Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space

The Ritual and Risks of “Walking Out”

• Caroline Wyburgh (1870): A nineteen-year-old in Chatham, England, who was observed “walking out” with a sailor.

• Courtship and Walking:
      * Walking was a long-established, cost-free part of courtship.
      * It provided a semiprivate space in parks, plazas, boulevards, or byways.
      * “Lovers’ lanes” and other rustic features offered private space for more intimate interactions.

• Psychological and Emotional Alignment:
      * Solnit suggests that walking together aligns two people emotionally and bodily, much like marching generates solidarity in a group.
      * The act of “marching the rhythms of their strides” allows a couple to feel they are a pair by moving through the street and the world together.
      * Strolling is described as “doing that something closest to doing nothing,” allowing for presence without the obligation of constant conversation.

• The Terminology of “Walking Out”:
      * In Britain, “walking out together” could be explicitly sexual but more commonly signified an ongoing connection, similar to the American “going steady.”
      * James Joyce’s The Dead: A husband asks his wife if she loved a boy from her youth. She replies, “I used to go out walking with him,” illustrating the profound depth of the term.

Legalized Violence: The Contagious Diseases Acts

• The Arrest of Caroline Wyburgh: Despite her walking partner being a soldier, Wyburgh was dragged from her bed late at night by a police inspector.

• The Contagious Diseases Acts:
      * Empowered police in barracks towns to arrest anyone suspected of being a prostitute.
      * Merely walking at the wrong time or place constituted grounds for suspicion.
      * The law assumed women “guilty till proven innocent.”

• Punishment and Medical Violations:
      * Refusal to undergo medical examination could lead to months in jail ($3$ months in Wyburgh’s case).
      * Wyburgh supported her mother by washing doorsteps and basements; her mother urged her to submit to the exam to avoid losing income.
      * The Violation: Wyburgh was strapped to a bed for four days. On the fifth day, she was taken to surgery, straitjacketed, and thrust onto a couch with her feet strapped apart while an assistant held her down with an elbow on her chest.
      * The Result: She fell off the couch while still strapped, injuring herself. The surgeon laughed because his “instruments of inspection” deflowered her, causing her to bleed. His comment was: “You have been telling the truth. . . You are not a bad girl.”

• The Double Standard: The soldier involved was never named, arrested, or inspected. Solnit notes that men have usually had an easier time walking than women.

Prerequisites and Barriers to Female Mobility

• Sylvia Plath’s Lament: At age nineteen, Plath wrote in her journal: “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy.” She expressed a “consuming desire to mingle” with road crews and sailors, but felt spoiled by the danger of assault and battery. She envied men’s freedom to sleep in open fields or walk freely at night.

• Three Prerequisites for Walking for Pleasure:
      1. Free Time: Variables exist, but public places are often unsafe for women.
      2. A Place to Go: Restricted by legal and social measures.
      3. A Body Unhindered: Must be free of illness and social restraints.

• Social and Bodily Confinements:
      * Clothing: High heels, fragile shoes, corsets, girdles, full or narrow skirts, and veils serve as social mores that handicap women effectively as laws.
      * Public Perception: A woman’s presence in public is often treated as an invasion of her private parts, either literally or verbally.

The Linguistic Sexualization of Walking

• Terms for Prostitutes: “Streetwalkers,” “women of the streets,” “women on the town,” and “public women.”

• Gendered Divergence in Language:
      * A “public man,” “man about town,” or “man of the streets” holds very different, often positive or neutral, connotations compared to the female equivalents.

• Vocabulary of Transgression: Terms like “strolling,” “roaming,” “wandering,” and “straying,” when applied to women who violate sexual convention, imply that their travel is inevitably sexual.

• Example: The Sunday Tramps: A group of women using the name of Leslie Stephen’s male walking group would have been seen as salacious rather than peripatetic.

• Performance vs. Transport: Women’s walking is often viewed as a performance for a male audience (“to be seen”) rather than an independent experience of seeing the world.

Historical Paradigms of Control: Assyria and Greece

• Middle Assyria (17th–11th centuries B.C.):
      * Wives and widows on the street were required to have their heads covered.
      * Prostitutes and slave girls were forbidden from covering their heads.
      * Illicitly wearing a veil resulted in $50$ lashes or having pitch poured over the head.

• Gerda Lerner’s Analysis: Respectable women are those under the protection/control of one man (veiled); “public women” are those outside that control (unveiled). This pattern created “disreputable” districts where women were forced to register or carry ID cards.

• Ancient Greece:
      * Radical division between interior (private) and exterior (public) spheres.
      * Richard Sennett: Athenian women were confined because of “supposed physiological defects.”
      * Pericles’ Dictum: “The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men.”
      * Xenophon’s Advice: “Your business will be to stay indoors.”

• The Theory of Control: Ensuring paternity in patrilineal societies where inheritance and identity are governed by descent.

• Owen Lovejoy’s Theory: An attempt to naturalize female immobility by arguing it was essential for the species before humans were even human.

Architectural and Social Confinement

• Mark Wiggins’ Perspectives:
      * In Greek thought, women lacked “internal self-control,” described as a failure to maintain secure boundaries.
      * Wiggins argues female sexuality is seen as a fluid that “endlessly overflows and disrupts” boundaries.
      * Role of Architecture: Architecture functions to control women’s sexuality (chastity and fidelity). The house serves as a “masonry veil” to protect a father's genealogical claims.

• Comparison to Men: Figures like Odysseus could travel and sleep around, while women like Penelope were the stationary prizes or keepers of the hearth.

19th-Century Urban Regulation and Reform

• European Governments: Regulated prostitution by limiting where women could walk, which effectively limited all women's mobility.

• Safe Havens: Stores and shopping provided “safe semipublic havens” where women could prove they were NOT for purchase by being purchasers.

• Flâneurs: Women were seen as incapable of being detached flâneurs because they were either commodities or consumers.

• Vice Squads (Germany): Persecuted solitary women in the evening. A Berlin doctor noted that men believed “a woman of good reputation does not allow herself to be seen in the evening.”

• Police des Moeurs (France):
      * Arrested women for appearing in sex industry locations at the wrong time.
      * Registered prostitutes were arrested if seen outside stipulated beats (e.g., shopping at Les Halles at $9$:$00$ AM).
      * Saint Lazare Prison: A place for arrested women characterized by starvation, lack of hygiene, and silence. Women were often forced into registration as prostitutes to escape.

The Activism of Josephine Butler and Suffrage

• Josephine Butler:
      * Upper-class, devout Christian who campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts.
      * Argued the laws condoned prostitution and enforced a double standard where women suffered “surgical rape” while men spread disease freely.
      * Faced violent mobs hired by brothel owners; she was once beaten and smeared with excrement.

• Suffrage and Militant Walking:
      * The movement utilized marches and public meetings as outdoor politicking.
      * State Violence: Police in Britain and soldiers/mobs in the US met demonstrations with violence.
      * Institutional Rape: When suffragettes went on hunger strikes, both governments responded with force-feeding—restraining women and pumping food through tubes in their nostrils.

Modern Harassment and the Geography of Fear

• Routine Harassment: Serves to remind women they are sexual beings available to men and not equals in public life.

• Fear Statistics:
      * $\frac{2}{3}$ of American women are afraid to walk alone in their neighborhoods at night.
      * $50\%$ of British women are afraid to go out after dark alone.
      * $40\%$ of British women are “very worried” about being raped.

• Internalized Socialization: Women are often advised to stay indoors, wear baggy clothes, cut hair, or take taxis—modern versions of “Assyrian veils.”

• June Larkin’s Study: Canadian teenagers stopped recording minor street harassment because it simply took up too much time.

Solnit’s Personal Narrative

• At Age Seventeen: Living in Paris, street grabbing was “annoying” but not “terrifying.”

• At Age Nineteen: Moved to a poor neighborhood in San Francisco. Experienced constant threats and sexual violence.

• The Fisherman’s Wharf Incident: Solnit was followed by a well-dressed man murmuring vile sexual proposals. When she confronted him, he threatened to kill her, shocked that she used profanity back at him.

• The Realization: Solnit discovered she had no “real right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness out-of-doors,” and that sex easily became violence.

Intersections of Race, Gender, and the Right to Roam

• Origins of Women's Rights: Often rooted in racial justice movements (Seneca Falls organized by abolitionists Stanton and Mott).

• James Baldwin: For Baldwin, Manhattan was not a place of liberation (as it was for Whitman or Ginsberg) but a place where police and pimps constantly monitored him.

• Edward Lawson (1983): An African-American man who won a Supreme Court case challenging California’s loitering/identification laws after being arrested $15$ times for walking.

• The 1980s Hate Crimes:
      * Michael Griffith (Howard Beach): Chased by white men into traffic and killed.
      * Yusef Hawkins (Bensonhurst): Bludgeoned to death for being in a white neighborhood.
      * Central Park Jogger Case: A white woman was gang-raped and beaten by Latino and black youths. Media analyzed race, drugs, and class but ignored the most glaring factor: society's attitude toward women and gender-motivated violence.

• Differential Perception: Racial violence is recognized as a civil rights issue; gendered violence is often treated as “isolated incidents” rather than systemic hate crimes.

Cultural and Literary Exclusions

• Nature Romanticism: Often unavailable to marginalized groups.
      * Evelyn C. White: Felt “heart-stopping fear” in rural Oregon due to memories of lynchings.
      * Ingrid Pollard: Photographed herself in the Lake District to show she felt nervous where Wordsworth felt at home.

• Gwen Moffat (Isle of Skye): A mountaineer who had to call for a man to join her after a neighbor broke into her room; she realized her lifestyle was read as an “open invitation.”

• The Impact of Limited Mobility:
      * If walking is a “primary cultural act,” those barred from it are denied a “vast portion of their humanity.”
      * Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own asks if Judith Shakespeare could “roam the streets at midnight.”
      * Sarah Schulman: Her novel Girls, Visions and Everything follows Lila Futuransky, who tries to identify with Jack Kerouac’s freedom but eventually realizes, even on her own block, that “the world was not hers.”