Wanderlust: A History of Walking (36 page)

By the 1870s in France, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, prostitutes were only allowed to solicit at certain times. France was particularly cynical in its regulation of prostitution; the practice was licensed, and both the licensing and the banning of unlicensed sexual commerce allowed the police to control women. Any woman could be arrested for soliciting merely because she appeared in the times and places associated with the sex industry, while known prostitutes could be arrested for appearing in any other time or place—women had been divided into
diurnal and nocturnal species. One prostitute was arrested for “shopping in Les Halles at nine o'clock in the morning and was charged with speaking to a man (the stall holder), and with being off the beat stipulated on her registration license.” By that time, the Police des Moeurs, or Morals Police, could arrest working-class women for anything or nothing, and they would sometimes round up groups of female passersby on the boulevards to meet their quotas. At first watching the women get arrested was a masculine pastime, but by 1876 the abuses became so extreme that boulevardiers sometimes tried to interfere and got arrested themselves. The mostly young, mostly poor, unmarried women and girl children arrested were seldom found innocent; many were incarcerated behind the high walls of Saint Lazare prison, where they lived in dire circumstances, cold, malnourished, unwashed, overworked, and forbidden to speak. They were released when they agreed to register as prostitutes, while women who ran away from licensed brothels were given the choice of either returning to the brothel or being sent to Saint Lazare—thus women were forced into rather than out of prostitution. Many committed suicide rather than face arrest. The great champion of human rights for prostitutes Josephine Butler visited Saint Lazare in the 1870s: “I asked what the crime was for which the greater number were in prison and was told it was for walking in streets which are forbidden, and at hours which are forbidden!”

Butler, a well-educated, upper-class woman who grew up amid progressives, was the most effective opponent of Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts passed in the 1860s. A devout Christian, she opposed the laws both because they put the state in the business of regulating prostitution and thus, implicitly, of condoning it and because they enforced a double standard. Women could be punished by incarceration or by the inspections dubbed “surgical rape” for the slightest suspicion of being a prostitute, and a woman found to carry a venereal disease was confined and treated, while men were left free to continue spreading it (similar measures have been considered and sometimes carried out in regards to prostitutes and AIDS in recent years). The law had been passed to protect the health of the army, whose soldiers had a much higher incidence of such diseases than the general public; it seems to have been based on a cynical recognition that the health, freedom, and civil rights of men were of greater value to the state than those of women. Many more extreme abuses than that of Caroline Wyburgh were carried out, and at least one woman—a widowed mother of three—was
hounded into suicide. Going out walking had become evidence of sexual activity, and sexual activity on the part of women had been criminalized. Though the laws in the United States were never quite so bad, similar circumstances sometimes prevailed. In 1895 a young working-class New Yorker named Lizzie Schauer was arrested as a prostitute because she was out alone after dark and had stopped to ask directions of two men. Though she was in fact on her way to her aunt's house on the Lower East Side, the act and the time were interpreted as signs that she was soliciting. Only after a medical examination proved she was a “good girl” was she released. Had she not been a virgin, she might well have been found guilty of a crime compounded of the twin acts of having been sexual and of walking alone in the evening.

Though protecting respectable women from vice had long been one rationale for state regulation and prosecution of prostitution, the eminently respectable Butler took on the formidable task of protecting women from the state, for which she was vilified and chased by mobs (often hired by brothel owners). On one occasion the mob caught her and she was badly beaten and smeared with dirt and excrement, her hair and clothes torn; on another, a prostitute she came across as she fled a mob led her through a labyrinth of back streets and empty warehouses to safety. Of course she herself had transgressed by moving into the public sphere of political discourse and challenging the sexual conduct of men, and she was decried by one member of Parliament as “worse than prostitutes.” As she lay dying in 1906, far more women were moving into that sphere and meeting with similar treatment. The women's suffrage movement in the United States and Britain, after decades of quiet and ineffectual effort to gain the vote for women, became militant in the first decade of the twentieth century, with an extraordinary campaign of marches, demonstrations, and public meetings—the now-usual forms of outdoor politicking available to those denied entrée to the system. These demonstrations were met with an unusual degree of violence—by the police in Britain, and by crowds of soldiers and other men in the United States. Union activists, religious nonconformists, and others had been met by violence before, but some of the things that happened to the suffragettes were unique. In Britain archaic laws were invoked to criminalize the women's public gatherings, and current laws that gave all citizens the right to petition the government were violated. In both the United States and Britain these women arrested for exercising their right to be and to speak in public went on hunger strike, demanding
they be recognized as political prisoners. Both governments responded by force-feeding the prisoners, and the agonizing procedure—which involved restraining the woman, forcing a tube down her nostrils to her stomach, and pumping in food—became a new form of institutional rape. Once again women who had attempted to participate in public life by walking down the street were locked up and found the privacy of their bodily interiors violated by the state.

But women won the vote, and in recent decades most of this strange duet between public space and private parts has been not between women and the government but between women and men. Feminism has largely addressed and achieved reforms of interactions indoors—in the home, the workplace, the schools, and the political system. Yet access to public space, urban and rural, for social, political, practical, and cultural purposes is an important part of everyday life, one limited for women by their fear of violence and harassment. The routine harassment women experience ensures, in the words of one scholar of the subject, “that women will not feel at ease, that we will remember our role as sexual beings, available to, accessible to men. It is a reminder that we are not to consider ourselves equals, participating in public life with our own right to go where we like when we like, to pursue our own projects with a sense of security.” Both men and women may be assaulted for economic reasons, and both have been incited by crime stories in the news to fear cities, strangers, the young, the poor, and uncontrolled spaces. But women are the primary targets of sexualized violence, which they encounter in suburban and rural as well as urban spaces, from men of all ages and income levels, and the possibility of such violence is implicit in the more insulting and aggressive propositions, comments, leers, and intimidations that are part of ordinary life for women in public places. Fear of rape puts many women in their place—indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors rather than their own will to safeguard their sexuality. Two-thirds of American women are afraid to walk alone in their own neighborhoods at night, according to one poll, and another reported that half of British women were afraid to go out after dark alone and 40 percent were “very worried” about being raped.

Like Caroline Wyburgh and Sylvia Plath, I was nineteen when I first felt the full force of this lack of freedom. I had grown up on the suburban edge of the country in the days before children were closely supervised and I went to town or to the hills at will, and at seventeen I ran away to Paris, where the men who
often propositioned and occasionally grabbed me in the streets seemed more annoying than terrifying. At nineteen, I moved to a poor San Francisco neighborhood with less street life than the gay neighborhood I had moved from and discovered that at night the day's constant threats were more likely to be carried out. Of course it wasn't only poor neighborhoods and nighttime in which I was threatened. I was, for example, followed near Fisherman's Wharf one afternoon by a well-dressed man who murmured a long stream of vile sexual proposals to me; when I turned around and told him off, he recoiled in genuine shock at my profanity, told me I had no right to speak to him like that, and threatened to kill me. Only the earnestness of his death threat made the incident stand out from hundreds of others more or less like it. It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness out-of-doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wish to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem. I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move to someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me—all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them—but it had not in me.

The constant threats and the few incidents of real terror transformed me. Still, I stayed where I was, became more adept at navigating the dangers of the street, and became less of a target as I grew older. Almost all my interactions nowadays with passersby are civil, and some are delightful. Young women receive the brunt of such harassment, I think, not because they are more beautiful but because they are less sure of their rights and boundaries (though such unsureness manifested as naïveté and timidity are often part of what is considered beauty). The years of harassment received in youth constitute an education in the limits of one's life, even long after the daily lessons stop. Sociologist June Larkin got a group of Canadian teenagers to keep track of their sexual harassment in public and found they were leaving the less dramatic incidents out because, as one said, “If I wrote
down every little thing that happened on the street, it would take up too much time.” Having met so many predators, I learned to think like prey, as have most women, though fear is far more minor an element of my everyday awareness than it was when I was in my twenties.

The movements for women's rights often came out of the movements for racial justice. The first great women's convention at Seneca Falls, New York, was organized by abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott out of anger over the discrimination they faced even while trying to fight against slavery—they had attended the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, only to find that the male-dominated organization would not seat any female delegates. “Stanton and Mott,” writes one historian, “began to see similarities between their own circumscribed status and that of slaves.” Josephine Butler and the English suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst also came from abolitionist families, and in recent years some of the most original and important feminists have been black women—bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, June Jordan—who address both race and gender.

When I wrote of the gay poets of New York, I left out the Harlem-born James Baldwin, because for him Manhattan was not a deliciously liberatory place where he could lose himself, as it was for Whitman and Ginsberg. It threatened instead never to let him forget himself, whether it was the policemen near the Public Library telling him to stay uptown, the pimps on uptown Fifth Avenue trying to recruit him, when he was a boy, to become one of the dangers, or the people in his own neighborhood keeping track of him as do people in small towns. He wrote about walking the city as a black man rather than a gay one, though he was both; his race limited his roaming until he moved to Paris. Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public, so that the law often actively interferes with their freedom of movement. In 1983 an African-American man, Edward Lawson, won a Supreme Court case challenging a California statute that “required persons who loiter or wander on the streets to provide a credible and reliable identification and to account for their presence when requested by a peace officer.” Lawson, who, the
New York Times
reported, “liked to walk and was often stopped late at night in residential areas,” had been arrested fifteen times for refusing to identify himself under this
statute criminalizing walking. An athletic man with tidy dreadlocks, he used to dance at the same nightclub I did then.

But in public space, racism has often been easier to recognize than sexism and far more likely to become an issue. Late in the 1980s two young black men died for being in “the wrong place at the wrong time.” Michael Griffith was chased by a gang of hostile white men in Howard Beach, ran out into traffic to escape their persecution, and was killed by a car. Yusef Hawkins was bludgeoned to death for being a black man in another white Queens neighborhood, Bensonhurst. An enormous outcry arose over these two cases; people rightly understood that these young men's civil rights had been stripped from them when they were attacked for walking down the street. Not long after Griffith and Hawkins died in Queens, a large group of teenage boys from uptown Manhattan went into Central Park at night and found a white female jogger. She was gang-raped, cut with knives, beaten with rocks and pipes, her skull was crushed, and she lost most of her blood. Expected to die, she survived with brain damage and physical disabilities.