The literature of modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of life in the metropolis, mainly accounts for the experiences of men. It ignores the concomitant separation of public and private spheres from the mid-nineteenth century, and the increasing segregation of the sexes around that separation. The influential writings of Baudelaire, Simmel, Benjamin and, more recently, Richard Sennett and Marshall Berman, by equating the modern with the public, thus fail to describe women's experience of modernity. The central figure of the (...) flâneur in the literature of modernity can only be male. What is required, therefore, is a feminist sociology of modernity to supplement these texts. (shrink)

I would like to thank my colleagues John Fout and Joanna Gillespie for their close reading of the first draft of this paper and for their constant encouragement and support. This article has its origins in a paper entitled ‘Female Culture’ presented at the American Sociological Association meetings in Boston in 1976.