Events

Visiting Professor, Turku University, Finland

Gender in the European Town

Online book event on 18 January 2023 (Zoom)

Welcome to the book launch of Deborah Simonton’s Gender in the European Town on Wednesday 18 January 2023 at 2:30 GMT (3:30 CET, 4:30 EET).

Moving from the mid-seventeenth century to the near present, this book marks physical and conceptual changes across European towns and examines how gender was implicated and imbricated in those changes.

As places which fostered and disseminated key social, economic, political and cultural developments, towns were central to the creation of gendered identities and the transmission of ideas across local, national and transnational boundaries. From 1650 to 2000, towns grew rapidly and responded to the needs for new infrastructures, physical reconfiguration and ideas of citizenship. Gender relations vary over space and time and are continually altering; such variation under- lines the need for a thorough non- or even anti-essentialism. Drawing primarily on three themes of economy, civic identity and uses of space, the volume shows that urban development, and responses to it, is not gender neutral and thus argues for the fundamental importance of a gendered perspective.

Gender in the European Town is a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in urban history and its interaction with gender from 1650 to the present. Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor, emerita, at the University of Southern Denmark, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Visiting Professor in Cultural History, University of Turku, author of A History of European Women’s Work and Women in European Culture and Society and Sourcebook, and General Editor of Routledge History Handbook on Gender and the Urban Experience.

To participate in the launching event, please send an email to Hannu Salmi by 15 January at hansalmi@utu.fi, and he will send you the zoom link.