Medieval etiquette already prescribed disciplined, forward-only gaze for urban women.

Evidence

When you go to town or to church go suitably accompanied by honourable women according to your estate, and flee suspicious company, never allowing any ill famed women to be seen in your presence. And as you go bear your head upright and your eyelids low and without fluttering, and look straight in front of you and about four rods ahead, without looking round at any man or woman to the right or to the left, nor looking up, nor glancing from place to place, nor stopping to speak to anyone on the road. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 650

Categorization

• XREF: This is a medieval precursor to Simmel’s blase attitude and Goffman’s civil inattention: a prescribed technique of not-looking in public that predates modern urban anonymity. Connects strongly to the reader’s cross-reading of urban observation.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the historical-moral-panic reading in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: norms on dress/gaze as class and status signaling for urban bourgeois women.