shifted, nation-states were not fixed, and people identified as much with locality, region or principality as nationality. Thus, many people shaped their identities from urban culture. As places which fostered and disseminated key social, economic, political and cultural developments, towns were central to the creation of gendered identities and the transmission of ideas across local, national and transnational boundaries. This book is one of a series of publications from a European network of historians whose interests lie in examining the ways that the European urban experience was gendered over time and across borders. We also ask what influence gender has on the shape of towns themselves.