Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

Shopping for gender 69
1880s to serve male interests. 52 The rise of wealthy suburbs like
Parktown in Johannesburg during the 1890s confirmed the split
between office and home for the well-to-do middle classes. 53
The expansion of capitalism during the nineteenth century disrupted
the existing relations between men and women; as men increasingly
worked outside the home, they developed shared interests with other
men, and the notion of domestic production was dislocated by the
alignment between capitalism and patriarchy. 54 Modern urban
experience and gender divisions can be traced back to the division
between work and home and the related development of factories
and offices; the new ideology of separate spheres for men and women
was reinforced by the rise of suburbs in major cities after the middle
of the nineteenth century. 55 The modern city engendered a sharp line
between public and private spaces, and whereas men enjoyed the
freedom to move in the crowds of modernity, middle class women
were confined to the private sphere symbolised by the suburb and the
home. 56 The public life of modernity was performed in places such as
cafés, boulevards, bars and brothels that were patronised by men.
Janet Wolff comments that the experience of the institutions of
modernity was thus ‘equated with experience in the public arena’
that inevitably became an almost exclusively masculine domain. 57
Not only were middle class women banned from the male world of
work, but they were also excluded from the dominant forms of
political and social life, and male activities were separated from
female concerns. Furthermore, industrial capitalism successfully
parted work from leisure, whereby leisure was feminised and defined
‘in relation to paid (male) employment’; 58 women who entered the
public sphere were usually regarded as objects for male consumption.
Femininity was believed to ‘find its meanings in the domestic, in
consumption, in leisure’, 59 and hence it was located in the
decorative, minor, insignificant and frivolous and came to be
associated with mass culture from the nineteenth century onwards. As
Andreas Huyssen contends, ‘the political, psychological, and
aesthetic discourse around the turn of the [nineteenth] century
consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as
52 E Palestrant Johannesburg one hundred. A pictorial history (1986) 46-47, 51.
53 J Clarke Like it was. The Star 100 years in Johannesburg (1987) 36; Palestrant (n
52 above) 43.
54 Massey (n 38 above) 191, 193.
55 Wolff (n 48 above) 36, 44.
56
Wolff 40; Massey 233.
57 Wolff 34-35, 45.
58 C Aitchison ‘Poststructural feminist theories of representing Others: a response to
the ‘crisis’ in leisure studies’ discourse’ (2000) 19 Leisure Studies 141.
59 Fiske (n 8 above) 24.