The urban street is the subject of Chapter Two, which analyzes how modern architectural and social geographies of women’s leisure and entertainment influenced Djuna Barnes’s depictions of women’s use of urban space in her early journalism. The first chapter concentrates extensively on the architectural, social, and cultural development of Chicago’s Hull-House through a discussion of Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895), and first-person accounts from immigrants associated with the settlement.

I examine texts written between 18 and argue that women reimagined and re-appropriated the built environment of the city and outright challenged the dominant gender ideologies of the time. The Progressive-era spaces that I analyze are the settlement house, the street, and the skyscraper. Through the application of feminist geography and space/place theory, I demonstrate how women during this period appropriated and reconstructed these spaces/places and, conversely, how these spaces/places transformed and influenced women’s agency and mobility. I examine three specific spaces outside of the traditional domestic sphere in order to better understand how women in the Progressive Era contested normalized spatial boundaries and laid claim urban spaces that were not traditionally viewed as theirs. Focusing on the intersection between literature and material spaces in the urban environment, the literature discussed here maps the evolution of women’s expanding mobilities and occupation of urban space. This dissertation investigates dramatic changes in women’s geographic experience as represented in key literary texts from the Progressive Era.

Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin