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Feminist Geography, Prehistory of

S. Bowlby and J. Tivers, University of Reading, Reading, UK, and Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

In Britain, the history of feminist geography began in the late 1970s. This article is about the largely unwritten ‘prehistory’ of feminist geography in Britain. The first stirrings of concern for the geography of women seem to have taken place in North America in the early 1970s, but did not impact the United Kingdom until the mid-1970s. What did established women geographers feel about the male dominance of the discipline before the mid-1970s? Many of them, like Monica Cole and Alice Coleman, found important roles within the geographical community, and did not question the male bias of its subject content. In the early 1970s, however, a new generation of geographers began their study. They had been brought up in a post-war world of growing women’s employment, when women’s education and academic achievement were becoming ac- cepted among the middle classes. Feminist geography began to develop among this new generation.

We start our story by outlining the state of feminism in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then discuss the intellectual and social context within which geographers in Britain were working.

Second-Wave Feminism

The so-called ‘second-wave feminism’ is generally held to have developed out of the Civil Rights and leftist movements that were active in the 1960s in North America, Europe, and Australasia. This was a time of increased prosperity for adolescents and young adults that encouraged a ‘youth culture’, evidenced in con- sumption of new styles of music and dress, which ap- proved opposition to the ideas of the older generation and sought sexual freedom, facilitated by the develop- ment of ‘the pill’. The Civil Rights Movement in North America and the opposition to the war in Vietnam en- couraged ideas about liberation – for oppressed colonial peoples, from racial prejudice and from outmoded social conventions. Many women who engaged in these move- ments became disillusioned with the treatment they re- ceived from male activists – relegated to routine work and organization, while men played the more glamorous activist and leadership parts – summed up in the image of women ‘making the tea’. Furthermore, sexual liberation often meant that women activists were expected to pro- vide sexual services for male leaders as part of their delivery of ‘sexual liberation’.

It was out of such tensions and concerns that the women’s movement began. In North America and Britain, groups of women began to meet to share ideas and ex- periences and to develop political demands that were expressed through a variety of demonstrations and public statements. At this period, the majority of women activists were white, educated, and middle class: as many feminists have pointed out, this resulted in later claims that the experience and oppressions of non-white and working- class women had been excluded from the framing of feminist politics and theory. These claims were later to result in intense debate within feminism and major changes in feminist theory and practice. However, from its inception the women’s movement was politically disparate – it encompassed a wide variety of views, from liberal rights-based demands for equality to radical questioning of women’s sexuality and separatist movements. Between 1970 and 1978, the women’s movement, nevertheless, articulated seven demands: (1) equal pay; (2) equal edu- cation and equal opportunities in work; (3) financial and legal independence; (4) free 24-hour nurseries; (5) free contraception and abortion on demand; (6) a woman’s right to define her own sexuality; and (7) freedom from violence and sexual coercion.

Anglo-American Geography in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s

The so-called ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography oc- curred in the 1960s in Britain and North America. A new concern to develop and use rigorous ‘scientific’ theory and methodology, adopt positivist methodology, and statistical analysis of quantitative data became widely accepted. Much of the methodological and theoretical inspiration for this approach came from neoclassical economics. As behavioral geography developed, ideas and methods from psychology were also drawn in. This was a discipline which talked about genderless ‘indi- viduals’ and ‘households’ whose decision making resulted in the creation of settlement, travel, and economic ac- tivity patterns that might be predicted and modeled. Other traditions still continued and alternative ideas and approaches were also in evidence. As Hanson asks us to imagine, however, this was a world in which:

women’s subordinate status is vividly evident through

gender differences in educational attainment (years of

formal education), employment (job type, hours of

59

employment, wages), and political power (presence/ab-

sence in governmental decision-making positions) (y)

in which geography journals and university geography

curricula are practically devoid of the words ‘‘gender’’

and ‘‘women’’ and in which all instructional materials

implicitly, if not explicitly, assume that all salient geo-

graphical actors are male. Imagine university geography

teaching staffs, graduate student cohorts, and national

geography conferences composed almost entirely of

white men. (Hanson, 2008: 1)

Hanson describes the type of geographical education that both authors of this article received as under- graduates and, in the next two sections, we tell our stories of ‘discovering feminism’ as we now recollect them. In doing so, we have struggled to re-create for ourselves the intellectual and social climate of the period as well as details of times, places, and people. As many commen- tators on ‘narrative approaches’ have remarked, such re- call in not always accurate and we apologize to others who were there at the time if we have misrepresented or omitted events or people. Drawing on the material of our stories, we will finish with a discussion of how feminist ideas entered geography in the UK.

Sophie’s Story

In 1966, I (Bowlby) left Cambridge, eager to train as a postgraduate student at Northwestern University in Chicago. At the time, the Geography Department at Northwestern was in the vanguard of the ‘new’ quanti- tative geography. In my second year as an undergraduate, I had been inspired with enthusiasm for this approach by reading William Bunge’s Theoretical geography and by the ideas of Peter Haggett and Dick Chorley, lecturers in the Geography Department at Cambridge. And I was not disappointed – courses on math, economics, and stat- istics, and discussions of research on Monte Carlo simulations of the spread of innovation and modeling of travel behavior seemed exciting and novel (if difficult!). It never occurred to me to question the validity of this approach or to think that geographers should pay at- tention to the differences in the lives of men and women; however, I was becoming aware of some of those differ- ences in my own life. Specifically, some members of staff in the Department thought that women ‘were not worth taking on as postgrads’ or that we were there to ‘catch a husband’ and some fellow male students resented being outshone by their female peers. I was angry and surprised that my, and other women’s, desire to learn and excel academically was not taken seriously (and thought their attitudes old-fashioned and ridiculous). Although in my personal life I was adopting feminist principles, I knew nothing of feminist politics or theory and, certainly, it did

not occur to me to question the gender-blind nature of geographical study – indeed, I had no idea of such a concept.

In retrospect, I see that during my stay at North- western I also encountered ideas, politics, and approaches that moved me in the direction of feminist theory. I be- came more committed to left-wing politics through my reactions to the Chicago race riots, the political up- heavals of the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968, and the Kent State shootings in 1970. I was introduced to sociological thinking through a wonderful course run by Janet Abu-Lughod. In 1971, I went back to Northwestern, from the UK, to spend a summer writing up my thesis and sharing a house with Susan and Perry Hanson, who were analyzing data for their theses from a diary study of household travel behavior in Uppsala, Sweden. This allowed them to analyze the differences in the travel behavior of employed men and women – one of the first geographical analyses that explored the implications of the gender division of labor.

Back in Britain as a lecturer at Reading University in the early 1970s, I was asked to lecture on Social Geog- raphy and began to read literature in urban sociology, as well as the new ideas about Marxist geography. A reading group of social scientists at Reading was exploring Marxist literature and I quickly became a convert to this (to me) new type of approach. At the same time, my experience in job hunting and at conferences had made me more aware than before of the prejudices and pitfalls facing woman academics: at one interview I was asked if I could guar- antee not to have a baby before I was 35. I was fortunate in ending up in one of the rare Departments that welcomed women, and where other women lecturers were soon ap- pointed. I was also introduced further to feminist political ideas by John Silk who started lecturing in the Department the year before me, and by his wife Cathy Silk. I got a grant, in 1975, from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC, a government-funded public body), to extend the work I had done for my thesis on knowledge of, and access to, shopping opportunities. In this research, I surveyed each sample household’s ‘principal grocery shopper’ most of whom were, of course, women. My thesis had stemmed from an interest in mental maps and the ways in which everyday travel in the city might lead to the development of knowledge of shops and leisure opportunities. By the mid-1970s, I was beginning to re-frame the problem in terms of inequality and class differences but it was only through doing this study that I became increasingly con- cerned with the fact that it was ‘women’ who were doing the shopping, and began to think about the implications of inequalities in domestic labor. These ideas were given further impetus when, in 1975, Laurie Pickup came to the Department to do a thesis on women’s travel behavior and employment, supervised by Peter Hall and myself. His exploration of the then scanty literature on women’s travel

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to work broadened my appreciation of feminist issues in geography.

It was not until I met other people working with feminist ideas at successive Institute of British Geog- raphers (IBG) conferences, from 1977 to 1979, that I became properly aware of the wealth of feminist work that had already been done in other disciplines and the geo- graphical work that was underway in the United States. Some of the women I met had been actively involved in feminist politics and were better read than I in feminist analysis – notably Jo Foord, Jane Lewis, Suzanne Mack- enzie, Linda McDowell, and Jacky Tivers. Many of them, like Jacky, were already working on aspects of women’s lives. It was wonderful to meet people of like mind – interested in similar ideas and political concerns, who understood the problems of being a feminist woman in a male-dominated profession. We were strongly influenced by socialist feminist ideas and excited by the prospect of making a difference to geography and to the place of women academics in the discipline. These encounters led to my engagement with the Woman and Geography Study Group. This early period laid the foundations for developing my research beyond the initial focus on gen- der alone, to engage with issues of age, disability, and race. The development of this later research was also aided by involvement with ReadiBus (a bus service for those who cannot use ordinary buses) and Berkshire Women’s Aid; by interaction with other feminist postgraduates at Reading (especially Jo Little, Linda Peake, and Pat Richardson); and by supervision of postgraduates who have studied a range of issues, from child-care to binge drinking by young women, and extended my knowledge of feminist approaches and issues (including Gill Valen- tine, Ruth Butler, Fiona Smith, Lisa Doyle and, at present, Melissa Stepney and Cheryl Nosworthy).

Jacky’s Story

In early January 1977, I (Tivers) attended my first An- nual Conference of the IBG, held that year in Newcastle. At this stage, I was one term into my PhD studies at Kings College, London (funded by SSRC). Only a couple of months earlier, my supervisor, Barrie Morgan, had urged me to focus on a specific topic for research from among the broad field of leisure studies, which was my main interest within geography, and had suggested that I look at the particular interests and experiences of a population subgroup. Since, at the time, I was in my mid- thirties with an 18-month-old son, he had proposed that I should study the leisure experiences of women with young children. It is to Barrie that I owe the original idea for the research project, which grew into the first com- pleted thesis in feminist geography in the UK. By the time I got to the IBG conference at Newcastle, the topic

had broadened into a study of the weekday activity patterns of women with young children and I was reading whatever I could find which was remotely relevant. I ‘discovered’ the work of Ann Oakley, the British soci- ologist, and this opened my eyes to feminist issues for the first time, but I began to realize, with a sinking heart, that British geography had so far failed to grapple with even the simple differences between men’s and women’s lives, let alone the underlying reasons for these differences.

So, it was with some despondency about my chosen topic that I found myself among only about 40 women delegates (out of about 600 delegates in total) at New- castle IBG. In the queue to register I met a young woman lecturer, Bronwen Walter (now a Professor and well- known expert on Irish immigration into the UK), who fell on me with undisguised enthusiasm as another woman in the male-dominated place. Of greater immediate sig- nificance to my research project was my meeting with three geographers from Reading University – Sophie Bowlby, John Silk, and Laurie Pickup. Each, in their own way, encouraged and challenged me. With Sophie and John, I talked about the idea of studying women, spe- cifically, within the discipline of human geography. Laurie was a postgraduate student, like myself, and was researching mobility and transport issues for women. I was delighted to find that someone else (albeit a man!) was interested in women’s lives, from a geographical point of view. At the end of the conference I was warmly invited to go to Reading for further discussions at any time I would like to do so.

The next few months brought further advances. I uncovered some American literature, relating to the ‘geography of women’. This mainly took the form of seminar notes and unpublished departmental papers, not easy to track down in the pre-Internet era. I met Doreen Massey for the first time; she was lecturing in London, shortly before her move to the Open University. I con- tacted her and requested a discussion with her. With characteristic generosity, she took me to a café and bought me lunch, and was incredibly supportive and encouraging, urging me to pursue my line of thinking and stressing its importance to geography. My field work (a large-scale questionnaire survey of 400 women with young children) was conducted in September 1977 by 14 interviewers, including myself. The geography ‘frater- nity’ heard about my research, probably through Barrie Morgan, my supervisor, who was a committee member of the Urban Geography Study Group (UGSG) at the time, and I was approached to present a paper at the following year’s Annual Conference, in a session organized by the UGSG. In preparation for this, I was asked to write a departmental paper, and present a seminar, at Kings College. The atmosphere within the department was supportive and professional, and did not at all prepare me

Feminist Geography, Prehistory of 61

for the onslaught of negative opinion which I was to face at Hull in January 1978.

I still have the conference handbook, and it records that on the morning of Thursday, 5 January 1978, I gave a paper entitled ‘Constraints on spatial activity patterns: the case of women’ within the UGSG session ‘Socio-spatial aspects of urban life’. This, I believe, was the first paper ever presented from a feminist perspective at a British Geography conference, although I was not really aware of making history at the time. I did call for the explicit consideration of women in geographical studies, but did not feel that the argument was anything other than ‘perfectly straightforward’. Despite the presence at the conference of people like Mayer Hillman and Anne Whalley, Peter Jones, John Raine, and Malcolm Moseley – all thoughtful academics who were researching household activity patterns and the transport needs of individual household members – with whom I had fruitful dis- cussions, continuing long after the conference ended, my overwhelming experience of the conference was of being patronized, marginalized, and made to feel that my re- search lacked validity and importance. The term ‘gender’ was not even understood by many people, as became apparent later.

I returned from Hull in a bad mood, stormed into the postgraduate room at Kings College on the following Monday morning, and sat all day writing a polemical article for the journal, Area, before my annoyance and frustration had time to dissipate. Without discussing or revising it, I sent it off straight away to Jeremy White- hand, the editor. To my shame, I assumed that he would reject it, and that would be another black mark against male-dominated geography. But, within a very short time, he wrote back, accepting the paper for publication. It was in print within 6 months of submission – the first paper in a British geography journal to talk specifically about women. I am not particularly proud of the content – it is all talk and few facts, the editor had changed all the references to ‘gender’ into ‘sex’, without consulting me, and I felt too insecure, as a humble postgraduate, to alter the page-proofs when they were sent to me. Neverthe- less, it was a start. I had laid down a challenge:

By accepting the household as the predominant unit of

study in human geography and by neglecting the explicit

study of the geography of women, geographers have

implicitly accepted the existing structure of society and

prevented the examination of one of the most persistent

and pervasive forms of inequality in our society (Tivers,

1978a, 305).

At the 1978 Hull IBG conference, the British collective of the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG) was formed, the inaugural meeting taking place (for some reason, which I have now forgotten) in my bedroom. In the spring

of 1978, I received my first copy of the USG newsletter, containing an interesting review article by Bonnie Loyd, entitled ‘The quiet revolution in geography’. This opened my eyes to research which had already taken place in the United States on the ‘geography of women’ and to the number of dedicated courses which were already being taught there. Loyd talked about the ‘quantity of studies’ and a ‘steady stream of research’, but I felt that the focus of these studies was not on the real constraint which underlay women’s lives; and so I wrote ‘Yet another view on the geography of women’, which was published in the USG Newsletter at the end of the year. In this paper, I argued that geography had been too concerned with production, at the expense of reproduction, and that it was necessary to focus on the ‘gender-role constraint’, which was both supportive of capitalism and the frame for women’s lives.

By the end of 1978, I was a committee member of the IBG Social Geography Study Group, and had met both Linda McDowell and Suzanne Mackenzie. Suzanne ar- rived from Canada to study at Sussex University, bringing with her a wealth of experience in feminist geography from North America. Together with Sophie Bowlby, we organized the first dedicated session about women and geography at an IBG conference, which took place in January 1979 at Manchester University. It was not an unqualified success; heavy snowfall caused a lot of problems and our principal speaker, Pat Burnett from the US, was unable to attend. Suzanne and I gave papers, hers being a review of North American work in the field, and Sophie read Pat’s paper. As I have recorded elsewhere, ‘the debate tended to descend into acrimony, with tight corners being fought by the Marxists who saw feminism as a distraction from the ‘true cause’ of socialism’. This was quite ironic, considering that feminist geography in the UK had been born, primarily, out of Marxist geography.

Nevertheless, we were undeterred, and two further articles appeared in Area in 1979 and 1980, the first being Linda McDowell’s analysis of women in British geog- raphy and the second, a joint article by Suzanne, Linda, and Jo Foord, which sought to extend and perpetuate the discussion on women and geography. At the 1980 Annual Conference of IBG, the Women and Geography Working Party was set up, with Linda McDowell acting as the guiding force. After some delay, during which the group was required to demonstrate the level of support for its activities, the Women and Geography Study Group (WGSG) was inaugurated in 1982. One of its first actions was to enter publishing, since there was a complete lack of material in the UK suitable for teaching feminist geography. It was decided that a textbook would be written collectively; Linda McDowell, Sophie Bowlby, and I were appointed editors. The joint editing was something of a nightmare, in the era before e-mail, but

62 Feminist Geography, Prehistory of

the book (Geography and gender: An introduction to feminist

geography) was very well received and has become a ‘classic’ in human geography. With this book, the ‘pre- history’ of feminist geography could be said to have ended, as feminism then began to be part of the ‘history’ of the discipline; increasing numbers of papers and books were published, and increasing numbers of conference sessions organized, from a feminist perspective, mainly through the auspices of the WGSG, which has gone from strength to strength in the last 25 years. As I have re- corded elsewhere, ‘I am proud to have been a part of the beginnings of feminist geography, and am proud too of the movement which has grown and expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the early days’.

Concluding Thoughts

Clearly, our stories provide only two glimpses of the processes that led to the early development of feminist geography. The other people we have mentioned might tell it in very different ways. But our stories demonstrate that the development of early feminist geography was not the heroic creation of a few pioneers. Rather, in many places during the 1970s, women and some men in geography began to explore the geographies of women, and in time, this led to the examination of a range of explanations for the subordination of women and to the development of more sophisticated feminist geographies. Those of us working in or entering the geographical discipline, in the 1970s, were in a social and economic environment in which ideas of equal opportunities for women, of sexual equality, autonomy, and choice were widely debated and relevant to young educated women entering the academic profession. We addressed issues drawn from our own experience and raised new questions linked to the new ways of life that women were adopting. Although some came to these questions after involve- ment in feminist politics, many did not and only began to explore the wealth of feminist literature outside geog- raphy after initiating their research.

Despite the contribution of some men, this history also suggests how important it was for the creation of a feminist geography that women were entering the dis- cipline. It was women’s interest in and experience of aspects of everyday life affecting women that led to the rapid expansion of the early geography of women and the subsequent development of feminist geographies. This reminds us of the importance of striving to ensure that the discipline is open to disadvantaged and minority groups. For example, the developments of geographies of sexuality and of disability have been led largely by people who are bisexual, gay, lesbian, or disabled. It is vital that we work to ensure openness at a time when the

pressures of the research assessment exercise (RAE) and work intensification in universities may limit the access of such groups and the development of challenges to contemporary ideas.

See also: Feminism and Work; Feminism, Maps and GIS;

Feminist Groups within Geography; Feminist

Methodologies; Feminist Political Economy;

Possibilism.

Further Reading

Bowlby, S. R. (1979). Accessibility, mobility and grocery shopping. In Goodall, B. & Kirby, A. (eds.) Resources and Planning, pp 293--323. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Bowlby, S. R. (1984). Planning for women to shop in postwar Britain. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2, 179--199.

Bunge, W. (1966). Theoretical geography. Lund: C W K Gleerup. Foord, J., Mackenzie, S. and McDowell, L. (1980). Women’s place,

women’s space. Area 12(1), 47--49. Haggett, P. (1965). Locational Analysis in Human Geography. London:

Edward Arnold. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Hanson, S. (2008). Geography and gender: 1984 women and

geography study group. In Hubbard, P., Kitchin, R. & Valentine, G. (eds.) Key Texts in Human Geography. pp 91–980. London: Sage.

Hanson, S. and Hanson, P. (1974). Daily Activity Patterns of Working Women and Working Men: Are They Different? Clarke University: Mimeo.

Lewis, J. (1984). Postwar Regional Development in Britain: The Role of Women in the Labour Market. PhD Thesis, University of London.

Lewis, J. and Foord, J. (1984). New towns and new gender relations in old industrial regions: Women’s employment in Peterlee and east Kilbride. Built Environment 10, 42--51.

Loyd, B. (1978). The quiet revolution in geography. Union of Socialist Geographers Newsletter 3(3), 30--32.

McDowell, L. (1979). Women in British geography. Area 11(2), 151--154.

McDowell, L. (1983). Towards an understanding of the gender division of urban space. Environment and Planning D Society and Space 1, 59--72.

Pickup, L. (1983). Travel Issues in Women’s Job Choice: An Activity Based Approach. PhD Thesis, University of Reading.

Relph, E. (1970). An enquiry into the relations between phenomenology and geography. Canadian Geographer 14, 193--201.

Tivers, J. (1977). Occasional Paper No. 6: Constraints on Spatial Activity Patterns: Women with Young Children. London: Kings College, Geography Department.

Tivers, J. (1978). How the other half lives: The geographical study of women. Area 10(4), 302--306.

Tivers, J. (1978). Yet another view on the geography of women. Union of Socialist Geographers Newsletter 4(2), 25--26.

Tivers, J. (1982). Weekday Spatial Activity Patterns of Women with Young Children. PhD Thesis, University of London.

Tivers, J. (1997). In Women and Geography Study Group of the Royal Geographical Society (ed.) Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference, pp 36–38. Harlow, UK: Longman.

Tuan, Y.-F. (1971). Geography, Phenomenology and the study of human nature. Canadian Geographer 15, 181--192.

Wilson, E. (1986). Hidden Agendas. London: Tavistock. Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1984). Geography

and Gender: An Introduction to Feminist Geography. London: Hutchinson.

Women and Geography Study Group of the IBG (1997). Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference. Harlow: Longman.

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