Wanderlust: A History of Walking (35 page)

“They tell me that, while they are marching they feel very close to their children,” wrote the poet Marjorie Agosin, who walked with them. “And the truth is, in the plaza where forgetting is not allowed, memory recovers its meaning.” For years these women taking the national trauma on a walk were the most public opposition to the regime. By 1980 they had created a network of mothers around the country, and in 1981 they began the first of their annual twenty-four-hour marches to celebrate Human Rights Day (they also joined religious processions around the country). “By this time the Mothers were no longer alone during their marches; the Plaza was swarming with journalists from abroad who had come to cover the strange phenomenon of middle-aged woman marching in defiance of a state of siege.” When the military junta fell in 1983, the Mothers were honored guests at the inauguration of the newly elected president, but they kept up their weekly walks counterclockwise around the obelisk in the Plaza de Mayo, and the thousands who had been afraid before joined them. They still walk counterclockwise around the tall obelisk every Thursday.

There are many ways to measure the effectiveness of protest. There's its impact on the wider public, directly and through the media, and there's its impact on the
government—on its audiences. But what's often forgotten is its impact on the protesters, who themselves suddenly become the public in literal public space, no longer an audience but a force. I had a taste, once, of this public life during the first weeks of the Gulf War, of living there more intensely than in San Francisco's many annual marches and parades before and since. Not much was written then or has been since about the huge protests all over the country in January 1991—surrounding Philadelphia's Independence Hall, gathering in Lafayette Park across from the White House, occupying the Washington State and Texas legislatures, shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge, covering Seattle in posters and demonstrations, holding “gas-pump protests” across the South. But there was, amid the fear and more deferential versions of patriotism, a huge outcry that continued for weeks in San Francisco. I don't mean to suggest that we had the courage of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or the impact of the people of Prague, only that we too lived for a while in public. The whole strategy of that war—its speed, its colossal censorship, its reliance on high-tech weaponry, its very limited ground combat—was organized to defeat opposition at home by limiting information and U.S. casualties, which suggests that protest and popular opinion were so strong a force that the war (and the little wars like it since) was a preemptive strike against them.

We went out into the streets anyway, and the very space of the city was transformed. Before the first bombs dropped, people began to gather spontaneously, to march together, to make bonfires out of the old Christmas trees put out on the streets, to organize rituals and gatherings, to plaster the city with posters that seemed to make the very walls break their silence with calls for specific actions and caustic commentaries on the meaning of the war. Many of the demonstrations here, as elsewhere, instinctively headed for the traffic arteries—bridges, highways—or for the power points—the federal building, the stock exchange—and shut them down. There were protests almost daily into February. The city was being remade as a place whose center did not belong to business or to cars, but to pedestrians moving down the street in this most bodily form of free speech. The streets were no longer antechambers to the interiors of homes, schools, offices, shops, but a colossal amphitheater. I wonder now if anyone has ever protested or paraded simply because such occasions provide the only time when American city streets are a perfect place to be a pedestrian, safe from
assault by cars and strangers if not, occasionally, police. From the middle of the street, the sky is wider and the shop windows are opaque.

The Saturday evening before the war began, I ditched my car and walked in the boisterous march that coalesced spontaneously, drawing people out of bars and cafés and homes. I marched in the well-organized protest the day before the war broke out with a few thousand others. I joined more thousands the afternoon the war broke out to march again through the dark and our own horror to the Federal Building. The next morning I blockaded Highway 101 with the group of activists I spent much of the war with, until the highway patrol began clubbing away and broke one man's leg, and later that morning I walked with twenty or thirty others again down the city streets into the financial and commercial district. On the weekend after the war broke out, I walked with 200,000 others who gathered to protest the war with banners and placards, puppets and chants. For those weeks my life seemed to be one continuous procession through the transformed city. Private concerns and personal fears faded away in the incendiary spirit of the time. The streets were our streets, and all our fear was for others. There were mutterings about using nuclear weapons and suggestions that Israel might be drawn into a conflict that seemed as though it could spread like wildfire into a worldwide conflagration. The horror about what was happening far away and the strength of the incendiary resistance inside us and around us generated extraordinary feeling. I have never felt anything as intensely as I did that war except for the most passionate love and the most mourned deaths (and it was a war with plenty of deaths, though few were of Americans until the effects of the war's toxic materials began to materialize).

The afternoon of the first day of the war, I got caught up in a police sweep and spent a few hours sitting down for a change, handcuffed in a bus near the center of activity, looking out the window, and in an odd truce, listening with the policemen to an arrested journalist's shortwave radio broadcasting the war. Missiles were being fired on Israel, and the radio said the inhabitants of Tel Aviv were all in sealed rooms wearing gas masks. That image stuck with me, of a war in which civilians lost sight of the world and of each others' faces and, from behind their hideous masks, lost even the ability to speak. Most Americans weren't much better off, voiceless in front of televisions running the same uninformative footage of the censored war over and over again. In living on the streets we were refusing
to consume the meaning of that war and instead producing our own meaning, on our streets and in our hearts if not in our government and media.

In those moments of moving through the streets with people who share one's beliefs comes the rare and magical possibility of a kind of populist communion—perhaps some find it in churches, armies, and sports teams, but churches are not so urgent, and armies and teams are driven by less noble dreams. At such times it is as though the still small pool of one's own identity has been overrun by a great flood, bringing its own grand collective desires and resentments, scouring out that pool so thoroughly that one no longer feels fear or sees the reflections of oneself but is carried along on that insurrectionary surge. These moments when individuals find others who share their dreams, when fear is overwhelmed by idealism or by outrage, when people feel a strength that surprises them, are moments in which they become heroes—for what are heroes but those so motivated by ideals that fear cannot sway them, those who speak for us, those who have power for good? A person who feels this all the time may become a fanatic or at least an annoyance, but a person who never feels it is condemned to cynicism and isolation. In those moments everyone becomes a visionary, everyone becomes a hero.

Histories of revolutions and uprisings are full of stories of generosity and trust between strangers, of incidents of extraordinary courage, of transcendence of the petty concerns of everyday life. In
1793,
Victor Hugo's novel of revolution, he wrote, “People lived in public: they ate at tables spread outside the doors; women seated on the steps of the churches made lint as they sang the ‘Marseillaise.' Park Monceaux and the Luxembourg Gardens were parade-grounds. . . . Everything was terrible and no one was frightened. . . . Nobody seemed to have leisure: all the world was in a hurry.” At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell wrote of Barcelona's transformation, “The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. . . . Above all there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling
of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.” To use a Situationist word, there seems to be a psychogeography of insurrection in which life is lived in public and is about public issues, as manifested by the central ritual of the march, the volubility of strangers and of walls, the throngs in streets and plazas, and the intoxicating atmosphere of potential freedom that means the imagination has already been liberated. “Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society,” writes Situationist Raoul Vaneigem.

But nobody remains heroic forever. It is the nature of revolutions to subside, which is not the same thing as to fail. A revolution is a lightning bolt showing us new possibilities and illuminating the darkness of our old arrangements so that we will never see them quite the same way again. People rise up for an absolute freedom, a freedom they will only find in their hopes and their acts at the height of that revolution. Sometimes they may have overthrown a dictator, but other dictators will arise and bring with them other ways of intimidating or enslaving the populace. Sometimes everyone will have a vote at last, food and justice will be adequate if not ideal, but ordinary traffic will return to the streets, the posters will fade, revolutionaries will go back to being housewives or students or garbage collectors, and the heart will become private again. On the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille came the Fête de la Federation, a national festival of dances, visits, parades, and overflowing joy, and it was the spontaneous participation of all classes of Parisians in readying the Champ de Mars for their fête, rather than the fete itself, that was most exhilarating. A year later, on July 12, 1791, there was a military parade commemorating Voltaire, and the people who had participated in history ferociously and then joyously had become spectators again.

“Resistance is the secret of joy,” proclaimed the pamphlet someone from Reclaim the Streets handed me in the middle of a Birmingham street, in the midst of one of their street parties. Reclaim the Streets was founded in London in May 1995 with the understanding that if the twin forces of privatized space and globalized economies are alienating us from each other and from local culture, the reclaiming of public space for public life and public festival is one way to resist both. The very act of revolting—happily and communally and in the middle of the street—
was no longer a means to an end but victory itself. Imagined thus, the difference between revolutions and festivals becomes even less distinct, for in a world of dreary isolation festivals are inherently revolutionary. The RTS party in Birmingham three years later was intended as a counterpoint to the Group of Eight meeting that weekend, in which leaders from the world's top economic powers would make the world's future without consulting citizens or the poorer nations. Hundreds of thousands gathered by the group Christian Aid formed a human chain around the central city to demand that third-world debt be forgiven. Reclaim the Streets wasn't asking, but taking what they wanted.

There was a glorious moment when trumpeters blew a sort of pedestrian charge, and the thousands who'd come for this Global Street Party surged out of the bus station into Birmingham's main street. People quickly shimmied up light poles and hung banners: “Beneath the Tarmac the Grass,” said one about sixty feet long, copping a line from May '68 in Paris, and “Stop the Car/Free the City” said another. Once people settled in, the great spirit of the move forward subsided into a fairly standard party of mostly young and scruffy people, dancing, mingling, stripping down in the steamy heat, not notably different from, say, Halloween in the Castro, except that it was illegal and obstructionist. Walking and marching are communal in spirit in ways that mingling after arrival is not. It wasn't, an RTS activist told me later, one of their great street parties, nothing compared to their three-day street party with the striking Liverpool dockworkers, or the rave-style protest of an intrusive new highway near London that included giant puppets wearing hoop skirts beneath which hid jackhammer operators putting holes in the overpass that were then planted with trees, or RTS spinoff the Revolutionary Pedestrian Front's pranks at an Alfa Romeo promotional event, or the taking over of Trafalgar Square. Perhaps some of the other places where sister street parties were held that day—Ankara, Berlin, Bogotá, Dublin, Istanbul, Madrid, Prague, Seattle, Turin, Vancouver, Zagreb—lived up to the glorious rhetoric of Reclaim the Streets' publications. Though Reclaim the Streets may not have fulfilled its goal, it has set a new one for every street action—now every parade, every march, every festival, can be regarded as a triumph over alienation, a reclaiming of the space of the city, of public space and public life, an opportunity to walk together in what is no longer a journey but already an arrival.

W
ALKING
A
FTER
M
IDNIGHT
:
Women, Sex, and Public Space

Caroline Wyburgh, age nineteen, went “walking out” with a sailor in Chatham, England, in 1870. Walking had long been an established part of courtship. It was free. It gave the lovers a semiprivate space in which to court, whether in a park, a plaza, a boulevard, or a byway (and such rustic landscape features as lovers' lanes gave them private space in which to do more). Perhaps, in the same way that marching together affirms and generates solidarity between a group, this delicate act of marching the rhythms of their strides aligns two people emotionally and bodily; perhaps they first feel themselves a pair by moving together through the evening, the street, the world. As a way of doing that something closest to doing nothing, strolling together allows them to bask in each other's presence, obliged neither to converse continually nor to do something so engaging as to prevent them from conversing. And in Britain the term “walking out together” sometimes meant something explicitly sexual, but more often expressed that an ongoing connection had been established, akin to the modern American phrase “going steady.” In James Joyce's novella
The Dead,
the husband who has just discovered that his wife had a suitor in her youth asks if she loved that now-dead boy, and she replies, devastatingly, “I used to go out walking with him.”

Caroline Wyburgh, age nineteen, was seen walking with her soldier, and because of it she was dragged from her bed late one night by a police inspector. The Contagious Diseases Acts in effect at that time gave police in barracks towns the
power to arrest anyone they suspected of being a prostitute. Merely walking about in the wrong time or place could put a woman under suspicion, and the law allowed any woman so accused or suspected to be arrested. If the arrested woman refused to undergo a medical examination, she could be sentenced to months in jail; but the painful and humiliating medical examination constituted punishment too; and if she was found to be infected, she was confined to a medical prison. Guilty till proven innocent, she could not escape unscathed. Wyburgh supported herself and her mother by washing doorsteps and basements, and her mother, fearing the loss of their income for so long, tried to persuade her to submit to the examination rather than to serve the three-month prison sentence. She refused, and so the officers of the law strapped her to a bed for four days. On the fifth day she agreed to be examined, but her willingness failed her after she was taken to the surgery, straitjacketed, thrust onto an examining couch with her feet strapped apart, and held down by an assistant who planted an elbow on her chest. She struggled, rolled off the couch with her ankles still strapped in, and severely injured herself. But the surgeon laughed, for his instruments of inspection had deflowered her, and blood poured between her legs. “You have been telling the truth,” he said. “You are not a bad girl.”

The soldier was never named, arrested, inspected, or otherwise drawn into the legal system, and men have usually had an easier time walking down the street than have women. Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, talking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality. Throughout the history of walking I have been tracing, the principal figures—whether of peripatetic philosophers, flâneurs, or mountaineers—have been men, and it is time to look at why women were not out walking too.

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy,” wrote Sylvia Plath in her journal when she too was nineteen. “Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Plath seems to have
been interested in men for the very reason she was unable to investigate them—because their greater freedom made their lives more interesting to a young woman just setting out on her own. There are three prerequisites to taking a walk—that is, to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints. Free time has many variables, but most public places at most times have not been as welcoming and as safe for women. Legal measures, social mores subscribed to by both men and women, the threat implicit in sexual harassment, and rape itself have all limited women's ability to walk where and when they wished. (Women's clothes and bodily confinements—high heels, tight or fragile shoes, corsets and girdles, very full or narrow skirts, easily damaged fabrics, veils that obscure vision—are part of the social mores that have handicapped women as effectively as laws and fears.)

Women's presence in public becomes with startling frequency an invasion of their private parts, sometimes literally, sometimes verbally. Even the English language is rife with words and phrases that sexualize women's walking. Among the terms for prostitutes are streetwalkers, women of the streets, women on the town, and public women (and of course phrases such as a public man, man about town, or man of the streets mean very different things than do their equivalents attached to women). A woman who has violated sexual convention can be said to be strolling, roaming, wandering, straying—all terms that imply that women's travel is inevitably sexual or that their sexuality is transgressive when it travels. Had a group of women called themselves the Sunday Tramps, as did a group of Leslie Stephen's male friends, the monicker would have implied not that they went walking but that they engaged in something salacious on Sundays. Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive. Much has been written about how women walk, as erotic assessment—from the seventeenth-century miss whose “feet beneath her petticoat / like little mice, stole in and out” to Marilyn Monroe's wiggle—and as instruction on the right way to walk. Less has been written about where we walk.

Other categories of people have had their freedom of movement limited, but limitations based on race, class, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation are local and variable compared to those placed on women, which have profoundly
shaped the identities of both genders over the millennia in most parts of the world. There are biological and psychological explanations for these states of affairs, but the social and political circumstances seem most relevant. How far back can one go? In Middle Assyria (circa the seventeenth to eleventh centuries
B
.
C
.), women were divided into two categories. Wives and widows “who go out onto the street” may not have their heads uncovered, said the law; prostitutes and slave girls, contrarily, must not have their heads covered. Those who illicitly wore a veil could be given fifty lashes or have pitch poured over their heads. The historian Gerda Lerner comments, “Domestic women, sexually serving one man and under his protection, are here designated as ‘respectable' by being veiled; women not under one man's protection and sexual control are designated as ‘public women,' hence unveiled. . . . This pattern of enforced visible discrimination recurs throughout historical time in the myriad regulations which place ‘disreputable women' in certain districts or certain houses marked with clearly identifiable signs or which force them to register with the authorities and carry identification cards.” Of course “respectable” women have been equally regulated, but more by social constraints than legal ones. Many things are remarkable about the appearance of this law, whose ordering of the world seems to have prevailed ever since. It makes women's sexuality a public rather than a private matter. It equates visibility with sexual accessibility, and it requires a material barrier rather than a woman's morality or will to make her inaccessible to passersby. It separates women into two publicly recognized castes based on sexual conduct but allows men, whose sexuality remains private, access to both castes. Membership in the respectable caste comes at the cost of consignment to private life; membership in the caste with spatial and sexual freedom comes at the cost of social respect. Either way, the law makes it virtually impossible to be a respected public female figure, and ever since, women's sexuality has been public business.

Homer's Odysseus travels the world and sleeps around. Odysseus's wife Penelope stays dutifully at home, rebuffing the suitors she lacks the authority to reject outright. Travel, whether local or global, has remained a largely masculine prerogative ever since, with women often the destination, the prize, or keepers of the hearth. By the fifth century
B
.
C
. in Greece, these radically different roles were defined as those of the interior and exterior, the private and the public spheres. Athenian women, writes Richard Sennett, “were confined to houses because of their supposed physiological defects.” He quotes Pericles concluding his funeral
oration with advice to the women of Athens—“The greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticizing you”—and Xenophon telling wives, “Your business will be to stay indoors.” Women in ancient Greece lived far from the celebrated public spaces and public life of the cities. Throughout much of the Western world into the present, women have remained relatively housebound, not only by law in some countries even now, but by custom and fear in others. The usual theory for this control of women is that in cultures where patrilineal descent is important for inheritance and identity, controlling women's sexuality has been the means of ensuring paternity. (Anyone who thinks such matters are archaic or irrelevant need merely remember the anatomist-evolutionist Owen Lovejoy, discussed in chapter 3, attempting to naturalize this social order by theorizing that female monogamy and immobility were important for our species long before we became human.) But there are many other factors pertaining to the creation of a dominant gender whose privileges include controlling and defining the female sexuality often viewed as chaotic, threatening, and subversive—a sort of wild nature to be subdued by masculine culture.

Architectural historian Mark Wiggins writes, “In Greek thought women lack the internal self-control credited to men as the very mark of their masculinity. This self-control is no more than the maintenance of secure boundaries. These internal boundaries . . . cannot be maintained by a woman because her fluid sexuality endlessly overflows and disrupts them. And more than this she endlessly disrupts the boundaries of others, that is, men. . . . In these terms the role of architecture is explicitly the control of sexuality, or more precisely, women's sexuality, the chastity of the girl, the fidelity of the wife. . . . While the house protects the children from the elements, its primary role is to protect the father's genealogical claims by isolating women from other men.” Thus, women's sexuality is controlled via the regulation of public and private space. In order to keep women “private,” or sexually accessible to one man and inaccessible to all others, her whole life would be consigned to the private space of the home that served as a sort of masonry veil.

Prostitutes have been more regulated than any other women, as though the social constraints they had escaped pursued them as laws. (Prostitutes' customers,
of course, have almost never been regulated in any way, either by law or by social condemnation: think of Walter Benjamin and André Breton a few chapters ago, who managed to write about their relations with prostitutes without fear of losing their status as public intellectuals or marriageable men.) Throughout the nineteenth century, many European governments attempted to regulate prostitution by limiting the circumstances in which it could be carried out, and this often became a limitation of the circumstances in which any woman could walk. Nineteenth-century women were often portrayed as too frail and pure for the mire of urban life and compromised for being out at all if they didn't have a specific purpose. Thus women legitimized their presence by shopping—proving they were not for purchase by purchasing—and stores have long provided safe semipublic havens in which to roam. One of the arguments about why women could not be flâneurs was that they were, as either commodities or consumers, incapable of being sufficiently detached from the commerce of city life. Once the stores closed, so did much of their opportunity to wander (which was hardest on working women, for whom the evening was their only free time). In Germany the vice squad persecuted women who were out alone in the evening, and a Berlin doctor commented, “The young men strolling on the streets think only that a woman of good reputation does not allow herself to be seen in the evening.” Public visibility and independence were still equated, as they had been three thousand years earlier, with sexual disreputability; women's sexuality could still be defined by geographical as well as temporal locale. Think of Dorothy Wordsworth and her fictional sister Elizabeth Bennet upbraided for going out walking in the country, or Edith Wharton's New York heroine in
The House of Mirth
risking her social status at the beginning of the novel to walk into a man's house unchaperoned for a cup of tea and ruining that status for good by being seen to leave another man's house in the evening (while the law controls “disreputable women,” “respectable women” often patrol each other).