women and cities

Suffragist Parade in Honeoye Falls, New York. Village of Honeoye Falls Collection, via http://www.winningthevote.org

I've been thinking about women and cities since your last post, Gator. I've been Googling around, trying to figure out the relationship between the urbanity and the enfranchisement of women.

Most of what I've come up with is some awesome pictures. This is Ontario County suffragist Anne Fitzhugh Miller, from the same website as above.

I'm not going to take on this blather about women being good at hugs and men at smashing things, but I do think cities do enable people who have been excluded from political and business life to participate in social and cultural life. After one of my drunken book-buying expeditions, I ended up with the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), who wrote poems and essays, argued furiously with Pope, invested in the South Sea Company, and fought to begin a campaign of public inoculation.

A book I was reading recently argues that restrictions on education for women left anti-misogynist writers having to start from scratch in their writing, rather than building on the ideas of their forebears. Being part of an urban community resolves part of that..