Analyzing the Roles and Representation of Women in the City

Analyzing the Roles and Representation of Women in The City

Amanda Demers

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of B.A. Honours in Urban Systems

Department of Geography McGill University Montréal (Québec) Canada

December 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would first and foremost like to thank my thesis supervisor, Professor Benjamin Forest. My research would have been impossible without the guidance and support of Professor Forest, who ultimately let me take the lead on this project while providing me with encouragement and help when I needed. I appreciate his trust in me to take on a topic that has interested him over the years. I would also like to extend my thanks to Professor Sarah Moser, who kindly accepted to be my thesis reader, and to the 2018 Honours Coordinators, Professor Natalie Oswin and Professor Sarah Turner, who have provided their wonderful and insightful guidance along this process as well. Additionally, I would like to thank my friends and family for their support, and the GIC for its availability and convenient hours, as it served as my primary writing spot for this thesis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES………………………………………………………………….……….…iv LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………………iv ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………....v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….…1 1.1: Research Aim and Questions……………………………………………………….1 1.2: Significance of Research……………………………………………………………2 1.3: Thesis Structure……………………………………………………………………..2 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK……………………………….………….…4 2.1: Feminist Geography………………………………………………………………...4 2.1.1: “Separate Spheres”: Women in Private Space, Men in Public Space……..4 2.1.2: Women and Consumption in 19th and 20th Century America………………5 2.1.3: Girls in Public Space and Gendered Play………………………………….6 2.1.4: Feminist Geography: Concluding Remarks………………………………..7 2.2: Geography and Film………………………………………………………………...7 2.2.1: Rural and Urban Portrayals in Early 20th Century Film…………………..8 2.2.2: Film Documentaries, Identity Formation, and Place-Making……………..9 2.2.3: Geography and Film: Concluding Remarks………………………………10 2.3: Theoretical Framework Conclusion……………………………………………...10 CHAPTER 3: CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE CITY…………………………………...12 3.1: Lewis Mumford…………………………………………………………….……...12 3.1.1: The “Dead City” …………………………………………………..……..12 3.1.2: Mumford’s Solution……………………………………………………….13 3.1.3: Lewis Mumford: Concluding Remarks………………………………..…..14 3.2: New York World’s Fair (1939) ………………………………………….………..14 3.3: Greenbelt, Maryland………………………………………………………………16 3.3.1: The History of Greenbelt Cities…………………………………………...16 3.3.2: The Exclusive Community of Greenbelt, Maryland……………………….16 3.3.3: The Place for Women in Greenbelt, Maryland…………………………...18 3.3.4: Greenbelt, Maryland: Concluding Remarks……………………………...19 3.4: The City……………………………………………………………………………..19 3.4.1: The City and Historical Context…………………………………………. 19 3.4.2: The City and Urban Social Reform……………………………………….20 3.4.3: The City: Concluding Remarks……………………………………………21 3.5: Contextualization of The City Conclusion………………………………………..22 CHAPTER 4: QUANTITATIVE STOP-FRAME ANALYSIS…………………………...…23 4.1: Methodology……………………………………………………………………..…23 4.1.1: Coding the Frames………………………………………………………..23 4.1.2: Statistical Analysis………………………………………………………...26 4.2: Data and Analysis………………………………………………………………….27

4.3: Discussion & Conclusion………………………………………………………...... 31 CHAPTER 5: QUALITATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS……………………………….…...32 5.1: Methodology………………………………………………………………………..32 5.2: Retrospective Frames……………………………………………………………...32 5.3: Prospective Frames………………………………………………………………...35 5.4: Discussion & Conclusion…………………………………………………………..36 CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION……………………………………………..38 Reference List……………………………………………………………………………………40

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 4.1: Frame #357………………………………………………………………………….24 Figure 5.1: Frame #54 and #56…………..………………………………………………….…..33 Figure 5.2: Frame #144 and #150…………..…………………………………………...………34 Figure 5.3: Frame #184 and #230…………..………………………………………………..….35 Figure 5.4: Frame #417 and #460………...... …………………………………………………...36

LIST OF TABLES

Table 4.1: The City Coding Format……………………………………………………………..24 Table 4.2…………………………..……………………………………………………………..27 Table 4.3: …………………………………………………………………………………………..27 Table 4.4: ……………………………….…………………………………………………………..28 Table 4.5: ……………………………….…………………………………………………………..29 Table 4.6: …………………………………………………………………………………………..29 Table 4.7: ……………………………….…………………………………………………………..30 Table 4.8: ……………………………….…………………………………………………………..30

ABSTRACT

Lewis Mumford, a 20th century urban visionary, stood out from the public of his time by refusing to blindly praise rapid technological innovation and urbanization. Rather, he professed that a small, democratic, and green community in the form of a “greenbelt town” would be the ultimate living space for humankind to avoid the foreseeable downfalls of urban growth and unstoppable technological progress. Mumford showcased this vision in The City (1939) to millions at the New York World’s Fair. We must be critical as to how truly “democratic” and inclusive these communities were portrayed as on screen, as to see if this film subtly perpetrated social inequalities to a wide audience, despite Mumford’s claims to having conceived of a nearly utopian democratic community. Thus, the aim of my research is to examine specifically the roles and representation of women in Lewis Mumford’s vision in The City.

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

“The town was us and we were part of it,” declares the narrator, describing an idyllic, democratic living environment in the form of a greenbelt town. Lewis Mumford, a leading 20th century intellect on urban studies and design, shows a planned suburban community in his 1939 film, The City, as a solution to existing and foreseeable urban problems of his time. Urban areas can be easily confounded with negative imagery of crime, pollution, overcrowding, poor sanitation, and lack of green space. On the surface, a small, green suburb may seem like a safe- haven from these urban plights. However, it is important to examine Mumford’s greenbelt fantasy under a critical lens. Did Mumford truly intend for everyone to be part of this town in the same manner? Specifically, I wish to explore how gendered, “separate spheres” of space exist between women and men within this film, and even within the greenbelt town itself. I will focus on the quantitative differences between men and women as shown in the film through a stop-frame analysis and then I will apply statistical analyses to further examine these quantitative relationships. In addition, I will use a qualitative content analysis to assess women’s roles and primary activities within the film, of which are too complex and nuanced to be captured by the quantitative data alone. These analyses will be conducted to test my overall hypothesis that The City, and ultimately Mumford’s greenbelt vision, is plagued with gender inequalities, despite its overall claim as a democratic “safe-haven” from urban issues of the time. More specifically, I hypothesize that: 1) there will be less women than men quantitatively shown in the film; 2) women will be shown in more often in “domestic” roles and activities than men are in the film; and 3) women will be more confined to the private sphere and occupy a more domestic role within “The Green City”, as compared to the other scenes of the film, due to the expected spatial entrapment of women corresponding with suburbanization. These hypotheses are ultimately based on a theoretical framework of feminist geography and geography and film literatures that I will set up in Chapter 2 of my thesis, and they set out to test whether women were envisioned to be a part of greenbelt communities in the same manner as men as showed by Lewis Mumford.

1.1: Research Aim and Questions Lewis Mumford, a 20th century urban visionary, stood out from the public of his time by refusing to blindly praise rapid technological innovation and urbanization. Rather, he professed

1 that a small, democratic, and green community in the form of a “greenbelt town” would be the ultimate living space for humankind to avoid the foreseeable downfalls of urban growth and unstoppable technological progress. Mumford showcased this vision in The City (1939) to millions at the New York World’s Fair. We must be critical as to how truly “democratic” and inclusive these communities were portrayed as on screen, as to see if this film subtly perpetrated social inequalities to a wide audience, despite Mumford’s idyllic portrayal of a seemingly nearly utopian democratic community. My research aim is to examine the roles and representation of women within Lewis Mumford’s greenbelt vision in The City by focusing on the following three research questions:

1. Are women quantitatively represented as much as men in The City? 2. In what roles are women portrayed within The City, as compared to men? 3. Are women found more in the private sphere, occupying domestic roles, in Mumford’s greenbelt vision as compared to the prior scenes of the film?

1.2: Significance of Research Due to the very public nature of The City’s showing during the era of its release, this film was seen by many during the post-Great Depression era, including women. I believe this film helped shape women’s identities and perpetuated the notion that women should remain in the private, domestic sphere to those who have viewed this film, as well as to women who have moved to greenbelt towns in which these societal expectations were actually implemented formally there, as according to recorded historical documentation. However, most of the pre-existing scholarly literature on this film either focuses on The City’s renowned soundtrack, or its importance as one of the premier American documentary films (Newlin 1977; Bukatman 1997). Additionally, the existing analyses of this film on the topic of urban social geography have mostly regarded the solutions that greenbelt towns could provide to pressing urban problems, such as overpopulation and poor sanitation (Arthur 1993). In contrast to these analyses, I will fill in this gap within the pre-existing literature by choosing to analyze and critique the film for its gender inequalities as perpetuated in space. A deeper and more critical social lens needs to be applied to such a historic and wide-reaching film. 1.3: Thesis Structure

In Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework, I will review scholarly works on feminist geography and geography in film, which will serve as the theoretical basis for an examination of gender inequalities in The City. In Chapter 3: Contextualization of The City, I will examine the historical context surrounding Lewis Mumford, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Greenbelt, Maryland, and The City itself, to set up the background information surrounding this film and its production. In Chapter 4: Quantitative Stop-Frame Analysis, I will outline the steps of my methodologies for coding frames and running statistical analyses. I will then outline the corresponding data, and then analyze and discuss my results to complete the quantitative analysis section. In Chapter 5: Qualitative Content Analysis, I will analyze the general roles and activities of women as observed visually throughout the film. I will first outline my methodology, then I will focus on the frames in the first and second halves of the film separately. In Chapter 6: Discussion & Conclusion, I will wrap up my main findings to my three research questions to conclude my examination of the representation and roles of women in Lewis Mumford’s urban vision as portrayed in The City (1939), and ultimately determine whether my hypotheses are supported by these quantitative and qualitative data.

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

As a theoretical framework to set up this thesis, I primarily focused on analyzing feminist geography and geography and film literatures. Within the feminist geography body of literature, I will pay particular attention to the concept of “separate spheres,” an ideology used to maintain patriarchal gender relations alongside the growing capitalism of 19th century America. This ideology encouraged women to stay at home in the private sphere, or to go out in public as a consumer. I will also look at how this ideology is developed through the concept of gendered play amongst children. Within the geography in film body of literature, I will show how film, and especially documentary film, plays a major role in not only portraying but also reproducing identities. However, these identities are presented subjectively through film, as through the narrow lenses held by film-makers and producers. Both bodies of scholarly work serve as a basis to my analysis of The City as an urban planning film that shaped women’s perception of themselves in geographic space during the 1930’s post-war American era, through both societal expectations and their corresponding portrayals on screen which were ultimately driven by Lewis Mumford’s subjectivity as a film-maker.

2.1: Feminist Geography Feminist geography is a subfield within the larger field of geography that is primarily concerned with the structure of gender divisions in different societies (McDowell 1993). This approach towards studying geography has placed attention on the division between public and private space to construct and reinforce gender divisions. In the ideology of “separate spheres”, public space and its associated activities of work and politics are gendered as “masculine”. Private space and the typically domestic activities that take place there are gendered as “feminine”. The evolution of the concept of separate spheres, in a late 19th- early 20th century American context, is particularly relevant to my study of The City, due to Lewis Mumford’s place-making and mostly clear distinctions between public and private space within this film. I will analyze this concept further, in addition to investigating how this socio-spatial division is constructed over time.

2.1.1: “Separate Spheres”: Women in Private Space, Men in Public Space The notions of public and private space are socially constructed (Bondi and Domosh 1998; McDowell 1999). The factors that shape and construct the distinctions of private and

4 public space, such as the context and the physical infrastructure present, ultimately determine the identity and manner of interaction with this space. Women are one group of actors whose interactions in space are affected greatly by the social constructions of it, for largely women are more accepted in the private sphere of space, as according to societal standards. “There are many ways in which gender is spatially produced. Perhaps the most commented on is the binary of public and private which has been mapped on to masculine and feminine, man and woman,” (Cresswell and Uteng 2008, 2). Gender division was also mapped onto the macro-structure of the city, “the public domain of the urban center…both deeply masculine and associated with social, economic, and political power. Conversely, the suburb came to be associated with middle-class domesticity, femininity, and dependence,” (Bondi 1998, 161). Each space was associated not only with different traits, but also with different participants. The idea of urban, public space fitting into the masculine realm is an example of a largely accepted social construct, and with this in mind, “women’s visible presence in urban space could signify forms of disruption and disorder,” (Tonkiss 2005, 125). Therefore, a shift in societal expectations for women would need to occur for women to be accepted in the public sphere, otherwise this presence would be out-of- line and a challenge to the social norms.

2.1.2: Women and Consumption in 19th and 20th Century America As of the mid-19th century, a distinct separation between the places of home and work formed, especially for the middle-class (Mackenzie and Rose 1983; Davidoff and Hall 1987). Eventually, “the doctrine of separate spheres came to dominate almost all aspects of middle-class life,” (Bondi and Domosh 1998, 278). Therefore, this era marked a greater distinction between public and private space, and thus between the masculine and feminine spheres. Bondi and Domosh (1998) also note the importance of defining this evolved concept of “public” space as “public”, in the sense of not being controlled by private interests. Nonetheless, public space was still socially constructed and gendered, and exclusionary to certain identities, primarily women. However, women were not entirely excluded from public space, rather they were assigned a very limited, new role within it, for,

The late-nineteenth-century industrial order required on the one hand a societal commitment to the values of production…and, on the other hand, a commitment to the values of consumption. These seemingly contradictory values could be maintained by

aligning the first with the world of men and the second with the world of women (Bondi and Domosh 1998, 280)

Thus, as compared to earlier American contexts, the 19th century marked a distinct separation of not only work and home, men and women, but also defined a distinct activity for women in public space: consumption. Consumption ultimately allowed women a socially accepted activity out in the public realm, whereas prior to this shift in gendered spaces, women were exclusively accepted in the private, domestic sphere. Regardless, this increasing separation between spaces of work and home still promoted the suburbanization and spatial entrapment of middle-class women (England 1993), despite helping to foster capitalist ideals by promoting a limited newfound “freedom” for women in the form of public consumption.

2.1.3: Girls in Public Space and Gendered Play Gender distinctions in public spaces are generally less rigid for children as compared to adults. Children, confined to certain spaces based on their youth, tend to only inhabit a few public areas, including playgrounds and other recreational facilities. However, girls are confined further in the public spaces they can inhabit as a youth, based on perceptions of what are considered masculine and feminine contexts and activities in these spaces. Daytime alludes to playtime for both girls and boys, whereas nighttime is largely reserved for just boys in the public sphere. Also, boys often choose more “masculine” activities to engage in within public space, such as more physical sports, like soccer or baseball. Girls are confined to activities with less physical contact, such as gymnastics, by societal norms of what is accepted for a girl to do (Lever 1978; Karsten 2003). This is largely true of the 1930’s context in The City, in which gender binaries and societal expectations were even more rigid than in modern times. Additionally, societal expectations were followed in practice more so than today.

Not only do gendered divisions in public space also occur in children’s spaces, such as on the playground, children in fact learn of these separate spheres here. As it is a socially constructed concept, they ultimately carry on this learned concept throughout life (Hart 1979). Hart (1979) conducted an observation on children on the playground to see that younger children had less gendered divisions in their games and activities, but this gender division became more prominent as the pool of children observed were older.

2.1.4: Feminist Geography Concluding Remarks Ultimately, the expected place of women has evolved over time. As of the 19th century separation of work and home, a separation between places for men and places for women was also created. Women were now expected to tend to the home in the private sphere and men were expected to work out in the public sphere. In order maintain these traditional societal expectations while still facilitating the ongoing evolvement of capitalism in the 19th and 20th century, spaces of consumption were constructed in the public realm for women to participate in. Spaces of consumption thus allowed for capitalism to evolve to adapt to the separation of home and work, as it is the needed counterpart to places of production (the work space) that men were participating in. These gendered divisions in space are socially constructed and learned at a young age, and ultimately applied further over the course of a lifetime. The production of societal norms and expectations is carried out through many mediums. One of the most widespread and influential mediums of social construction would be through the media. Specifically, film and popular cinema are media that tend to effectively reach large audiences. The ultimate popularity of these mediums allows for producers and directors to have the power to interpret identities, norms, and values and to show this respective interpretation to the public. Therefore, the public’s interpretation of real life is altered by the subjectivity of those who produce these mediums, such as film producers and directors. Identities, norms, and values are thus constantly being interpreted by producers and reinterpreted by the public in an on-going, dynamic process.

2.2: Geography and Film Film is a multi-sensorial medium in which people and places are interpreted and portrayed. Film ultimately, “…has its own geography, one that situates the spectator in a cinematic place where space and time are compressed and expanded and where societal ideals, mores, values, and roles may be sustained or subverted,” (Hopkins 1994, 47). Within the field of geography, objectivity is valued for “true” accounts of real places and spaces (Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997). I will be examining how documentary producers, using the supposed “objectivity” of their genre of film, create and recreate identities and societal ideals through their portrayal of cities in the 1920-30’s, and ultimately how these phenomena are also received and interpreted by an audience.

2.2.1: Rural and Urban Portrayals in Early 20th Century Film The different portrayal of cities in popular cinema reflects changes in public attitude towards city life in the U.S. From 1920, “cities were portrayed as characteristically overcrowded, claustrophobic, dark and violent. The city appeared as a mixture of anthill and labyrinth; a place where good had to struggle to overcome inherent evil,” (Gold 2001, 338). Such visions were inspired by some of the premier urban images in Friedrich Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Webb (1987) argues that Lang wished to convey the perpetual anxieties of city life by casting the city in a negative light in film. The visual appearance of these early 20th century urban-set films were marked by, “dark shadows…contrasted with tense, malevolent light,” (Ford 1994, 120). These portrayals corresponded with urban crises of the time, including overcrowding, reflecting problems in actual cities. Popular cinema in the U.S. has shown urban spaces as dark and chaotic, and as a stark contrast to rural and suburban life, “industrialisation and urbanisation brought intense concerns in the Western world about the physical state of the city and about the moral and spiritual well- being of its inhabitants,” (Gold 2001, 341). Rural towns were often depicted as places with adequate housing, employment, and community facilities, lots of open space, and an ordered and sociable community life, as in the 1948 film Planned Towns (Aitken and Zonn 1994a). Conversely, urban life was depicted as revolving around moral decrepitude and inner- city degeneracy (McCarthy et al. 1996). Therefore, rural and suburban areas were presented as safe-havens from and solutions to the urban problems of this era (Lukinbeal and Sharp 2014). This urban-suburban/rural contrast presents non-urban areas as solutions to common urban problems, such as overcrowding, but this notion is largely scarred by racist undertones. “The filmic and electronic media play a critical role in the production and channeling of suburban anxieties and retributive morality onto its central target; the depressed inner city. These developments deeply inform race relations,” (McCarthy et al. 1996, 123). Film of the 1920-30’s not only showed cities as dark and chaotic, but also as a space for non-whites, thus presenting suburban/ rural areas as a contrast; a white “safe-haven”. Popular cinema thus inevitably excluded the portrayal of non-whites in these suburban and rural spaces. Popular cinema during the 1920-30’s embodied small-town values, not only because it corresponded with the public attitude, but also for more practical reasons, as, “the high cost of moviemaking has always strengthened Hollywood's natural conservatism,” (Webb 1987, 10).

Film producers tend to prefer small-town settings for their films, as the production cost is much cheaper. Therefore, not only was urban space largely negatively portrayed in popular cinema, but urban space was generally neglected as a setting by Hollywood producers for cost-saving reasons.

2.2.2: Film Documentaries, Identity Formation, and Place-Making Popular cinema, of course, is not constrained by standards of accuracy or objectivity, and indeed, such films are often explicitly fantasying. In contrast, the authority of documentaries rests to one degree or another on the claim that they provide an accurate mirror to the world. Documentaries, however, are not “objective” but are ultimately “situated” in a particular worldview (Nichols 2008). “In [documentaries] are grounded the figures of the contemporary men, women, and children, and the places they inhabit. The power of representations to intervene in the ongoing transformations of everyday life should not be underestimated,” (Aitken and Zonn 1994a, 8). Not only does real-life present documentary producers with content to film, but the inevitably subjective message and representations of these real-life phenomena as interpreted by documentary producers and transcribed to medium of film ultimately gets back to the public. Therefore, documentary production is part of an ongoing process of media interpretation of real- life phenomena affecting the public’s perception of such phenomena. “Representation reinforces a set of societal structures that help individuals to make sense of surroundings that are otherwise chaotic and random, and to define and locate themselves with respect to those surroundings,” (Aitken and Zonn 1994a, 7). Thus, people can use the medium of film, especially as a viewer, to see their own and other identities and to gain a fuller understanding of them. Not only do documentaries stand as an interpretation and representation of real-life identities, but also an interpretation and representation of real-life places, for, “the cinematic landscape is not, consequently, a neutral place of entertainment or an objective documentation or mirror of the “real”, but an ideologically charged cultural creation whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested, and obscured,” (Hopkins 1994, 47). The “objective” representation of place in documentaries is but a myth, as the producers of the film ultimately put in their subjective perception. Thus, place can also be seen as a “process” in which it is dynamic and constantly being made and remade through film and other media (Pink 2008). Ultimately, not only are documentaries based on real-life concepts, but documentaries

9 also influence the public’s perception on them and thus have the potential to alter these real-life concepts themselves.

2.2.3: Geography and Film Concluding Remarks Ultimately, film directors and producers of the 1920-30’s largely used their power of portrayal to depict urban spaces as dark and morally decrepit places, which both resonated with the common public opinion of the time and reproduced this notion further in the public eye. Film and documentary producers have the power to shape how place is interpreted by the public through how they choose to portray supposed “objective” phenomena. Therefore, film holds an important role within the field of geography, especially in social geography, for holding the capacity to help build, interpret, and reproduce spatial identities in a subjective manner as a medium.

2.3: Theoretical Framework Conclusion Both feminist geography and geography in film literatures present different ways that people, specifically women in this case, can form their identities through societal norms and corresponding portrayals in film and media. As such, “visual media naturalizes social and cultural difference in that they seek to pass off that which is cultural as natural...social and cultural meanings are constructed and contested through film,” (Lukinbeal and Sharp 2014). Therefore, in The City, Lewis Mumford holds the ultimate power of identity construction and perpetration through what he decides to show on screen, for, “representation reinforces a set of societal structures that help individuals to make sense of surroundings that are otherwise chaotic and random,” (Aitken and Zonn 1994b). In relation to women and geographic space, women viewers of The City thus naturally will identify with the women portrayed in the film, and how they are portrayed will ultimately help determine how the women viewers will make sense of themselves and their respective positions in space. This constant feedback between viewer and film-maker, reality and cinema, is a vicious cycle of identity construction and perpetration that is prevalent in all media, even supposed “documentary” film. Subjectivity is at the core of all film, and I contend that Mumford’s subjective views on women, likely influenced by gender inequalities within societal expectations of his time, have been perpetrated to a large audience through the rather grandiose and wide-scale showing of The City.

Both scholarly literatures set up a theoretical background that encompasses the basis of how I plan to analyze this film, in contrast to how it has been previously analyzed by scholarly literature, and both literatures can offer explanations as to what we can expect in reference to women’s portrayals in this film. Not only does a theoretical framework help explain the basis of my hypotheses, but the cultural and historical context of this film can also add another layer of meaning to the content within.

CHAPTER 3: CONTEXTUALIZATION OF THE CITY

To help understand the importance of The City in the world of urban planning, specifically within Mumford’s era, I will provide a socio-historical context for this film by way of touching on a brief history of Lewis Mumford, the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Greenbelt, Maryland, and finally The City itself. All these components help frame as to why this film is worthy of further critique and academic investigation, all the while providing us with the surrounding societal ideals that were prevalent during the time period of its release. Lewis Mumford, despite being a forward-thinker as of his era, may not be considered forward-thinking regarding all social aspects of his visions, and I plan to bring to light his insensitivities to the inclusion of race and gender in the implementation of his works and designs.

3.1: Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford, as described by his close friend Mark Van Doren, “…builds cities, societies, civilizations, cultures- truly builds them, with the most durable stuff available to man: ideas,” (Miller 2002a, xiii), and is known by many today as, “one of the great American critics of culture and civilization…a philosopher, planner, historian, cultural and political commentator, literary critic and essayist,” (Li 2009, 1). A notable thinker of the 20th century, Mumford focused most of his work on cities, society, technology, and future advancements. Most known specifically for his literary works, his ideas have changed the field of urban studies and continue to have a lasting influence today. However, many of his non-literary works, including the 1939 film The City, have received little scholarly attention despite their profound importance and direct impact on the general public of Mumford’s era.

3.1.1: The “Dead City” Unlike The City, Mumford’s published literary works of the 1920’s and beyond have substantial gained traction within the world of modern academia. One of his earliest books, The Story of Utopias (1922), serves as, “an early vehicle for his analysis…pursued throughout his career, that the one-sided development of technology and science alone had disastrous potential… [and] that this had led to the recent disaster of the First World War,” (Li 2009, 45). Mumford pursued this theme of technological disaster and future dystopias, attempting to provide a forewarning of what he expected to happen to society if innovation was left unchecked. The public of this era was often blinded by the upsides of technology and innovation in a quickly

12 progressing time period. However, the positive notions associated with the term “progress” masks the potential negative consequences of such change, as was Mumford’s critique of the great thinkers of his era who seemed to overlook any negative externalities that may be accumulating in the background of technological innovation. Another issue that Mumford feared becoming true was the concept of the “dead city”, in which cities would eventually become too overpopulated to function orderly and properly. Mumford based this idea on past civilizations which experienced excessive growth that eventually lead to ecological catastrophe (Stephenson 1999).

First the back gardens and the breathing spaces disappear…then the original residential areas are eaten into from within, as if by termites…then these overcrowded quarters, serving as an area of transition between the commercial center and the better dormitory areas become in their disorder and their misery special breeding points for disease and crime (Mumford 1938, 245).

Mumford’s references to ecological issues, in tandem with his discussion of the destruction of the metropolis, allude to his conceptualization of the city as an ecological unit as opposed to a more rigid conception of urban space as a machine of production. As mentioned earlier, Mumford considers “growth” as a process with both positive and negative externalities, not just a linearly positive feat. His references to negatively-associated terms such as termites, disorder, misery, disease, and crime show exactly how he views urban centers to be sources of evil.

3.1.2: Mumford’s Solution However, Mumford has also proposed various ideas to evade very the urban crises that he predicted. He expressed a great desire to beautify cities and towns, contending that this was one way to improve human life in urban spaces without relying too much on the “evils of technology”, for, “the democratic view of art and aesthetics is a very important dimension of Mumford’s thought,” (Li 2009, 54). This idea was written about within various literary works from Mumford, including: The Brown Decades (1931), Technics and Civilization (1934), and The Culture of Cities (1938). In The Culture of Cities, Mumford proposes that, “each type of environment, then, has its special interest for man, its special economic capacities- above all, its special uses as a social habitat,” (Mumford 1938, 333). The importance of preserving the natural environment, and beyond this, beautifying such environment, can be used to improve social

13 facets of human life, as Mumford contests. Not only does environmental preservation stand as a viable measure in Mumford’s mind to save the world from future technological and urban destruction, he also proposes that small communities, as opposed to sprawling urban metropolises, are a better option to support human life, as “the grasp of the region as a dynamic social reality is a first step toward a constructive policy of planning, housing, and urban renewal,” (Mumford 1938, 305). Smaller regions, as opposed to large cities, are more able to handle the local specificities that are embedded in place in a more democratic fashion. Therefore, small, green communities are Mumford’s envisioned solution to the future urban problems that he foresees. This notion will take shape as a “greenbelt town” in Mumford’s later works.

3.1.3: Lewis Mumford: Concluding Remarks Overall, Lewis Mumford was, and still remains today, a notable scholar as, “virtually all the issues he raised and illuminated in the 1920’s and 1930’s are under discussion by intellectuals of the current generation,” (Stunkel 2004, 1). His many reputable literary works expand from the democratic availability and presence of art and nature in residential areas, to the embracement of regionalism and rejection of large administrative centers, such as urban areas. The content of his work and the context that it was produced in helps highlight why Lewis Mumford is a very important scholar of his era. In a time of uncritical evaluation of technological advancements, he remained skeptical, and even ended up predicting some societal issues that we are seeing today. He tended to focus on the democratic and the social in a time of rigid mass production and innovation- which ultimately set him apart from other great thinkers of his era. One of his least touched upon works is his 1939 film, The City. Most literature briefly mentions this film within the extensive list of Mumford’s work, however, The City’s context and content make it an important production of its time which is deserving of further analysis. The City expands on Mumford’s ideas in The Culture of Cities, in which beautifying, democratizing, and regionalizing space is presented as a solution to urban problems, in opposition to the advancement of science and technology. This film also sets out to promote the greenbelt suburb as the ultimate solution to urban chaos, to ultimately a very wide audience, as The City was even shown as one of the main attractions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

3.2: The 1939 New York World’s Fair

On April 30th, 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened on its premier day in Flushing, New York. Some notable people present in the opening crowd included President Roosevelt, Mayor LaGuardia, and many people crucial to the facilitation of the New Deal project (Kargon et al. 2015). A total of over 45 million people from over 60 different nations attended the fair throughout the exhibition’s total duration. The objective of the fair was, “…planned to be 'Everyman's Fair' and to show the way towards the improvement of all of the factors contributing to human welfare,” (Clarke 1937, 35). Taking place in a post-war and unstable context, the fair committee ultimately ended up selecting a utopian, forward-looking theme, entitled, “The World of Tomorrow” (Duranti 2006). The public at large wished to focus on future advancements as opposed to the treacheries of the past that the war brought. Robert D. Kohn, fellow member in the Regional Planning Association of America to Lewis Mumford, was named chairman of the theme committee, and thus this futuristic theme selection was primarily his decision (Kargon et al. 2015). However, the idea itself may have also been influenced from his colleague, Lewis Mumford’s, comments critiquing previous fair themes,

Mumford declared that they had been content to celebrate past technological achievements while ignoring the social implications of industrialization. It was not enough simply to stage an encomium to industrial progress, he cautioned, because the new technologies ‘are ready to make hell on earth and destroy our civilization unless the forces which are working in the other direction, on the side of a different order of society, become victorious’ (Duranti 2006, 666).

Therefore, Mumford was clearly bothered by previous years’ theme choices as they had celebrated technological and industrial advancements, without critique, which were ultimately some of his biggest fears. Mumford thus proceeded to show his work at the newly utopian- themed fair, specifically his film The City (1939), as this film fit in with the overarching goal of improving human welfare. Not only was the film shown, but it was watched by many attendees at this event. It even “became one of the most popular attractions at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939…a critic called it ‘one of the most brilliant jobs in film making ever accomplished’,” (Miller 2002a, 366). The popularity of this film at the fair indicates how The City is an important piece of cinema, whose message, imagery, and narration has been seen and heard by millions as of 1939. Therefore, this film’s historical importance alludes to a necessity to critically analyze it and its implications further in academia.

3.3: Greenbelt, Maryland Garden cities, planned, self-contained communities surrounded by “greenbelts” of land, are a concept originally drafted in the UK by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1898. These cities were designed to relieve urban areas of overpopulation crises and provide needed housing through strategically planned neighborhood units, traffic-free housing areas, and housing groupings (Howard 1898; Miller 2002b). The garden city concept was adopted in different ways in various contexts to address socio-political problems worldwide, but ultimately this concept was also used to impose discrimination and exclusion of certain people from these planned communities, something that could not be as easily carried out in unplanned communities.

3.3.1: The History of Greenbelt Cities Garden cities were implemented in 20th century U.S. in the form of “greenbelt towns”, as, "[garden cities] have aroused interest throughout the world as demonstrations of the practicability of the relief of congestion in overgrown cities," (Howard 1898, 72). By 1920, the Regional Planning Association of America began constructing greenbelt towns in the U.S. This association was backed by architect Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford. However, it lost sufficient government funding during the Great Depression. Under the New Deal, Clarence Stein was appointed to the Resettlement Administration (R.A.), which built three greenbelt cities: Greenhills, Ohio, Greendale, Wisconsin, and Greenbelt, Maryland (Daniels 2009). According to the 1940 United States Farm Security Administration, these cities were planned to foster civic engagement and strengthen community values, for these facets of community living were pushed aside in the age of the metropolis. If a city is, “too big and sprawling, Mumford fears the engagement of the citizens will decrease,” (Li 2009, 198). Lewis Mumford and Clarence Stein ultimately shared an appreciation for the supposed benefits of greenbelt towns, which alludes to their collaboration on The City, and furthermore set the scene for the community of Greenbelt, Maryland to take cinematographic and physical form.

3.3.2: The Exclusive Community of Greenbelt, Maryland To foster a strong sense of community, greenbelt town planners were careful to plan out many aspects of life. This is a stark contrast to many unplanned suburban towns that had popped up prior due to the overcrowding of nearby cities. The planners noted that, “every community is not only judged by its buildings and landscape, but by its residents- individually and as a

16 society,” (Arnold 1971, 136). In regard to Greenbelt, Maryland specifically, for it’s the premier focus of The City, the planners did not only plan out the physical infrastructure of Greenbelt- they also planned out the ideal type of resident that they wanted to live there. Planners drafted a family selection process to choose residents amongst Greenbelt, Maryland’s applicants, in which various requirements had to be met to be selected. This process included passing an in-person “screening” or interview. Another requirement was passing the “Family Integration” assessment (Form 1945). This criterion enforced a streamlined image of a “model family”, as planners took into consideration how the family being evaluated would fit in with the rest. Thus, the selection process pushed Greenbelt towards being a particularly homogenous community with generally less social stratification than the average, unplanned community (Form 1945). Not only did Greenbelt planners keep their community exclusive by way of using the “Family Integration” assessment, but the planners also excluded potential residents based on class and race. Originally planned as a low-income community, it could not be financially sustained due to the lack of wealth of the tenants. Thus, “by the fall of 1936 the R.A. had to change the income range of prospective families to $1,200-$2,000 and began to call the future tenants "moderate income" families,” (Arnold 1971, 139). Therefore, Greenbelt planners placed a strict income boundary on potential tenants to not only exclude the lower class but the upper class as well. This regulation is yet another example of how Greenbelt planners attempted to foster such a homogenized community in Maryland. Urban metropolises of the 1920-30’s were seen as “unpleasant” and chaotic areas of social heterogeneity (Ballard 2004). Disguised as a tool to foster a strengthened community and a democratic grassroots ethos, the planners’ exclusive selection process formed a “safe-haven” for white, middle-class families away from the perceived urban chaos (Looker 2015). The racism perceived in popular thought of the time was formalized explicitly in Greenbelt plans, as, “Will Alexander [R.A. assistant administrator] admitted "that there is little likelihood that any of the houses will be rented to colored tenants." (Arnold 1971, 143). “The racial exclusiveness of the greenbelt towns stands in contrast to other R.A. (later F.S.A.) programs in which Negroes were discriminated against, but were at least allowed entrance,” (Arnold 1971, 144). Greenbelt planners excluded racially “undesirable” people with a selection process to create a homogeneous community.

3.3.3: The Place for Women in Greenbelt, Maryland Women were excluded from many facets of public life by Greenbelt planners, as they were largely confined to the home in the private sphere (Wagner 1984). The plans for Greenbelt, Maryland emphasized the idea of men as the workers, while women were assumed to stay in the suburbs and tend to the home, which ultimately furthered and distinguished the public-private space divide. Therefore, there is a major disconnect between the expected role of women in the domestic sphere and the promoted value of civic life and engagement, shared by both men and women in Greenbelt. Community organizations and leadership roles opened the door for women to get access into the public sphere in Greenbelt, but it remains unclear whether or not women really capitalized on this, as they were likely still bound to the private sphere by the commonly accepted societal expectations and the predisposed image of the “the model family” (often composed of a working man and a domestic woman), which may have eliminated many working women from Greenbelt’s public sphere in a normative manner. Even within the realm of civic engagement, women’s roles were different than men. In community events, specifically within “block concerts” (different bands performing within a town block), “the women are urged to give the student-musicians refreshments, as ‘custom dictates’,” (Form 1944, 52). Therefore, even though women are seemingly given a window of opportunity to participate in a seemingly civically engaged, democratic community, they still may experience gender discrimination in their roles and tasks, as serving food and drink is still considered as a “domestic” role. Additionally, there is disproportionally fewer women formally employed in Greenbelt, as this may stem from the income limit imposed on families who wish to reside in Greenbelt. “Of all the community participation requirements, the one eliminating the most applicants prohibited wives of employed husbands to work,” (Form 1944, 160). Therefore, if a family had income coming from both the man and the woman of the house, they would not be selected to become tenants. Within the number of women who formally worked in Greenbelt, “women constitute a greater proportion of office clerks and saleswomen, meanwhile, men typically are employed as “independent professionals”, and largely taking up more technical and manual labor,” (Form 1944, 160). Women were ultimately confined to either have no formal job or a more “domestic” role in the workplace by Greenbelt’s regulations, therefore further reducing the number of opportunities for women to appear in the public sphere.

3.3.4: Greenbelt, Maryland: Concluding Remarks Ultimately, garden cities took on a new meaning upon their implementation in the U.S. as “greenbelt towns”. Not only were greenbelt towns proposed as a solution to urban problems, just as garden cities were, but greenbelt towns also were implemented to foster more democratic, civically engaged communities. However, only certain types of people could engage in Greenbelt, Maryland, as the tenant selection process served as a method to discriminate “undesirable” people. Greenbelt was ultimately riddled with racial and gender discrimination, as non-whites were largely not selected to be residents within this community, and women were primarily confined to private space, in accordance with societal expectations and the framework of rules and regulations that guided the development of Greenbelt. However, all of the above exclusions and discriminations have not come directly from Mumford himself, so we will turn to a further analysis on The City to get a better picture as to who Mumford envisioned residing in his depiction of Greenbelt, Maryland.

3.4: The City Most available scholarly literature on The City has either highlighted the film’s renowned soundtrack (Newlin 1977; Bukatman 1997; Bick 2008), or has emphasized its importance as one of the premier American documentaries (Johnson 1989; Barsam 1992; Shepard 2007). A small subsection of the literature discusses the importance of the film regarding its historical context (which was during both the Great Depression and a time of increasing urbanization and mechanization) (Gillette 1977), and other subsections of the existing literature discusses the issue of urban social reform in relation to the film (Wojtowicz 2002). I will analyze the available literature on the film’s theoretical implications, and then establish how the existing literature on The City could be taken further.

3.4.1: The City and Historical Context Gillette (1977) notes the importance of The City as a historical artifact. Whereas films are often used to document the past, Gillette stresses the importance of analyzing the past not only by the content shown on the film, but also through the context in which the film was realized. “We can explore through The City the question of how ideas influence the structuring of a film and how, in turn, the surviving artifact can serve as an indicator of past social values, outlook and perception,” (Gillette 1977, 72). The film marks a time in American history plagued

19 by the Great Depression, which ultimately served as window of opportunity to rouse public support for change and reform, specifically in an urban context in this case (Gillette 1977). Whereas Lewis Mumford, a prominent urban visionary and realizer of The City, produced many books in this period, such as The Culture of Cities, public support for his ideas of urban reform would undoubtedly be greater realized through the captivating medium of film. The film's production itself, segmented and visualized by many different participants, marks a representation of 'plural authorship' and individual freedom, concepts promoted by the New Deal in response to the Great Depression (Arthur 1993). Mumford’s urban vision, a “garden city” idea that was proposed to solve urban issues of the time, was also backed by Ralph Steiner, noteworthy documentarian of the time. These two, part of the Regional Plan Association of America, used film as a medium to push their urban agendas. Debate was later sparked between the various planners and visionaries who came together to realize this film, as some of the participating visionaries have suggested that the garden city agenda is pushed too much, taking up 17 of the film’s 44 minutes.

3.4.2: The City and Urban Social Reform Filipcevic (2010) examines how The City was used as a platform to propose democratic social reform within urban space: greenbelt towns as the solution to urban problems. Greenbelt towns mark a return to small-scale, rural communities, which is a more democratic living environment. This socio-political agenda is explicitly touched on in the film itself, as the narrator mentions that within greenbelt towns, “there was lasting harmony between the soil and what we built and planted there … working and living we found a balance. The town was us and we were part of it’,” (Filipcevic 2010, 82). A real emphasis on community involvement and participation was placed on the foundation of these greenbelt towns. Conversely, the urban metropolis is presented as the great destructor of civic engagement,

…the cities of the Western world began to grow at an inordinate rate…What followed was a crystallization of chaos; disorder hardened uncouthly in metropolitan slum and industrial factory districts; and the exodus into the dormitory suburbs and factory spores that surrounded the growing cities merely widened the area of social derangement. The mechanized physical shell took precedence in every growing town over the civic nucleus; men became dissociated as citizens…(Mumford 1938, 261).

The fast-paced shots and rushed, urgent narration of the film’s scenes of the metropolis allude to urban space as a place of chaos, marred by accidents and disorder (Wagner 1984), for "old documentaries experimented with such things as rhythmic synchronization between the words, music and images," (Youdelman 2005, 398). This is exemplified by scenes of car accidents and crowds in a rush in “The Metropolis” chapter, set in Manhattan, which shows people in contentious and limited interactions. Primarily, the city is depicted as a place of rushed commuting, as opposed to a stress-free, recreational place of living, which Greenbelt is portrayed to be. These dismal portrayals of the metropolis allude to a technological and human disaster on the horizon, for not once is the metropolis framed in a positive light throughout the film (Filipcevic 2010). The public, generally blinded by technological and industrial advances of the time, may not have fully realized the loss of humanism and democracy as the sociopolitical consequences of these advances. Therefore, The City stands as a socio-political commentary in accordance with Mumford’s critiques of the destructive urbanization and lack of democracy of cities in the 1920-30’s. However, The City is often critiqued itself as being a social documentary that merely suggests an idealistic, oversimplified solution to an extremely complex problem (Barsam 1992; Flight 1996). By showing the film in sequential chapters of disorder and chaos, the juxtaposition against the final chapter, “The Green City”, is clear. The greenbelt town is hailed as the solution to urban problems in this social documentary. The film itself proposes reform but ultimately lacks a deeper analysis of social relation, specifically gender and racial relations, and simply serves as a 'sales pitch' for the new garden city idea (Flight 1996).

3.4.3: The City: Concluding Remarks Ultimately, there is a lack of deep social criticism of The City. The current literature focuses on highlighting the soundtrack of the film, establishing the importance of The City as one of the first fundamental American documentaries, or analyzing how greenbelt towns serve as a solution to urban crises. I will use this gap in the literature to address a deeper issue of social relations within the film itself: gender relations within The City. In The City, 17 of the 43 minutes take place in one setting: Greenbelt, Maryland. This community, planned to be a safe-haven from the urban issues of the surrounding metropolises, also lists civic engagement as one of its primary goals. However, women were discouraged from civically engaging in the same manner as men in Greenbelt, for the planners’ community rules

21 and regulations, in tandem with societal expectations of 1930’s America, prevented women from accessing much of the public sphere. Thus, my analysis is ultimately to determine whether Lewis Mumford envisioned these disparities in civic participation in Greenbelt, as depicted through his film, or if these accounts of exclusion and discrimination were just applied to Greenbelt in built form, after its conception.

3.5: Contextualization of The City Conclusion Mumford sets himself from the rest by way of criticizing mindless innovation, purporting that technological, “positive” growth may have a negative social effect. Despite Mumford’s claims to value the “democratic” and the “social” in housing and living in an era in which people overlooked its importance, it is necessary to be critical of the authenticity of this claim. Upon looking at the rules and regulations of some of Greenbelt, Maryland, supposedly a democratic, socially engaging living environment, we can see that it did not serve this purpose for everyone in reality. Greenbelt largely excluded non-white people from residing there, which brings into question how “democratic” Mumford actually intended his vision to be. The social exclusion of many from these suburbs is especially problematic considering the audience of millions who have viewed The City during Mumford’s era, which would serve to perpetrate the misguided idea that suburbs are for white people only, in a visual form of place-making and exclusion, if Greenbelt was truly portrayed on screen as it was implemented in reality. Thus, on a similarly- founded social critique, I will set out to further analyze whether Mumford visualized women having the same democratic representation and participation within Greenbelt by examining women’s representation and roles both quantitatively and qualitatively in The City, as compared to the exclusion of women we see within the actual built environment of Greenbelt itself.

CHAPTER 4: QUANTITATIVE STOP-FRAME ANALYSIS

The first part of my analysis of women’s representation in The City uses quantitative data to compare women and men’s representation throughout the film. I plan to use this quantitative data in tandem with my qualitative data analysis to provide a fully comprehensive approach towards examining The City and its overall representation of women within the film. First, I will discuss my methodologies for coding frames of the film and for the corresponding statistical analyses. Then, I will address my data and results. Lastly, I will analyze and discuss the implications of my findings, with respect to my hypotheses. On the quantitative front, I hypothesize that there will be quantitatively more men than women shown in the film and that women will be more confined to the private sphere in “The Green City” (compared to the other scenes) due to the spatial entrapment of women corresponding to suburbanization.

4.1: Methodology I use frame-by-frame coding and chi-squared tests to evaluate the relative presence of women and men in the film. For the coding, selected frames at regular intervals and code the number of people (distinguishing men and women, boys and girls), whether the setting is public or private, indoors or outdoors, the general function of the setting, and which scene of the film the given frame takes place. The statistical analyses will show us in which contexts women are located to ultimately provide a numerical basis for purporting the claim that gender inequalities are perpetuated throughout this film in the form of the “separate spheres” ideology, even in Mumford’s idyllic greenbelt community vision.

4.1.1: Coding the Frames The methodology for the quantitative portion of my analysis draws on the so- called Bechdel–Wallace test (first suggested by Alison Bechdel)1, in which a film or literary work must follow three criteria to be considered non-misogynist, “one, it has to have at least two women in it who, two, talk to each other about, three, something besides a man,” (Selisker 2015, 505). Rather than analyzing the presence of women and the content of their conversations (The City is a narrated documentary with no dialogue) I counted the number of men and women in various contexts to analyze the gender (in)equalities present. I conducted a stop-frame analysis to

1 The original text describing the rules of the Bechdel-Wallace test was written by Alison Bechdel in her 1986 comic strip, Dykes to watch out for.

23 assess the proportion of women to men appearing in a sample of 524 frames, using the version of the film currently available on DVD.2 Starting from the initial frame, I sampled frames at five second intervals for the entire length of the film (43:40 minutes). To do so, I used the screen capture function to copy each image for analysis. I coded each frame for both the number and type of people present and coded the context in four different ways. See Table 4.1. The values were recorded on a spreadsheet and identified by the number of seconds from the start of the film, e.g., Frame 45 would be the 9th frame in the sample.

The City Coding Format Category Coding People Total number of people Number of adult men Number of adult women Number of male children and juveniles Number of female children and juveniles Number of indeterminate people (not possible to determine gender) Context 1: Public space (0) Public/Private Private space (1) Context 2: Outdoor (0) Outdoor/Indoor Indoor (1) Context 3: Other/Indeterminate (0) Setting Transportation (1) Recreational (2) Consumption (3) Work (4) Residential/Home (5) Context 4: “In the Beginning”: 18th century rural New England community (0) Scene3 “The Industrial City”: Pittsburgh (1) “The Metropolis”: Manhattan (2) “The Highway”: NY/ NJ traffic (3) “The Green City”: Radburn, NJ and Greenbelt, MD (4) Table 4.1: Coding used for Stop-Frame Analysis.

I counted the number of people shown in a given frame, but also included partial images (e.g., an arm in the frame), only if gender could be determined by clothing or a body part.

2 I based my analysis of The City (1939) on a 2009 DVD produced by Naxos Records (Poing, Germany; www.naxos.com). The version on the DVD is the original 1939 film, but with a newly recorded soundtrack. 3 Scene divisions are taken from those identified by Ellis and McLane (2005).

Coding by gender and age relied on several cues, but especially clothing (e.g., pants/suits/ties for adult men, skirts/ dresses for adult women) if faces were not visible clearly. To distinguish between an adult and a child, I relied largely on the physical size of the person (short = child; tall = adult). The actions of the person also helped determine the age, as people who were playing in children’s recreational settings (e.g., playgrounds) were classified as children. Private spaces are defined as those owned by a person for use by themselves and their dependents (e.g., inside a home, in a private yard, on a private porch). I classified space as “public” if it is technically open, accessible, and for use by the general public; public was the default setting for those that did not fit the three “private” settings. Indoor spaces are places that are walled in on all four sides, so porches and other places walled in on three sides or less are classified as “outdoors”. To determine the setting, I relied primarily on the context of the subject(s) that the camera is focused on in the respective frame. If a specific camera focus was not present, I classified the setting by the activities of the majority of the subjects in the frame. I classified a “residential” setting as houses, multiple homes (e.g., a neighborhood), or a public yard space. I classified a “work” setting as a place of production of goods or services (e.g., office, industrial spaces, or spaces with manual labor). I classified places of consumption as spaces in which goods and services are being purchased (e.g., restaurants, stores, markets). Recreational spaces are defined as spaces for activities done for enjoyment (e.g., swimming, biking, running, playing, picnics, playgrounds, arts and crafts, and other sports). Transport spaces are defined as spaces that are dedicated to the movement of people or goods (e.g., cars and other motor vehicles, city streets and sidewalks, carriages, trains and train tracks, planes). The “Other” or indeterminate category were spaces that could not be easily classified into one of the other five categories. Finally, I added a code to identify in which of the five scenes (or “chapters”) the frame appears, as categorized by Ellis and McLane (2005), which can help distinguish trends over time and place.

An example frame that we can look at is Frame #357 at the 1,785th second mark of the film. See Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1: Frame #357 in “The Green City”; three boys riding bikes in the greenbelt town.

To code this image, we would denote that there is “3” people total, and all 3 are considered as boys. Thus, there are “0” men, women, girls, and indeterminate people. Context 1 is coded as “0” for a public space. Context 2 is coded as “0” for outdoors. Context 3 is coded as “2” for a recreational space. And Context 4 would be coded as “4”, to exemplify the chapter of the film in which this frame takes place, “The Green City”. These coded data serve as the basis of general trends about women’s representation throughout the film.

4.1.2: Statistical Analysis First and foremost, I plan to calculate some basic descriptive statistics on frequencies of women throughout the film. This will ultimately describe the results of the frame-by-frame coding in a digestible manner. I will run a “total” command, in which I obtain both the total amount of women and the total amount of men recorded overall in the film. Then I will run a “summarize” command to show the mean of different demographics present overall in The City. After calculating basic descriptive statistics, I will perform a chi-squared (χ2) test at the p=0.05 level to see if there are any relations between gender and context. (See Appendix A for the syntax used in STATA). The null hypothesis (H0) for this test is there is no relationship between the presence of women and the given context being analyzed (whether we are testing

26 this on Context 1, 2, 3, or 4), while the alternate hypothesis (HA), that these two variables do have relation. If the P-value received is more than the critical value of 0.05, upon running the chi-squared test, we can accept the null hypothesis that there is no relation between these two values. 4.2: Data and Results There are numerically less women (308) than men (631) shown in The City total (See Table 4.2.). This is expected within my original hypothesis that women will be quanititatively present less than men in the film overall. Men are about two times more prevalent in this film than women.

. total women men

Total estimation Number of obs = 524

Total Std. Err. [95% Conf. Interval]

women 308 48.32617 213.0627 402.9373 men 631 94.61625 445.1254 816.8746

Table 4.2: Total number of women and men in The City.

Next, I will explore the summary statistics of the different demographics present overall in The City. (See Table 4.3.).

. summarize men women girls boys

Variable Obs Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

men 524 1.204198 4.13333 0 55 women 524 .5877863 2.111139 0 28 girls 524 .1908397 .8260992 0 8 boys 524 .480916 1.243576 0 9 Table 4.3: Summary statistics of the different demographics present overall in The City.

As according to the summary statistics, the average number of men present in each frame is 1.2 compared to 0.58 for women. Not only were there twice as many men as women in the film, but there are nearly as many boys as women (0.48 boys per frame). As expected, girls are the least prevalent demographic category to make an appearance throughout The City (0.19 girls per frame). Thus males – adult men and boys - are the most common demographic seen throughout the film.

Next, I explore the relation between public/private spheres (context 1) and scene (context 4) for women in The City. (See Table 4.4.).

-> tabulation of context1 by context4 if women > 0

Public and Private Scene Space In the Be Industria Metropoli Highway Green Cit Total

Public 4 5 32 7 43 91 Private 5 9 0 0 5 19

Total 9 14 32 7 48 110

Table 4.4: The relation between public/ private space and scene for women in The City.

Women are more likely to be found in public in “The Green City” than any other scene in the film. Women are most likely to be found in the private sphere in “The Industrial City”. Excluding “The Highway” scene in this analysis, “The Metropolis” is the only scene in which women are not found in the private sphere at all.

I then turn to the relationship between gender and a public/ private context (context 1). See Table 4.5.

. tab context1 b_women, chi2

b_women context1 0 1 Total

0 397 91 488 1 17 19 36

Total 414 110 524

Pearson chi2(1) = 23.5472 Pr = 0.000

Table 4.5: Relationship. between women and a public (0) or private (1) context.

For women, the test yields a p-value below 0.000, permitting the rejection of the null hypothesis of independent and showing that women are most frequently seen in a public context as according to this test. Next, I turn to the relationship between gender and an indoors or outdoors setting (context 2). See Table 4.6.

. tab context2 b_women, chi2

b_women context2 0 1 Total

0 354 85 439 1 60 25 85

Total 414 110 524

Pearson chi2(1) = 4.3363 Pr = 0.037 Table 4.6: Relationship between women and an indoor (1) or outdoor (0) context.

For women, the test yields a p-value below 0.000, permitting the rejection of the null hypothesis of no relation between gender and indoors/ outdoors. Women are most frequently seen in an outdoor context as compared to an indoor context within this film.

Next, I turn to the relationship between gender and general setting (context 3). See Table 4.7.

. tab b_women context3, chi2

context3 b_women 0 1 2 3 4 5 Total

0 77 128 50 14 79 66 414 1 7 36 10 10 8 39 110

Total 84 164 60 24 87 105 524

Pearson chi2(5) = 38.8823 Pr = 0.000 Table 4.7: Relationship between women and an: other/indeterminate (0), transportation (1), recreational (2), consumption (3), work (4), or residential/home (5) setting.

For women, the test yields a p-value equal to 0.000, permitting the rejection of the null hypothesis of no relation between gender and setting. Thus, women are most frequently seen in residential/ home setting in this film. Lastly, I turn to the relationship between gender and scene (context 4). See Table 4.8.

. tab b_women context4, chi2

context4 b_women 0 1 2 3 4 Total

0 76 65 87 22 164 414 1 9 14 32 7 48 110

Total 85 79 119 29 212 524

Pearson chi2(4) = 9.0740 Pr = 0.059

Table 4.8: Relationship between women and scene: “In the Beginning”: 18th century rural New England community (0), “The Industrial City”: Pittsburgh (1), “The Metropolis”: Manhattan (2), “The Highway”: NY/ NJ traffic (3), and “The Green City”: Radburn, NJ and Greenbelt, MD (4).

For women, the test yields a p-value greater than 0.05, permitting the acceptance of the null hypothesis of no relation between gender and scene in this film. Thus, gender and scene are independent of each other within The City.

4.3: Discussion and Conclusion Ultimately, the collected and analyzed quantitative data shows us that in The City, women are quantitatively less prevalent than men overall, with 308 women shown total as compared to 631 men. Thus, this proves my first hypothesis to be true. Women are disproportionally left out of the film overall numerically, as compared to men, which may reflect the general gender inequalities of the time. It is also worth considering that the key producers behind this film were all men. My next result was that women are most likely to be found in public in “The Green City”, which rejects my hypothesis that women would most likely be found in the private sphere in “The Green City” scene. This surprising statistic seems to allude to a more democratic space in “The Green City”, which is cohesive with Mumford’s vision of an equitable greenbelt space. Women overall are more likely to be found outdoors and in residential spaces overall, in regard to Contexts 2 and 3. Outdoors is surprising for women, as I expected them to be mostly indoors and within the home throughout the film. However, a lot of domestic responsibilities take place outside (but near) the home in this film, such as women hanging laundry on the line in “The Industrial City”. The fact that most women were located in a residential setting is not surprising to me, as it is in line with the societal expectations of women tending to the domestic sphere. All of the statistics above were statistically significant, indicating a relation between gender and the given context. The only independent statistic was between gender and scene, which bears no statistically significant relation.

It is interesting to note that women are most likely to be found in public in “The Green City” scene, as in my hypothesis, I thought that the opposite would be true due to the expected spatial entrapment of middle-class women that tends to go hand in hand with suburbanization. Thus, I expected to see the vast majority of women in “The Green City” to be located in the private sphere. Potentially, Lewis Mumford’s vision of greenbelt towns as a community encourages all members to take part in a collective neighborhood, as opposed to staying with individual homes (as we saw a lot in the village in “The Beginning”). Overall, there are some surprising gaps between what I expected to find through the quantitative data and what the results actually were. Next, I will turn to qualitative content analysis in attempts to fill in these gaps.

CHAPTER 5: QUALITATIVE CONTENT ANALYSIS

In this chapter, I turn to a qualitative or interpretive approach to discuss trends within the film that cannot be captured easily by quantitative methods. More specifically, I use this analysis to capture the nuances that explain women’s roles in their respective settings, which are typically embedded within the narrative of the film. “Qualitative research is based on textual data rather than quantitative data, on stories rather than numbers,” (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003, 23). The qualitative analysis compliments my quantitative analysis to provide a more comprehensive examination of The City’s representation of women. First, I will give a brief overview of the methodology for my qualitative content analysis. Then, I will depict the overall trends within women’s roles throughout the retrospective scenes of the film (from “In the Beginning” to “The Metropolis”). Next, I will outline the overall trends within women’s roles in the prospective scene, “The Green City”. Lastly, I will conclude with a discussion as to my overall findings, in accordance with my hypotheses. On a qualitative front, I hypothesize that women will occupy more “domestic” activities and roles than men and that women will be more confined to the private, domestic sphere in “The Green City” (as compared to other scenes) due to the expected spatial entrapment of women corresponding to suburbanization.

5.1: Methodology

Since my study is gender-based, this side of the analysis is particularly useful to denote what gender (in)equalities were visible to the eye, but not visible within the recorded data. “The qualitative approach begins with naturalistic observation…[which] is useful, not only to identify the lived experiences of the individuals being studied, but also to understand the relevant contexts (social, racial, economic, etc.) of the experiences,” (Auerbach and Silverstein 2003, 25), as so that we can gain a fuller grasp of women’s experiences as portrayed within this film. I will base my qualitative analysis only on the film’s visual elements, as there is no dialogue, and I will not consider the narration.

5.2: Retrospective Frames Within “In the Beginning”, “The Industrial City”, and “The Metropolis” scenes of The City, we travel through rural and industrial towns and cities, before ending in the dense urban center of Manhattan. I considered these as the “retrospective” scenes of the film, as they are

32 showcasing the times and contexts of the past, in comparison to the greenbelt town of the future. I chose to exclude analysis of “The Highway” scene, as it is merely a transitory scene within the film between the retrospective and prospective settings, showcasing only automobile activity on a highway between New York and New Jersey. Can we expect women’s roles and activities to change throughout the retrospective scenes of the film? Starting with “In the Beginning”: an 18th century rural New England community, we first encounter women in the town hall setting of the village. As opposed to the men in the town hall, the women were only shown as audience members, only speaking out upon “shushing” their husbands. It is important to note here that the leaders sitting up front at the town hall meeting are four men. This ultimately conveys a gendered and social dynamic within the village: the men hold the political power. See Figure 5.1. The only other time we see women in this scene is the images of women doing knitting and basket-weaving work inside their homes. This contrasts to the men we see working, who are also primarily working in the same sphere of their home, but are engaged typically in outdoor, physical/ manual labor (e.g., farming, wielding, driving a horse carriage). Thus, the men are preoccupied with political power and physical labor, while the women are working too, but from within the confines of their homes on more “domestic” craft.

Figure 5.1: Frame #54 and #56 within “In the Beginning”; men speaking out at a local town hall, where women are members of the audience.

In “The Industrial City”: Pittsburgh, we begin to see men work further from the home, in larger capacity workspaces than ever before. As the men of this scene are generally all at work in industrial and factory settings, we get a few glimpses of women in the domestic sphere, either

33 performing household tasks, or being the watching eyes of the neighborhood while the children are at play. See Figure 5.2. The women seem to be in a more domestic role than in “In the Beginning”, as they are tending to the house all day until their husband comes home from work. Within “In the Beginning”, both spouses were preoccupied with labor, whether it be manual, farm, or craft, in the private sphere. Thus, we are seeing the “separate spheres” ideology begin to emerge, as a separation between home and work and thus the feminine and masculine spheres are taking form.

Figure 5.2: Frame #144 and #150 in “The Industrial City”; women watching the neighborhood children and tending to household chores in the private sphere.

According to the feminist geography literature, we might expect women to be out in the public most in an urban setting. This is expected to be true as women’s roles eventually evolved to promote consumption, and simply because home, work, and places of consumerism would all be found within the same location: the urban center. For Scene 3: “The Metropolis”: Manhattan, we now see women out and about in the public sphere walking, dining, and even working (as a typist or server primarily). It is important to note the class dimension here, as only upper- and middle-class women would be financially able to partake in consumption at their leisure. This differs from the prior scenes of this film, where the primary focus was on working-class women. See Figure 5.3. Thus, in “The Metropolis” , it particularly appears to be the space in which (upper and middle class) women have the most freedom, by way of engaging in the widest variety of activities thus far in the film. In this light, is this one of the drivers behind the urban

34 disorder and chaos that Mumford is trying to depict? The “social disruption” of women gallivanting and engaging in the public sphere sets it apart from the rest of the prospective scenes, in this way, it is the scene that is conveyed as the most chaotic with its fast-paced shots and rushing crowds aplenty. Mumford strategically backs this scene up to “The Green City” to provoke a sharp contrast between the urban chaos and the supposed greenbelt serenity.

Figure 5.3: Frame #184 and #230 in “The Metropolis”; women out in the public sphere as producers and consumers.

5.3: Prospective Frames

Bypassing Scene 4: “The Highway”: New York and New Jersey traffic, due to its transitory nature, we focus on the frames in Scene 5: “The Green City”: Radburn, NJ and Greenbelt, MD. In these scenes, we see women in a larger variety of contexts than ever before. The most notable difference that contrasts the prospective frames with the retrospective frames is that women are now engaging in recreational activities, such as roller skating, going to the beach, attending a baseball game, etc., which had not been depicted in scenes before. However, it is important to note that all the above-mentioned examples of recreational activities are all ones that seem to be family-oriented; women are never engaging in these alone or amongst themselves. It is also noteworthy to mention that all the children (primarily boys but also girls) are out and about amongst themselves, almost indicating that they have more freedom in a way than the women of greenbelt towns. This is also an indicator of how the ideology of “separate spheres” is a social construct, something that is learned over time. The only other times we really

35 see the women in greenbelt suburbs is in childcare measures, in which the women are looking after children in the neighborhood. See Figure 5.4. This emphasis on childcare and domesticity draws parallels to the women in “The Industrial City”, but it is a portrayal of this domesticity in a positive light instead.

Figure 5.4: Frame #417 and #460 in “The Green City”; women fulfilling domestically-oriented roles, such as childcare, out in the public sphere.

5.4: Discussion & Conclusion

My qualitative content analysis suggests that women appear to be engaged in the greatest variety of activities in “The Metropolis”, despite the also apparent recreational freedom for women in “The Green City”. However, in “The Metropolis” is the only time in which we get to see women be both a producer and a consumer and walking around by themselves. This is almost paradoxical, as according to the geography and film literature and within Mumford’s own views, urban space constitutes the most chaotic and dangerous environment. Yet, it still remains the only scene in which women are traveling alone. This is set in stark contrast to “The Green City”, in which women are only out in the public sphere within a family context, generally not working (primarily occupied with childcare), and never transporting themselves alone, despite its claims to be a peaceful and serene environment. In this way, we can conclude that the greenbelt town vision that Lewis Mumford proposed is spatially entrapping women into the suburbs into a domesticated, childcare-focused lifestyle, as much as women had prior to “The Metropolis”, as they are fulfilling nearly the same forms of domestic roles as before. Otherwise, we would expect to see women out in this “safe”, idyllic, suburban environment alone, if they were not

36 spatially entrapped and tied down by domestic responsibility. The only difference between the retrospective scenes of “In the Beginning” and “The Industrial City” is that the cinematography in these scenes conveys the home, neighborhood, and its surroundings in a negative, dismal light. Whereas in “The Green City”, the cinematography depicts a fun, serene, positive lifestyle through its many shots of recreation and open greenery, despite women being re-confined to the domestic, private sphere which is an overall negative feat for gender equalities and equality of opportunity within Mumford’s “idyllic” greenbelt vision. “The Metropolis” constitutes an outlier to the other scenes, as women have the freedoms of solo travel, production, and consumption in public space. This could be explained by the chaotic cinematography of this scene, which may be Mumford’s way of exemplifying disruptive social disorder that in part, comes from women being out in public space. In this manner, the idyllic greenbelt town is set to remedy this social disruption by way of encouraging women to reoccupy the private, domestic sphere. Thus, the qualitative data purports that women are generally found in more domestic (i.e.- childcare) roles throughout the film than men are, especially in “In the Beginning”, “The Industrial City”, and “The Green City”, which is in line with my hypothesis of women’s suburban spatial entrapment. Despite this overall trend, there are some minor differences in women’s roles within this film, as women are portrayed in more independent, masculine roles in “The Metropolis”, which furthers Mumford’s claim of urban space as socially chaotic, upon considering the societal expectations imposed upon women as of 1920’s-30’s America.

CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION

In this thesis, I have drawn the connection between feminist geography and geography in film bodies of literature, which have both played out in The City. My hypotheses were that: 1) there will be less women than men quantitatively shown in the film; 2) women will be shown in more often in “domestic” roles and activities than men are in the film; and 3) women will be more confined to the private sphere and occupy a more domestic role within “The Green City”, as compared to the other scenes of the film, due to the expected spatial entrapment of women corresponding with suburbanization. As according to both my qualitative and quantitative research, my first hypothesis holds true. There are 308 women total in this film, as compared to 631 men. My second hypothesis also holds true, as women occupy the vast majority of domestic, childcare roles throughout every scene, except for in “The Metropolis”, in which kids (both boys and girls) were left to play on the city streets on their own. My last hypothesis is both true and false, as quantitatively, I found that women are most likely to be found in public space in “The Green City”, as compared to all other scenes. However, the vast majority of activities in “The Green City” that women are partaking in qualitatively are considered domesticized roles, such as family-oriented recreational activities and childcare in the public sphere.

This disparity and incongruity in my results between my quantitative and qualitative data thus highlights the importance of having both analyses to complement each other in my investigation into the social aspects of this documentary. Without the qualitative analysis, it might have appeared as though Lewis Mumford did create a more democratic, equitable, and inclusive environment in the form of Greenbelt, Maryland, in which women are out more frequently in the public sphere than in any other scene prior. However, my qualitative analysis was useful to highlight that the vast majority of roles and activities that women took part in within “The Green City” were highly domesticized and still revolved around childcare, as women’s roles did in every other scene except for “The Metropolis”.

Thus, I would argue that “The Metropolis” offered a more equitable space for women to participate in a variety of activities, such as production, consumption, and unaccompanied transit, in which women did not partake in such a variety of these activities in any of the other scenes. Despite Lewis Mumford’s voicing of concern for the dangers and evils of cities, urban spaces offered positives to a certain demographic of individuals during 1920’s-30’s America:

38 middle- and upper-class white women. The city was the one location in which all services and facilities could be accessed by foot, and of which women were accepted more widely in the public sphere under the pretense of consumption, to further fulfill a progression towards a more capitalist society. Perhaps Mumford’s inherent unequal views between men and women come across in The City, as the urban chaos portrayed may be an externalization of his perceived disruption of social order within urban space, in which his greenbelt suburb is an effective “remedy” to. Greenbelt further divides the separate spheres of space between public and private, work and home, masculine and feminine. Thus, Greenbelt upholds defined and gendered identities, spaces, and roles in its expectations and formalities.

Despite the framing of this end scene as peaceful, in stark contrast to the earlier scenes of dismal villages and chaotic urban spaces, there is still an issue that pervades here. It happens to be a social issue: the suburban entrapment of women (England 1993; MacDonald 1999). This finding has tremendous implications, as the premier visionary behind this film and its concept of the greenbelt town, Lewis Mumford, has been hailed as a leading constructor of both ideas and societies by his close friends, colleagues, and even by modern scholars. Mumford perpetuated his own constructed, subjective, and unequal identities of women on a large scale with The City by showing to millions at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Thus, Mumford constructed gender inequalities and separate spheres for women through his production and showcasing of this film. Therefore, the town wasn’t really for everyone, and everyone was not a part of it in the same manner, in Mumford’s own view.

Some limitations that I experienced during my research was that it was rather difficult to distinguish people upon coding my frames, due to the poor quality, black-and-white images that this film is comprised of. This was primarily an issue in larger crowd scenes, however, this issue was navigated by way of adding an “indeterminate” gender category in my coding, as so to not inflate the data in any particular way with uncertainty. Additionally, as since there is no dialogue in the film, sometimes it was also rather difficult to distinguish what activities were transpiring in a given location. This presented some difficulties, in tandem with the low-quality imagery, in determining some coding particularities. Further avenues for research regarding this topic could be to textually analyze the narrator’s script in The City to see how this could potentially complement my findings on perpetuated gender equalities that were visibly seen within this film.

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