From Civility to Self-Defense: Modern Advice to Women on the Privileges and Dangers of Public Space

In 1911, etiquette manual author Florence Hall began her chapter on manners in public places by declaring that American women had “the most desirable privilege” to go about the city “safe and unmolested” with “little danger of annoyance,” even in the nation’s largest cities (1911, 355). The urban environment envisioned by Hall and the authors of the hundreds of other advice books published for women in the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries reflected the middle-class optimism of the Progressive Era. From this perspective the city was being reformed into an orderly, clean, civil, and therefore safe space that would be the leading edge of the United States’ future development (Flanagan 2002; Teaford 1993). Evolving standards of etiquette assisted in this transition by guiding behavior and shaping expectations for the increasingly large and anonymous situations and spaces created by the rampant industrialization and urbanization in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. These codes of behavior helped to mitigate the uncertainties of public space by creating rules that were meant to be, as Hall advised, “constant, steady, uniform,” widely known, and consistently practiced (1911, ii). And women, according to the educators, ministers, journalists, housewives, and fiction writers who wrote books to advise Americans on all aspects of socially acceptable behavior, were to have a place in this orderly, civil space.

Fast-forward to the late 1960s and 1970s, and the advice to women had changed drastically, emphasizing self-defense over manners. In these later decades, authors promised women that the information contained on their pages could “save your life!” (Conroy 1975, 6). They told women in no uncertain terms that “violent crimes—from purse snatchings and muggings to beatings, rapes, and other brutal assaults—happen every day. And they happen to women” (Krone 1967, cover). The city, as imagined by these authors, was fragmented and disintegrating. Physical danger lurked around every corner, particularly for women who through “ignorance and carelessness” allowed themselves to be victims of “rapists, muggers, molesters or purse-snatchers” (25). What women needed, according to this genre of advice literature produced in the later decades of the twentieth century, was to learn “how to avoid danger—and how to fight back if you can’t” (Conroy 1975, cover).

Reflecting an increasingly negative view of urban life in the later twentieth century, the self-defense movement that began in earnest in the 1970s declared itself the answer to women’s fear of/in public space. That such an answer was needed suggests that apprehension and suspicion came to play a far greater role in women’s lives in the later 1900s than they had in the first half of the century. Both the traditional system of manners represented in the etiquette manuals and the self-defense phenomenon acknowledged and accepted women’s presence in public spaces. Both placed much of the responsibility for how women fared in public space on the individual women themselves. Etiquette, however, articulated a significant range of rights and privileges that women could expect to enjoy when out in the world if they followed the rules, whereas most self-defense literature validated and propagated women’s fears. The shift reflects anxieties over women’s rapidly shifting roles in the late twentieth century. But it can also be read as both an indication of the role women played in representing societal conceptions of order and a changing perception of the nature of public space, from one that envisioned public space as something truly shared and at least potentially civil to one that saw it as inherently dangerous and competitive.

The decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century saw significant shifts in the size and culture of American cities as new technologies and new populations transformed relatively compact cities into heterogeneous industrial giants. The lives of American women underwent similarly substantial changes, many of which required that women make substantial use of urban public space. The number of women in the paid labor force, for example, rose from 19 percent of all women in 1890 to 23 percent...