Church women mapped gender onto church-versus-street spatial oppositions

Evidence

As both physical and discursive space, the church and the street constituted opposing sites of assembly, with gender-laden and class-laden meanings. The street signified male turf, a public space of worldly dangers and forbidden pleasures. Churches and households, both rejecting the worldly attractions of male social space, signified female and also sacred space. Women who strolled the streets or attended dance halls and cheap theaters promiscuously blurred the boundaries of gender. In the minds of “respectable” church women of the working poor, a diminished social status befell working women who (as Hazel Carby describes) “had broken out of the boundaries of the home and taken their sensuality and sexuality out of the private and into the public sphere.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 931

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the gendered interior/exterior mapping of 19th-century domesticity and later urban sociology of street space. — connects to: Women’s church-based organizing pursued separate spaces while remaining dependent on male approval — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 701; Gendered norms proscribed the male gaze on women in public street space — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 675; The black church simultaneously united and divided men and women by gender — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 702 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Gendered norms proscribed the male gaze on women in public street space #expands (0.78) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 675
• Fearful women transit public space in planned, purposeful bursts rather than strolling #expands (0.76) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 876
• The black church simultaneously united and divided men and women by gender #qualifies (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 702