In these days of gender equality, it would be nice to say that an experience as simple as walking along the streets of London was exactly the same for a woman as for a man. Recent unhappy stories in the news, however, have indicated otherwise. Speaking on the topic of women’s safety, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has said:
If you’re a woman or a girl, your experiences of our city, in any public space, is very different than if you are a man or a boy.1
The enduring nature of this difference has meant that discussions on the figure of the flâneur, being a person who likes to wander freely and aimlessly in the city, have tended to focus on men. Identified in the nineteenth century by French writers like Baudelaire, the flâneur is a city stroller who gazes as he walks – or ‘drifts’ as the more bearded academics put it. But his female counterpart, the flâneuse, is thought to have been unable to exist, or at least to not have the same amount of freedom. A lone woman on the streets of London in the 1800s often risked being seen as a sex worker, a commodity, or just an object of the male gaze, deserving of hindrance.2
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