Geography and Feminism:
Worlds in Collision?
Susan Hanson
Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, MA 01610
FAX 508-793-8881,e-mail shanson@clarku
Abstract. Geography and feminism are two
powerful intellectual forces at large today. Are
they forces that can communicate effectively
with each other to build a richer understand-
ing of life on earth or are they two alien worlds
in collision? Iexplore three core analytic tradi-
tions that I see as common to geography and
feminism: finding significance in everyday life,
appreciating the importance of context, and
thinking about difference. With examples from
local labor market studies, Ithen illustrate how
the collision between geography and feminism
has not ignited a destructive explosion but in-
stead has illuminated how we think about gen-
der, how we think about place, and how we
think about work. Iargue that because geog-
raphy and feminism share certain intellectual
traditions, the two areas of inquiry should,
once they begin to open up to and learn from
each other, not only transform each other but
also contribute powerful new insights about
the world.
Key Words: feminism, geography, everyday life,
context, difference, local labor market.
Feminist criticism [is] based on ideas, types, and
events which, though not in general beyond ordi-
naty experience, are nonetheless beyond the or-
dinary experience of certain men (Heilbrun 1990,
199).
HIS passage, in which Carolyn Heilbrun
likens feminist literary criticism to sci-
ence fiction, prompted me to think
anew about feminism and geography: Does it
make sense to think of feminism as a form of
science fiction? Is feminism in extraterrestrial
juxtaposition to geographys earthbound con-
cerns? Are feminism and geography two alien
worlds in collision?
Certainly feminists have been likened to in-
vaders from outer space-alien, ugly, women
warriors, come to destroy the cozy tranquillity
and predictability of an established order of
earthly life. And the fear of feminism i s proba-
bly quite similar to the fear of extraterrestrials,
both being rooted in a terror of the unknown,
in anxiety about change. For indeed feminism
does speak of change, make no doubt of that.
But the changes posed by feminism are, I
think, ones that geographers, perhaps more
than any other band of earthlings, should
readily grasp, embrace, and absorb. I shall
argue that, unlike the male literary critics to
whom Carolyn Heilbrun refers, geographers
should not find feminism to be beyond their
ordinary experience; geography and feminism
need not be alien worlds unto each other. I
shall argue that geography and feminism share
certain central traditions that, if acknowledged
and nurtured, should enrich both areas of in-
quiry. Both geography and feminism are con-
temporary pan-disciplinary intellectual forces
to be reckoned with; both are central to theo-
rizing society and life on earth. Each i s poised
to make a lasting impression on the other, but,
first, they need to become acquainted and to
acknowledge what i s common in their intellec-
tual heritages.
Certainly in at least one monumental way
Annals of the Associatron of Amerrcan Geographers. 8214). 1992, pp. 569-586
0 Copyright 1992 by Association of American Geographers
570 Hanson
geography and feminism do diverge: central to
feminism is the notion that gender has been
and continues to be an important organizing
principle of social life. Any attempt to make
sense of the world as if it were ungendered is,
in a feminists view, therefore, to risk under-
taking a fundamentally flawed analysis. This
particular idea has not, until recently,
flourished in geography, which instead has fo-
cused on place, space, and location as key
organizing concepts and has dealt with each
(place, space, location) as if it were completely
ungendered (and unclassed and unraced).
Still, the analytical frameworks of geography
and feminism do share several fundamentals.
I shall explore here what I see as three core
analytic traditions that are common to geogra-
phy and feminism: a fascination with everyday
life, a realization of the importance of context,
and a focus on difference. I shall look at these
similarities and then illustrate-with the exam-
ple of local labor market studies-how these
shared traditions allow geography and femi-
nism, when they do collide, to spark the glow
of mutual insight rather than a fireball of de-
struction.
Feminism: Living in this World
While Envisioning New Ones
When I mentioned to a feminist colleague
(who is not a geographer) that I planned to
focus this address on the similarities between
geography and feminism, she quipped, Well,
one thing they surely have in common i s that
people dont seem to have a very clear idea of
what either one of them really is. While this
was not one of the similarities I had originally
had in mind, it is, probably a revealing one that
bespeaks a deeper commonality that I do be-
lieve i s significant: both are widely misunder-
stood and dismissed for being what in practice
they are not. As none of us here tonight has
any doubt whatsoever what geography is, I
dont need to clear that one up. But in order
to dispel any lingering confusion about femi-
nism, 111 tackle that prickly question: what i s
feminism?
The dictionary i s always a safe, if sometimes
unsatisfying, place to start. Websters Dictio-
nary defines feminism as the theory of the
political, economic, and social equality of the
sexes. The views of a few feminists them-
selves help to augment the dictionary: To feel
oneself born a feminist, I think, is to sense,
without having the language in which to ex-
press it, that there is an alternative life for
women (Nancy Miller, in foreword to
Heilbrun 1990, xii). A feminist . . . questions
the gender arrangements in society and culture
(all societies and cultures) and works to change
them; the desired transformation gives more
power to women while simultaneously chal-
lenging both the forms and the legitimacy of
power as it i s now established (Heilbrun 1990,
3). More recently Heilbrun has identified the
major, perhaps single mark of a feminist life
[as being] resistance to socialization (1992, 5).
Finally, Rebecca West summed it all up in 1913
when she said, I myself have never been able
to find out precisely what feminism is. I only
know that people call me a feminist whenever
I express sentiments that differentiate me from
a doormat.
All of these pronouncements on feminism,
like feminism itself, encompass a tension be-
tween the world as it i s and visions of a differ-
ent kind of place entirely, a tension between,
as Westkott has put it, describing and trans-
forming (1979,428). Hence, feminism looks at
the world through the lens of gender (note: not
women or femaleness), while simultaneously
seeking to build a world in which gender is no
longer a key dimension along which lifes pos-
sibilities are defined and resources allocated.
Feminists have called upon science fiction as a
way of limbering up minds for the stretch re-
quired to comprehend these new and different
possibilities. Like other master concepts in
social science (Block 1990,8), then, feminism is
not just an analytic abstraction, but a concept
that actively helps to shape social life.
While sometimes resorting to science fiction
scenarios and imaginary instances to unfasten
people from their fixation on the status quo,
many feminists have laced their writings with
geographic metaphors to signal their ground-
ing in the here-and-now realities of human ex-
istence as well as their mapping out of different
futures. Feminist poet Adrienne Rich, for exam-
ple, has written of the politics of location
(1986), and the title of her most recent book,
An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), uses a
cartographic metaphor to announce a work
that i s loaded with references to things geo-
graphic. Feminist biologist Donna Haraway
(1991) writes of situated knowing, by which
 Geography and Feminism
she explicitly says she means writing and
speaking from a specified location. The
works of these and other feminists are replete
with references not only to maps and atlases,
to place and location and specific geographies,
but also to paths, roads, networks, connec-
tions, and linkages, to borders and bound-
aries, to the local and the global.
Out of the mouths of feminist theorists,
then, come the words of geography; feminists
are speaking a language that we geographers
can understand. But do the feminists and ge-
ographers who share this vocabulary mean the
same thing by it?The answer I think is sort of,
but not really. By opening feminist meanings
to geographers and geographic meanings to
feminists, each stands to gain, for the two oc-
cupy much the same ground but have been
standing with their backs to each other. It is my
hope that geography and feminism will now
turn around and communicate with each other
face to face.
Feminism and Geography:
Common Ground
The three common threads that I identify-
finding significance in the everyday, appreciat-
ing the importance of context, and focusing on
difference-are so interwoven that in pulling
out one thread at a time for scrutiny I shall be
tugging at the other two. The threads simply
cannot be neatly snipped and drawn out one
at a time in isolation from each other.
Finding Significance in the Everyday
Geographers are down to earth-T-shirt slogan.
Even in the struggle against free-floating abstrac-
tion, we have abstracted. . . . Why not admit it, get
it said, so we can get on to the work to be done,
back down to earth again? (Rich 1986, 218-19).
At the center of the ground shared by femi-
nism and geography is their mutual interest in,
and intellectual respect for, the concrete and
mundane world of everyday life. Both find
significance in and seek understanding of the
material conditions of peoples lived experi-
e n ~ e .Both
~ appear to agree with Virginia
Woolf (1966, 107), Let us not take it for
granted that life exists more fully in what is
commonly thought big than what is commonly
thought small.
Geographys focus on space, place, and lo-
571
cation firmly fastens us, even in our wildest
flights of fancy, to the material world. The geo-
graphic imagination is, as John Agnew and
James Duncan (1989,l) have phrased it, a con-
crete and descriptive one, concerned with de-
termining the nature o f . . . places and the links
between them.4 To think geographically is,
then, to look analytically at what we take for
granted (Eyles 1988,202). I have always felt the
tug of the mundane; it i s what drew me to
geography in the first place. Rather than the
exploits of kings and queens, of generals and
prime ministers that were the stuff of history
courses during my college years, what so fas-
cinated me about geography was its interest in
how ordinary people in particular places at par-
ticular times shaped their livings and created
their lives. Geographers studies of time-space
paths and daily activity patterns, of peasant
farmers, and of environmental hazards all ex-
emplify to me a focus on the everyday.
Lived experience has been the starting place
for feminist analyses as well. Mascia-Lees et al.
(1989, 23) echo the thoughts often voiced by
feminists when they plainly state this feminist
fundamental: Much feminism derives its the-
ory from a practice based in the material con-
ditions of womens lives. Hence the attention
feminists have paid to the conditions of unpaid
domestic work as well as to paid work, to hous-
ing, to the needs of children. Westkott main-
tains that this feminist grounding [of] inquiry
in concrete experience rather than abstract cat-
egories (1979,426) i s linked in part to womens
historical involvement in domestic work and
reproduction, in meeting their families sur-
vival needs, in sustaining everyday life. But
surely another reason for this focus i s the con-
viction that gender is itself constructed daily in
the repetitive interactions of everyday life
(West and Zimmerman 1991; Moore 1988, 37).
So geography and feminism have in common
a fascination with lived experience, with the
real world, with the mundane. Moreover,
both feminism and geography have a facility for
seeing connections-between the small (the
everyday) and the larger policy making agenda,
as well as among events and processes occur-
ring at different geographic scales. For exam-
ple, feminists link the changing patterns of
womens and mens daily work to the need for
family leave policies; geographers link changes
in daily agricultural practices to the need for
changes in soil erosion policies. Feminist polit-
572 Hanson
ical scientist Cynthia Enloe (1989) exposes the
linkages between (a) the feminized flow of
nurses and domestic workers from poor coun-
tries to richer ones, and (b) the gendered na-
ture of the International Monetary Funds pol-
icies on debt repayment. Geographers devise
teaching modules connecting fast-food con-
sumption in your local neighborhood to trop-
ical deforestation in the Amazon.
An interest in the everyday and the mundane
does not mean a disinterest in theory; for both
geography and feminism, it has, however, sig-
naled an enduring struggle between the
specific and the abstract. It is a struggle that
has infused both feminism and geography with
intellectual excitement. An interest in the mun-
dane means using experience as a starting
place for theory and not forgetting that the
purpose of theory i s to shed light on that ex-
perience. As Rich puts it, Theory-the seeing
of patterns, showing the forest as well as the
trees-theory can be a dew that rises from the
earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns
to the earth over and over. But if it doesnt
smell of the earth, it isnt good for the earth
(1986, 213-14). Geographers echo the same
sentiment if not in such poetic terms: Cooke,
for example, insists that we need to talk with
and listen to real people to find out what Walby 1989; Foord and Gregson 1986; Acker
theories of social processes actually mean
(1987,411). Both geography and feminism have
grappled at length with the problem of what
level of abstraction will at once be powerful
enough to water the earth, yet rich enough to
smell of the earth.
Interestingly, the history of this encounter
between the general and the specific, stem-
ming from a fundamental concern for the mun-
dane, has followed a similar path in geography
and feminism, a path that has led both to the
same destination. Geographic theory of the
late 1950s and the 1960s explicitly aimed at a
very high level of abstraction, so high that, in
my opinion, the geography was washed out of
geography: on the isotropic plane, there is no
place-to-place variation save that created by
distance. Place is reduced to distance. The
search was on for universals such as those un-
derlying spatial behavior or locational decision
making. Ironically, it seems, the main meta-
message to emerge from abstract theoretical
geography was that distance matters. I say iron-
ically because the logical metamessage of dis-
tance matters i s pay attention to context, sion of the importance of context. But that is
insofar as it i s the very friction of distance that
yields differences among places. In recent
years, geographers have moved beyond a fas-
cination with distance to rediscover the places
that distance helps create.
This twisting of the theoretical lens in geog-
raphy to bring the specifics of place into
sharper focus mirrors the turn in feminism to-
ward a sharper focus on context. One can trace
this shift in feminism, away from pure abstrac-
tions, through the changing concept of patriar-
chy. Originally conceived at a very high level of
abstraction, patriarchy-a social system in
which men have power and authority over
women-was seen as universal across space
and time. Feminists sought the root cause of
womens universal oppression: why was it that
women in all times and all places had less
power than men (Moore 1988)? How did the
universals of patriarchy articulate with the uni-
versals of capitalism (Hartmann 1981)?
In the past decade, feminists have come to
pose the patriarchy question in rather differ-
ent terms. Now, instead of searching for the
single universal cause of womens oppression,
concern has turned to tracing out how gender
relations develop in particular places at partic-
ular times (see, for example, Rosaldo 1980;
1989). JoanSmith (1983) for instance, rejects the
notion of a universal patriarchy as smacking too
much of biological determinism. Joan Acker
(1989, 238) has also been sharply critical of an
ahistorical, universal concept of patriarchy and
has urged feminists to move away from a focus
on patriarchy to look at gender as the struc-
tural, relational, and symbolic differentiations
between women and men. Kandiyoti (1991)
has actually begun to analyze place-to-place
patriarchal variations as outcomes of the differ-
ent patriarchal bargains that women have
struck. Rich sums up these changing views of
theory within feminism: If we have learned
anything in these years of late twentieth-cen-
tury feminism, its that always blots out what
we really need to know: When, where, and
under what conditions has the statement been
true? (1986, 214). As geographers, to the
when, where, and under what conditions,
we would simply add and at what scale.
So I have slid sidelong from a discussion of
geographys and feminisms interest in the ev-
eryday, the small, the mundane, into a discus-
 Geography and Feminism
precisely where seeking insights from the ev-
eryday has led both geography and feminism.
Appreciating the Importance of Context
Geography-your place or mine?-T-shirt slogan.
There i s an irreconcilable tension between the
search for a secure place from which to speak,
within which to act, and the awareness of the price
at which secure places are bought, the awareness
of the exclusions, the denials, the blindnesses on
which they are predicated (Martin and Mohanty
1986,191).
Feminisms concern for context i s rooted in
the feminist view that everyone speaks from
somewhere, that there i s no such thing as a
universal perspective, that what i s touted as
universal i s really, to borrow Nagels (1986)
phrase, a view from nowhere (and of no-
where)-in other words, that all knowledge i s
necessarily subjective (Deutsche 1990,1991). In
speaking of the importance of context in in-
forming knowledge, feminists talk of the need
of positionality and situated knowing, the need
to specify location (see especially Harding
1990; Haraway 1991, ch. 9). The argument i s
that your context-your location in the world-
shapes your view of the world and therefore
what you see as important, as worth knowing;
context shapes the theoriesktories you con-
coct of the world to describe and explain it. All
of this brings to mind a quip I read in Science
years ago that was said to be an old geologists
saying, 1 wouldnt have seen it if I hadnt be-
lieved it (Science 1983,34). Knowledge is con-
tingent on beliefs and values, and one power-
ful force shaping these i s context.
When feminists use terms like context, posi-
tionality, location, and situatedness, they are
thinking of location in cultural space, not in
geographic space. Feminists use location as a
metaphor for immersion in a particular form of
everyday life, and as a way of conveying how
inevitably partial all knowledge i s as a result of
that immersion. A fascinating example of how
ones position can color what one sees and
records comes from historian Laura Thatcher
Ulrich (1990) in A Midwifes Tale: The Life of
Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary 7785-1812.
Ulrich compares the diary entries of Maine
midwife Martha Ballard with those for the same
days of a male physician who was party to the
same events as Martha but who recorded (or
omitted) an entirely different saga. Ulrich
shows how the new evidence contained in
573
Martha Ballards diary, coming from a context
that i s entirely different from other historical
sources, forces a reinterpretation of early nine-
teenth-century American history. Feminist biol-
ogist Donna Haraway (1991) provides another
example in her captivating story of how differ-
ent generations of primatologists observing the
same bands of primates have seen different
behaviors and have, depending on the cultural
location of the observer, spun radically differ-
ent tales (explanations, theories) of primate so-
cial organization.
To a geographer, a sensitivity to context
means looking at events and objects on the
ground, on the map, in particular places at
particular times. This i s not t o say that con-
text applies only to the local scale, or that
context signifies static, changeless, bounded
regions; it implies at once an area (or possibly
many areas at different scales) and the connec-
tions and linkages to other nodes, routes,
areas, and scales. This geographic meaning of
context i s nicely exemplified in some of Ellen
Churchill Semples geography. At a recent con-
ference on her work, Fred Lukerman (1992)
reminded the audience that in her paper on
Appalachia, often cited as perhaps the most
egregious example of environmental determin-
ism, Semple saw Appalachias poverty as
emerging not primarily from thin soils or
mountainous terrain per se, but rather from
Appalachias remote location and poor accessi-
bility. Places and context are, then, as Doreen
Massey (1991, 276, paraphrasing Nigel Thrift)
has put it, settings for interaction. She advo-
cates geographers actively promoting a con-
ceptualization and a consciousness of place
which i s precisely about movement and linkage
and contradiction (1991, 297).
In this sense of context as open locations-
cum-connections, the locations that feminist
theorists mention when they talk of situated
knowing are remarkably similar to what geog-
raphers mean by geographic context, though
feminists have not thought of such locations as
being grounded in geographic space. Listen to
Donna Haraway describing the home location
of situated knowers as she argues for feminist
identities that are permanently partial, contra-
dictory, unclosed, contingent. Insisting on the
embodied nature of all vision, Haraway
(1991) argues that feminist objectivity means
quite simply situated knowledge (1991, 188)
and limited location (1991, 190). If they are
574
bounded, these limited locations have bound-
aries that we ourselves have drawn and that are
permeable, porous, and perforated: bound-
aries materialize in social interaction; bound-
aries are drawn by mapping practices.
Objects do not preexist as such. Objects are
boundary projects (1991, 200-01). Moreover
these limited locations are tied together
through networks of interaction so that they
are not fixed locations, but nodes in fields
(1991, 195).
Haraway sees this partial vision implied by
rooted, situated knowledge as a viable alterna-
tive to relativism and as a requirement for tak-
ing responsibility for ones point of view, for
ones knowledge: the alternative to relativism
is not totalizing and single vision . . . [it] i s
partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustain-
ing the possibility of webs of connections
called solidarity. . . . relativism is a way of being
nowhere while claiming to be everywhere
equally (1991, 191). This explicit positioning,
then, grounds our knowledge and requires
one to take responsibility, to speak from some-
where, t o be answerable for what we learn and
how we see.
So geography and feminism share the belief
that location matters. And although feminists
do not envision geographic locations and ge-
ographers do not think first of cultural loca-
tions, both see the openness and fluidity as
well as the distinctiveness conveyed by the
terms place and location.
Thinking about Difference
Geography Makes a World of Difference-T-shirt
slogan.
Gender i s a field of structured and structuring dif-
ference, where the tones of extreme localization,
of the intimately personal and individualized body,
vibrate in the same field with global high-tension
emissions. Feminist embodiment, then, i s not
about fixed location in a reified body, female or
otherwise, but about nodes in fields (Haraway
1991, 195).
In both geography and feminism, the focus
on context is inextricably entwined with a fas-
cination with and concern for difference. Ge-
ography has focused on differences across
space and among places but has devoted only
meager attention to gender differences. Femi-
nism has dwelled on gender differences but
has ignored differences among geographic
places. I think that geography and feminism
Hanson
have a lot to learn from each other i n thinking
about difference.
Geography is replete with stories based on
difference and diversity; examples are the large
body of geographic work on residential segre-
gation, the attention paid to the push and pull
of migrants origin and destination places, and
studies of diffusion as an eroder of differences
over space. Geographers have reflected little,
however, on the significance of how we think
about d i f f e r e n ~ e .Feminists,
~ o n the other
hand, have given a great deal of thought t o the
construction and meaning of difference, partic-
ularly t o the role that difference plays in mobi-
lizing people to work for social change (Rich
1986; Barrett 1987; Haraway 1991; Pratt 1984).
But despite the fact that feminisms encounter
with difference has led to an engagement with
geographic concepts (flows and connections,
boundaries, hierarchies, and interdependenc-
ies), feminist theorists have not given much
thought to the role of geography-space,
place, location, networks, and linkages-in
creating and dissolving difference. How does
residential segregation, for example, feed con-
cepts of difference; how do workplace interac-
tions with coworkers from different neighbor-
hoods eat away at such concepts (Pratt and
Hanson 1988)? Feminist thinking about differ-
ence has moved from thinking about closed,
stable, smoothly bounded, opposing catego-
ries (geographys uniform regions?)to thinking
about changeable nodes in mutable networks
(geographys functional regions?).
Feminisms concern with gender differences
originates in the fact that womens oppression
springs from, as Mary Catherine Bateson puts
it, dominance based o n difference (1990,72).
Patriarchy is a hierarchical system that places
women in a subordinate position relative to
men simply on the basis of gender. The
gender dualism-wornadman, male/female-
poses two monolithic categories, of which the
woman/female side of the dichotomy is defined
as a deviation from, and as subordinate to, the
male norm (deLauretis 1989; Westkott 1979;
Mascia-Lees, et al. 1989; Deutsche 1991). Para-
doxically, while patriarchy takes this dualism
and the hierarchy embedded i n it to be natu-
ral, it sees the positions of masculine domi-
nance and feminine subordination as having to
be actively sustained through, for example,
teaching men that part of their masculinity in-
volves protecting women.
 Geography and Feminism
Feminists have come to ask, therefore, Can
we think of difference [the female] without
putting it against a [male] norm? Can we rec-
ognize difference but not in terms of hierar-
chy? (Mascia-Lees 1989, 29). And can we en-
sure that presumed differences are in fact
differences, rather than myths of difference?
Anthropologists have shown that separate-
ness and difference do not necessarily have to
imply inferiority or subordination (Moore
1988, 32), as in Diane Bells (1983) study of
Australian aboriginal groups in which women
and men operate in separate spheres, yet
women are not subordinate. Bateson (1990,
109) argues that because differences stimulate
creativity, they should be seen as a source of
strength, not of weakness or dominance. Yet
within feminism, a debate has raged over
whether or not the only hope for womens
equality is the eradication of gendered differ-
ences. If womens subordination i s based in
gendered differences, then can subordination
be eliminated, and equality with men
achieved, only by erasing such differences?
And would erasing such differences then mean
that equality i s to be defined by a societys
current masculinized values and behaviors?
In a discussion of the well-known Sears
casef6 Joan Scott (1990, 138) points out that
posing the question in these terms (equality
versus difference) i s neither cogent nor pro-
ductive: equality is not the elimination of dif-
ference, and difference does not preclude
equality. Equality refers to equal treatment for
particular purposes in particular contexts.
Scott and others (e.g., Pringle 1988) have ar-
gued persuasively that feminists have little to
gain by claiming that women and men are sim-
ilar or the same; what we need to recognize i s
a more complicated historically variable diver-
sity than is permitted by the opposition
male/female (Scott 1990, 143-44).
The male/female dualism sets in motion a
host of what feminist historian Joy Parr (1990,
9) has called galloping pairs like markethon-
market, publidprivate, nature/culture. Parr ob-
serves that, We come from a long tradition in
the west which finds meaning by specifying
difference, and clarity by concentrating and
amplifying presence and absence. We subordi-
nate continuity and diversity so as to feature
our world as a series of fixed oppositions, de-
pending upon the differences between each
part of each pair as our way to know the other
575
(1990, 9). Feminists insist that we need to see
how we have made the meanings of these
pairs, how we draw the boundaries, and to
recognize these meanings not as fixed but as
multiple and mutable (Parr 1990, 9).
To this end, a great deal of feminist research
has been devoted in the past few years to open-
ing up the category woman and exposing the
multiplicities-especially those of age, sexual
preference, class, race, and ethnicity-therein.
These many significant differences among
women lead some feminists to wonder
whether women have enough shared interests
to pursue common political goals and have
prompted feminists to discuss how women
might find common political cause while trans-
cending differences. Others have reacted to
this attention to difference by thinking in new
ways about the creation, sustenance, and dis-
mantling of difference. It i s on these feminists
ideas about difference that I want to focus be-
cause many have, unknowingly I think, drawn
on geography for key metaphors to convey the
notions that we create categories and assign
meaning to them, that the meanings change
over time and place, and that we should think
of the boundaries between categories as being
perforated, not solid.
Joan Scott (1990, 145), for example, warns
against simply substituting multiple for binary
differences by drawing rigid boundaries
around new finer categories. That is, we
should not simply decompose one large rigid
dualism (wornadman) into new, smaller, more
numerous, but equally rigid categories (white,
middle-aged, academic woman; Hispanic,
young, working-class woman). It changes little
to shatter the universal woman into a myriad
shards each of which is supposedly a different
type sharing similar interests, just as subdivid-
ing a uniform region into its composite,
smaller, uniform regions does not change our
way of thinking about regions. Recognizing
that difference occurs in so many dimensions
means that any boundary scheme defining cat-
egories must be seen as fluid, mutable, and
specific to certain circumstances or contexts.
Feminism has moved, then, away from see-
ing difference in terms of absolutes, bounded
by tight unbreachable borders, toward examin-
ing how difference i s actively created in partic-
ular times and places. Here i s where geogra-
phers have much to contribute, for, in focusing
on the role of space and place in creating and
76 Hanson
erasing difference, geographers are keenly
aware of the permeability of boundaries, the
ephemeral nature of regions, the linkages
among scales. As Neil Smith (1992) points out,
a focus on the active construction of difference
means looking at patterns of social interaction,
it means looking at how such social interac-
tions actually create different geographic
scales, and it means looking at how these
scales are connected. Furthermore, seeing dif-
ference as actively created means paying atten-
tion to similarities as well as to differences; in
short, it means paying attention to context and
to questions about the tensions between the
general (what places, groups, people have in
common) and the specific (how they may be
different). We have now come full circle via a
tour through thinking about difference, to re-
turn to feminisms and geographys common
interest in context.
Feminism and Geography
Collide: The local labor Market
Lest I betray both feminism and geography
by continuing to circle at too high a level of
abstraction, I want to illustrate these ideas with
examples from one arena in which feminism
and geography have already collided. The
arena is the local labor market, and my illustra-
tion will draw on the work that Geraldine Pratt
and I , with the help of many students: have
been doing in Worcester, Massachusetts for
the past several years. My point i s that because
geography and feminism share certain out-
looks and traditions, the collision has sparked
not a fiery explosion but a glow that has en-
lightened geography, feminism, and our un-
derstanding of the local labor market. The in-
terests in everyday life, in difference, and in
context come together in local labor market
studies to illuminate how we think about gen-
der, how we think about place, and how we
think about work.
Everyday Life and Difference: The
Abstracting of the Mundane
At the center of the local labor market i s not
the CBD, but the relationship between home
and work, certainly a relationship that stands
at the core of everyday life and that is central
to understanding the geography of settlement
patterns. The home/work relationship is at
once deeply gendered and intimately geo-
graphic.
In both feminism and geography, home and
work became abstracted, in geography into
two points on a plane and in feminism into the
concepts of the private (home) and the public
(work). But the home/work abstractions of fem-
inism and geography were different in key
ways: feminisms public/private abstraction
highlighted the gendered basis of all social re-
lations but ignored their geographic embed-
dedness, whereas geographys spatial abstrac-
tion emphasized location and obscured social
relations. Nevertheless, in both fields, the sym-
bolic abstraction of home and work stressed
their separation and opposition, rather than
their integration in peoples everyday lives.
In urban geography, home and work became
detached from each other, held together only
by that tenuous desire line between the two
points on the map. In feminism, the focus on
the ideological construction and the conse-
quences of the public/private dualism set the
two realms apart, with firm boundaries sealing
each from the other. In both feminism and ge-
ography, the effect was to detach economic
(public) life from the family and community
(private) life in which it functioned and to re-
move both the economic and the social from
their conjunction in place, to extract them from
context. It is interesting to this geographer that
when feminists began to critique the public/pri-
vate dichotomy, their argument was that the
private i s public (citing, for example, child care
or domestic violence), that the public i s con-
structed out of the allegedly private. They did
not focus on the links between home and work
either conceptually or concretely, on the
ground. The story of the collision between ge-
ography and feminism i s a story about prying
open and bringing together these closed and
distanced categories (private/home vs. pub-
lic/work); it is a story about devising new ways
of seeing the differences in and the bonds be-
tween home and work, a story in which place
and context take leading roles.
Gender divisions within the labor market-
the segregation of women and men into differ-
ent types of jobs-can be traced to the encap-
sulated and encapsulating dichotomization of
home and work; the home as female work
as male dictum has underwritten a pervasive
gender-based segregation of the labor market
 Geography and Feminism
that puts women in a subordinate p o ~ i t i o n . ~
Placing home and work in opposition has
thereby served to fuel a myth that has shaped
the behavior of employers and workers, as well
as government policy.
The sexual division of labm enmeshed in the
home/work myth sees womans paid work as
secondary to her primary reproductive role
and views mans reproductive role as second-
ary to his primary productive one (Molyneaux
1979). The myth provides employers with a ra-
tionale for creating certain jobs for women and
others for men, for assigning women and men
to different kinds of work, and for paying
women lower wages, sometimes even when
they are doing the same work as men (Scott
1982; Bielby and Baron 1986; Milkman 1986). It
provides male workers with a rationale for re-
sisting womens entry into male-dominated
work not only on the grounds that the pres-
ence of women would lower the wage, but also
because some men have come to define their
masculinity in terms of their paid work, on the
grounds that their masculinity itself would be
threatened (Cockburn 1983; Willis 1980).
The home/(paid) work dichotomy has moved
governments to pass legislation restricting
womens access to certain kinds of work
deemed immoral (like working the night shift)
or too strenuous (like firefighting or under-
ground mining) for women. The myth-and
the behaviors it engenders on the part of em-
ployers, male workers, and the state-also pro-
vides women workers with a rationale for ex-
pecting and then accepting lower wages, for
finding fulfillment in home and family rather
than in paid work (Pollert 1983; Kessler-Harris
1982), and for investing less in their own edu-
cation and job training (Reskin and Hartmann
1986). In addition, the home/work dichotomy
provided a convenient explanation for the
well-known empirical finding that the spatial
extent of womens local labor market is smaller
than mens; womens need to work closer to
home was long assumed (but not shown) to
stem from their need to tend to children and
other domestic obligations.
Several studies have emphasized the role of
employers in creating and defining distinctive
jobs for either women or men (Parr 1990;
Walby 1986; Johnson 1990). In designing or
assigning certain jobs for women, employers
often lump all women together, ignoring dif-
ferences among them and treating all women
577
as if they had great manual dexterity and little
physical strength, or as i f all women were
(throughout their entire lives) the mothers of
young children. Bielby and Barons (1986) scru-
tiny of some 400 California firms disclosed a
picture of employer practices that was consis-
tent with statistical discrimination, which refers
to the idea that employers make decisions
about individuals on the basis of their (the
employers) perceptions about the group to
which those individuals belong (see Reskin and
Hartmann 1986,42; Granovetter and Tilly 1988,
200). Bielby and Baron found that women were
kept from jobs that were deemed physically
demanding and were assigned to jobs that em-
ployers perceived as being routine and requir-
ing attention to detail. As further evidence of
how employers use pure, gendered abstrac-
tions of home-work difference, Beechy and
Perkins (1987) show how employers who want
flexibility in their work force create female jobs
as part-time work, reflecting the employers
view that womens domestic (maternal) role is
paramount-and fundamentally incompatible
with full-time work. By contrast, to achieve
flexibility in male jobs, employers use overtime
or hire male temporary workers. The point i s
that most employers seem t o be locked into the
gendered homelwork myth I have described.
But, as Bielby and Baron (1986,791) emphasize,
staying locked within these labels i s neither
rational, nor optimal employer behavior; an
enormous inertia blocks employers from de-
ploying labor more effectively by dropping
their use of gender as an inefficient screen for
attributes as easy to measure as physical
strength and finger dexterity.
These supposedly pure abstractions were
never adequate to the task of describing the
realms of home and work and the tensions and
interactions between them. Presented as uni-
versals, these abstract views of work and home
more closely approximated the lives of those
who conceived of them-largely white, upper
middle-class men and women-than of people
from other classes and racial and ethnic back-
grounds. Some (for example, Mackenzie 1989)
have argued that as women entered the paid
work force and public life, the publidprivate
categories became more chaotic, but in fact
the two categories have always been far more
chaotic than suggested by their smooth,
unruffled exteriors, because working-class
women, especially those from certain ethnic
578 Hanson
groups, have always been well represented in
the paid labor force and well integrated into
the public life of their communities (Nakano-
Glenn 1985).
Demystifying the HomeMrork Myth:
HomeMork links in Context
The myth that home and work are two pure
and very much gendered natural opposites
is precisely what feminists have cracked open
by showing how different ideas about the gen-
dering of home and work have developed in
different circumstances. When the concepts
home and work are no longer seen as
cocooned unto themselves, when the bound-
aries around each concept are seen as perfo-
rated, porous, and permeable, then a diversity
of possible configurations become candidates
for understanding. And place-geographic
context-emerges as key to that understand-
ing. The extent to which each realm is truly
intermingled with the other can be appreci-
ated, and the gender division of work within
the home as well as within the work place can
be seen not just as not natural but as human-
made and therefore mutable.
Nancy Hewitt (1991), for example, has docu-
mented how early twentieth-century Cuban
immigrants to Tampa, Florida blurred the lines
between factory and community; family
groups were hired together in the cigar facto-
ries, and people brought piecework home,
which stimulated the flow of more family mem-
bers to the factory. Joy Parr (1990) notes that a
strike in 1949 in Paris, Ontario-in many ways
a company town dominated by one textile
firm-failed precisely because the demarcation
between work and the rest of life was practi-
cally nonexistent; seeing the local textile mill
not simply as a work place but as a site for the
construction of the towns social life, the
women workers had difficulty making it the
target of a strike. Gerry Pratt and I have shown
how fuzzy the home/work divide i s in contem-
porary Worcester, a city of diverse manufactur-
ing and service industries, of old mills and
high-technology firms, and long-time home to
many different ethnic groups. We see much
evidence of the intermingling of home and
work in Worcester, where family and neighbor-
hood contacts often link people to jobs, where
the transfer of residential property between
generations replaces any rational workplace-
based residential location decision for almost
one-fifth of the households, and where one-
third of all dual-earner families with preteen
children arrange their work schedules (and
often their work locations and occupations) so
that one parent i s always at home (Hanson and
Pratt 1988a, 1991; Pratt and Hanson 1990).
Clearly new light i s shed on the local labor
market by splitting open the concepts of home
and work so that the bonds-the connective
tissues-between them become visible. Light is
also shed by tearing away the gendered skins
that have encased each in isolation from the
other. Although women do still carry the bulk
of responsibility for domestic chores in our cul-
ture and although the weight of peoples do-
mestic work load does seem to be related to
their labor force participation (for example,
whether they are in the labor force full time,
part time, or not at all, and their job type), we
can paint a much richer picture of how local
labor markets function when we stop coloring
home as female. For then we can see that it i s
not only women whose relationship to the
work force i s best seen in terms of her domes-
tic situation, that the relationship between
work force demands and domestic work load
changes over the life course, and that people-
both men and women-with the same domes-
tic responsibilities use a variety of strategies in
combining home and paid work.
Considerable evidence suggests that
womans domestic situations take on many
forms and influence her relationship to the
paid work force. First, participation in the labor
force is related to stage in the life cycle. Mar-
riage and the birth of children have had a neg-
ative impact on womens labor force parti-
cipation throughout the twentieth century,
although this relationship i s weakening
(Hayghe 1990). Second, the type of work, pri-
marily in terms of the demands it makes on
time and responsibility, is related to the domes-
tic situation. In her Australian study, Pringle
(1988) found that elite executive secretaries
were more likely than were other secretaries to
be single, allowing them the time-space
flexibility required to accommodate the jagged,
unpredictable work schedules dictated by their
bosses. In our Worcester study, married
women with the heaviest domestic work loads
were the ones who were the most likely to
work part time and to work in female-typed
occupations. Finally, this relationship between
 Geography and Feminism
domestic work and paid work has a geographic
dimension: in general, women with fewer do-
mestic responsibilities are willing to travel far-
ther to work than are other women (Hanson
and Pratt 1990; Pratt and Hanson 1992a).
The point i s that while domestic work loads
are related to participation in the paid work
force, domestic responsibilities vary tremen-
dously among women; moreover, often over-
looked i s the fact that such responsibilities also
vary among men. I already mentioned, for ex-
ample, that many Worcester fathers took on
child care responsibilities while their wives
were at work. As Siltanen (1986) has demon-
strated with data from Britain, it i s folly to at-
tribute domestic work to women only, thereby
assuming that gender i s an appropriate surro-
gate for measuring domestic situation.
Siltanens data show a strong link between as-
pects of paid employment (whether full time
or part time and the wage level of the job) and
domestic work, but it was clearly a persons
domestic situation (not sex) that was related to
employment. Men with heavy domestic re-
sponsibilities were just as likely as women with
such responsibilities to work part time or in a
lower-paying (female-dominated) job (and
conversely).
Moreover, both women and men with sim-
ilar domestic responsibilities may, because of
differences in local context, devise distinctive
strategies for combining the demands of home
and paid work. The availability of childcare and
elder care vary substantially over space and
between places, affecting the ease with which
parents of young children or caregivers to the
elderly can participate in paid work (Fincher
1992; Chicoine, et al. 1992). The nature of local
employment opportunities i s also spatially vari-
able at a fine scale (Hanson and Pratt 1988b).
The impacts of these geographic variations in
the local environment can be heightened by
peoples varying levels of daily mobility and
residential mobility.
In a comparison of women in two of
Worcesters suburban areas, we learned how
women whose domestic situations were essen-
tially similar (in terms of marital status and the
presence of children) had devised two very
different ways of joining home and work in
their daily lives. In the middle-class suburb,
where household incomes were higher and the
median length of residence in the Worcester
area was only twelve years, women made ex-
579
tensive use of formal daycare facilities and did
not rely heavily on family members or neigh-
bors for childcare. In the working-class area,
where the median length of residence was
twenty-seven years and multigenerational con-
nections were abundant, residential rooted-
ness had nourished extensive social networks,
which people tapped to find housing, jobs, and
childcare, enabling them to depend mostly on
friends, family, and neighbors for childcare.
This striking difference in the use of formal
daycare reflects not simply class differences in
the ability to pay, but strong, context-fed ideo-
logical differences on how children should be
cared for (Hanson, et al., forthcoming).
When home i s not colored all female and
paid work is not colored all male, then we
can begin to see how women and men negoti-
ate the demands of home and work differently
in different circumstances so that gender divi-
sions within the labor market are created dif-
ferently in different contexts. Feminist histori-
ans, anthropologists, and geographers have
begun to assemble evidence of how the gen-
dering of work, both at home and in the work-
place, varies over time and place. Parr notes,
Those studying segregation have been inter-
ested in sexual divisions as general features of
the economic or sedgender system rather than
as boundaries between tasks forged in defined
contexts by particular clashes of interests
(1990,234). Her point is echoed by Cranovetter
and Tilly (1988) who argue,that inequalities in
the labor process emerge from conflict and
bargaining; with an example of how nurses,
orderlies, and physicians came to be defined
as very different (and gendered and differently
rewarded) jobs, they note that occupations do
not emerge as gendered in isolation from, but
rather in relation to, each other. As geogra-
phers we are keenly aware of the role of space
and place in this process.
In her study of the textile industry in turn-of-
the-century Paris, Ontario, Parr (1990), for ex-
ample, illustrates how gender divisions of labor
within the textile industry depended on geog-
raphy-on what other jobs were locally avail-
able for men and on the employers need for a
stable work force. In Leicestershire, England,
the source of most of the female migrants to
Paris, knitting had grown up as a complement
to mens work in mining and had therefore
come to be defined as womens work. In Paris,
Canada, however, where male jobs outside the
580 Hanson
I
textile industry were not locally available for
men, the manufacturer named all knitting jobs
as male work and defined yarn preparation and
the finishing process as female work. The em-
ployers also joined forces with the male union-
ists to declare-on moral grounds-that the
night shift was bad for women, thereby further
circumscribing womens work. Confirming the
contextual basis of the gendering of work, Parr
also notes that in Paris, where there were few
male employment opportunities, men were
more likely to share in domestic work, mainly
by doing the cooking.
Louise Johnson (1990) tells a similar tale of
job labeling and relabeling along gender lines
as the Australian textile industry underwent
drastic changes in the 1970s. As the number of
jobs for men dwindled, employers, reasserting
mans role as breadwinner, came to define
weaving, previously considered womens
work, as mens work. This sudden shift was
linked to the installation of new looms, which
supposedly required more skilled (and
therefore more highly paid and also therefore
male) operators. The gendering of particular
tasks is clearly a slippery and contingent pro-
cess, one that i s dependent more on contest,
negotiation, and struggle in particular contexts
than on any natural talents of women and
men.
Creating and Dissolving Difference:
The Geography of Home and Work
Geography is central to this process of the
gendering of jobs and, more generally to labor
market segmentation, in several ways. At the
regional scale, McDowell and Massey (1984)
describe how gender relations and the form of
womens employment have historically both
helped to shape and been shaped by different
regional economies within Britain; the result i s
significant regional variations in the gendering
of work. Within contemporary Worcester, we
have found distinct clusters of male and female
employment at the census tract scale (Hanson
and Pratt 1988b), as well as, most definitely,
within firms and factories (Pratt and Hanson
1992b). This intraurban gender-based segrega-
tion reflects, in part, the prominence of retail-
ing in some districts, offices or hospitals in
others, and certain kinds of manufacturing in
still others. In this sense, the gendering of the
employment map simply mirrors the segrega-
tion of women and men into different indus-
tries and occupations.
Yet such spatial clusters also have to do with
the fact that employers seem to be keenly as-
tute social geographers and locate their estab-
lishments so as to ensure access to the partic-
ular type of labor they seek. In her study of the
San Francisco Bay area, Kristin Nelson (1986),
for example, reveals the spatial coincidence of
clerical-intensive back offices and the resi-
dences of educated middle-class married
women. Similarly Allen Scott (1988, 176) shows
that within Orange County, California, residen-
tial concentrations of Asian and Hispanic im-
migrants are found in close proximity to the
core of small manufacturers that like to hire
immigrant labor. In Worcester, we have found
the locations of manufacturing and producer
services firms to be extremely sensitive to the
location of different kinds of labor, with some
firms settling in the inner city to tap immigrant
Hispanic or Vietnamese workers, others locat-
ing near a large isolated public housing project
to draw upon the labor of female household
heads, and still others locating in a historically
blue-collar mill region to tap skilled male work-
ers or married women (Hanson and Pratt 1992).
This locational synergy between certain
kinds of firms and the residential landscape of
labor is one way that geography feeds the
emergence of place-to-place differences in the
gendering of work between regions as well as
within the metropolitan area (Pratt and Hanson
199213). Because most women-and some
men-work very close to home (the average
journey to work for all women in the Worcester
MSA in 1987 was about fifteen minutes) and
because employer-investors prove to be ex-
tremely knowledgeable social geographers in
locating their firms, highly distinctive small-
scale local labor markets develop inside the
metropolitan area (Hanson and Pratt 1992). Al-
though gender-based occupational segregation
remains a daunting problem, these little labor
markets differ in how womens and mens work
have come to be defined. For example, we
discovered place-to-place differences within
Worcester in the extent to which womens
work has been crafted in the form of part-time
jobs, or has been restricted only to day shifts,
or has been incorporated into traditionally
male work. As examples of women entering
male jobs, we found that women in one small
area have gained access to managerial and
 Geography and Feminism
I
computer jobs, in another to metalworking,
and in a third to technical and production su-
pervisory occupations (Pratt and Hanson
1992b). The Worcester study demonstrates yet
again, and at a fine spatial scale, that the
boundaries between womens work and mens
work are indeed constructed, permeable, and
dependent on context.
At yet another scale-that of the establish-
ment-place, context, and space also exert
themselves in partitioning the labor market by
keeping womens work and mens work spa-
tially separate. Historians remind us just how
long i s the tradition of separating womens
work spaces from mens within the workplace
( I . Scott 1982). This partitioning of women and
men within the workplace i s crucial to the ways
in which skills come to be defined, valued, and
gendered. It i s a well-known fact that womens
work-whatever it may be-is undervalued
and undercompensated relative to mens
work. In the U.S., for example, nurses earn
less than millwrights or police officers, secre-
taries earn less than lathe operators, elemen-
tary school teachers earn less than plumbers,
and health technicians earn less than truck
drivers (Mellor 1987). As Phillips and Taylor
(1980, 53) have noted, skill i s not an objective
economic fact but an ideological category im-
posed on certain types of work by virtue of the
sex and power of the workers who perform it.
Moreover, skill should not be viewed as being
attached to, or even developed by, an individ-
ual but as developing within a social context:
the social relations of the work place deter-
mine to what extent such [job] knowledge is
passed along to others (Granovetter and Tilly
1988, 210) and certainly to which others it is
passed along. As a warper put it when she was
explaining to Johnson (1990, 19) how one
learns the complexities of working a warping
machine, They [the employers] teach you the
basics and then you learn from the other girls.
Seeing skills as the outcome of a social pro-
cess in place highlights the role of geography
in the genesis and persistence of labor market
segmentation. This sociogeographical concept
of skill helps to explain employers fondness
for recruiting new workers through the per-
sonal networks of their employees: from the
employers point of view, employees are more
likely to impart establishment-specific job
skills or knowledge to a new recruit who is
someone they already know (a friend or rela-
581
tive) than to a stranger (see also Manwaring
1984). From the employees point of view, job
satisfaction i s likely to be higher when sharing
job knowledge through an informal appren-
ticeship system involves working with people
you already know and like and helped to bring
on board. Here i s where the spatial segregation
of men and women within the workplace pres-
ents a very real barrier to the transmission of
skills across gender lines. The ways in which
job skills become defined, gendered, and
shared are, then, closely tied to the functioning
of place-based social networks.
These networks flourish not only in work
places but also in extended families, in neigh-
borhoods, and in community groups; and they
are pivotal in connecting people to jobs. Be-
cause such networks are more likely to link
people who are similar than people who are
different (with respect to gender, social status,
and so on), they tend to reinforce existing
inequalities and lines of difference among
workers. As a means of recruiting workers,
employees personal contacts are prized by
employers not only for their low cost but also
for their role in building a compatible and
stable (homogeneous) work force. Moreover,
because informally recruited workers are more
likely to live locally than are workers recruited
through more formal means (e.g., newspaper
ads, employment agencies) (Manwaring 1984;
Hanson and Pratt 1992), employers value word-
of-mouth recruitment as a way of reducing ab-
senteeism and turnover in their labor force.
As a result, reliance on personal contacts tends
to segment the work force into small geo-
graphic regions, contributing to the construc-
tion of distinctive little labor markets within a
metropolitan area. Because social networks de-
velop in place, a strong relationship develops
between a persons length of residence in a
particular place and the likelihood of finding a
job or a home through personal contacts (Han-
son and Pratt 1992). Insofar as Worcester peo-
ple may be more rooted than are people in,
say, Tucson or Los Angeles, our findings about
the importance of social networks are context-
dependent.
In sum, the spatial bias of place-based social
networks helps to create labor market segmen-
tation in space; the social biases of such net-
works-especially their unbalanced gender
composition (Hanson and Pratt 1991)-helps to
perpetuate ideas about the gendering of jobs
582 Hanson
and occupations, the gendering of job skills,
and gender-based divisions of labor within
work places, And at the heart of both the spa-
tial and the social biases are the linkages be-
tween work and home.
As geographers, however, we fully realize
how open are the boundaries among these
small local labor markets, how important are
the flows of people, goods, and ideas between
as well as within them, and how intensely
places and processes beyond the purely local
are felt within these small areas. To the extent
that money and information flows, social net-
works, and activity patterns extend beyond the
home area, differences within and between
these local labor markets are shaped by social
interactions at many geographic scales and in
relation to localized interactions in other small
areas. Examples from Worcester of such
boundary permeability include (1) a footwear
firm that moved from another state into inner-
city Worcester to hire experienced workers
who had been idled by the closing of a shoe
factory there; (2) a wool-processing firm that i s
located in a suburban town but hires male Pol-
ish immigrants, all of whom live in a tradition-
ally Polish inner-city neighborhood, belong to
the same church, and car-pool to work to-
gether; (3) the geographic reach of Worcester
manufacturers, whose raw material inputs
come from, and whose finished products flow
out to, places distant from New England (on
average, 41 percent of a Worcester-area firms
material supplies come from, and 43 percent
of their sales go to, places outside New En-
gland) (Hanson and Pratt 1992).
Everyday life, Context, and Difference in the
local labor Market
When feminists and geographers team up to
understand the local labor market, their shared
traditions-the focus on everyday life, the in-
terest in context, the concern for difference-
provide a solid ground for the investigation.
Recognizing the significance of the mundane
demands that home and work be placed at the
center of the investigation. Recognizing the
many ways, aside from the journey to work,
that home and work are joined together in
peoples everyday lives requires seeing the
two, not in closed, mythical opposition to each
other, but as completely intermingled and
interdependent. Recognizing the integration
of home and work in daily life calls attention to
complexity and to the different ways in which
the two have been combined in different con-
texts.
Opening up home and work and stripping
away their gendered identities, then, also lays
bare the central role that geography plays in
creating and sustaining gender divisions-as
well as other kinds of divisions-of labor. We
can see how people in different places at dif-
ferent times have come to define certain tasks
as appropriate for women and others as appro-
priate for men. We can see how these
definitions, dependent as they are on context,
bear little or no relationship to womens or
mens natural talents or abilities. We can see
how, ironically, these constructions initially
create and then draw upon employers gener-
alizations about differences between women
and men (though the specific form of general-
ization may differ from place to place). We have
seen how, therefore, simply replacing one
normative, binary opposition (home/work; fe-
male/male) with other normative oppositions
(women do yarn processing/men knit) does not
fundamentally change how we think about dif-
fe rence.
But both geographers and feminists, seeing
that differences are constructed in particular
contexts, can see that any difference, such as
that embodied in occupational segregation,
can be similarly dismantled and constructed
anew. Moreover, feminists and especially geog-
raphers realize that the leakages between dif-
ferent contexts, the flows across places, reveal
just how contingent, how liquid, how unnatu-
ral categories can be.
After the Collision: No More
Science Fictions
So, after geography and feminism do col-
lide-once they have come to appreciate what
is common in their traditions and have begun
to converse face-to-face-what can they learn
from each other? From geographers, feminists
need to learn to appreciate the geographic
basis of all social life, and from feminists geog-
raphers need to learn to acknowledge the gen-
dered basis of geographic patterns and pro-
cesses. For the idea that life i s lived on the head
of a pin, not anchored in space and time, and
 Geography and Feminism
the idea that life i s in any way ungendered-
these are indeed science fictions.
Feminism has been much like a space ship,
floating free in the cosmos, unencumbered by
the gravity of real geographies. Feminists need
t o come down t o earth, quite literally, by in-
corporating space, place, and location into
feminist understandings of everyday life, into
feminist understandings of context, and into
feminist understandings of h o w differences are
created and dissolved. Geographers can trans-
f o r m feminism b y pulling it d o w n to earth, by
grounding it, b y showing how gender i s and
continues to be shaped by real geographies.
With appropriate infusions o f the geographical
imagination, feminists can come to see the im-
portance of the real geography behind the geo-
graphic metaphors that have suffused feminist
writing. Once thus transformed b y the gravity
of geography, feminism might find i t easier not
only t o describe the world but to actually trans-
f o r m it.
A n d what can geography, already thoroughly
grounded, learn f r o m feminism? How can fem-
inism transform geography? Feminism
challenges geography t o recognize the gen-
dered basis o f all social life; w e geographers
can begin our metamorphosis, therefore, by
paying attention to gender in o u r investiga-
tions of everyday life, in our studies o f context,
in o u r understandings of difference. Following
the old geologists saying, geographers need
t o begin t o believe in the importance of gender
in order t o see it. Feminism challenges geog-
raphy to unfold, open up, and rethink catego-
ries like gender, woman, man, concepts that
have long been taken for granted. Geog-
raphers sensitivity to place should make i t easy
f o r us to see gender as feminists have come to
do, n o t as t h e abstract male/female monoliths
but as an integral part of life that i s shaped
differently in different times and places
through everyday interactions.
Feminism i s explicit about seeing all knowl-
edge as situated, partial, and gendered. Femi-
nism challenges geography, therefore, t o see
the importance o f recognizing our location,
, [of] having to name the ground were coming
1 from (Rich 1986, 219), of being explicit about
taking responsibility f o r our perspectives. Fem-
inism challenges geography to build theories
that truly aid understanding, theories that at
once explain b y identifying patterns and causal
relationships and yet are attuned t o contextual
583
differences. The most useful kinds of theories
are likely t o be historically and geographically
specific, comparative rather than universaliz-
ing, and b o t h pragmatic and fallible (Fraser and
Nicholson 1990). Such context-sensitive theo-
ries will also expose certain universal truths
as science fictions. Certainly developing such
theories poses a challenge for both geogra-
phers and feminists, a challenge that will b e far
more easily and productively met once the
worlds of geography and feminism have col-
lided.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to those who gave me their reactions
to an earlier draft: David Angel, Glen Elder, Jody
Emel, Cynthia Enloe, Perry Hanson, Melissa Gilbert,
Doreen Mattingly, Jan Monk, Gerry Pratt, Joni
Seager, and B.L. Turner, 11. Thanks also to the Na-
tional Geographic Society and the National Science
Foundation, who have supported the Worcester
study.
Notes
1. It seems noteworthy that Terry McCee (1991), in
the other presidential address given to North
American geographers within the past year, cited
feminism as one of three key intellectual domains
currently shaping theories of society; he directed
his remarks toward one of the others, Eurocentr-
ism, and the third-inequality-seems to be
closely linked to the other two.
2. For one thing, outsiders to both treat geography
and feminism as if they were merely diffuse gas-
ses, not solid planets.
3. As Charles Taylor (1989) has pointed out, the sub-
ordination of the everyday events of family and
work to the supposedly loftier pursuits of citizen-
ship and contemplation has a long intellectual his-
tory in Western thought, dating back to Aristotles
definition of the good life.
4. Note that an interest in the mundane does not
imply giving priority to any particular geographic
scale (Massey 1991).
5. A recent exception i s Neil Smith (1992).
6. In 1979, the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission (EEOC) brought a sex-discrimination suit
against Sears (the retailer) charging that Sears dis-
criminated against i t s female sales force by not
providing equal access to the higher-paying com-
missioned sales positions. Basing their argument
on gender differences (i.e., that women them-
selves preferred other, lower-paying sales posi-
tions over the commissioned ones), Sears won the
case. The EEOC had based their case on the exis-
tence of differences among women, pointing out
that not all employed women share the same goals
and preferences.
7. Scott also urges feminists not to focus on differ-
584 Hanson
ences among women to the neglect of gender
differences. Because fixed gender categories (a
monolithic view of the male/female dichotomy)
are treated in our culture as normative and nat-
ural, feminists need to look carefully at how dif-
ferences between women and men are con-
structed and used.
8. Since we launched the Worcester Project in
1986, many students have contributed to it: Ce-
cile Badenhorst, Brooks Bitterman, Michael
Brown, Scott Carlin, Nancy Castro, Lee Dillard,
David Edmunds, Glen Elder, Caitlin Elkington,
Signe Furlong, Melissa Gilbert, Erik Hanson,
Kristin Hanson, lbipo Johnston-Anumonwo,
Deborah Kahn, Ruth Katz, Debby Leslie, Scott
MacLeod, Charlie Mather, Doreen Mattingly,
Kim Miller, Sheila OShea, Cyndia Pilkington,
Judy Pincus, Julie Podmore, Suzy Reimer, Mary
Riley, Christine Salek, Jennifer Santer, Mimi Ste-
phens, Stacy Warren, Martha Weist, and Michael
Zimmer.
9. The extent of gender-based segregation in the
workplace i s indeed astonishing. In perhaps the
most detailed study undertaken on this sub-
ject-a close dissection of some 400 California
establishments-sociologists Bielby and Baron
(1984, 35) found almost complete sex segrega-
tion by job title: only 10 percent of the nearly
61,000 workers [were] in establishment job titles
that [had] both men and women assigned to
them.
10. Many women, like the domestic servants Enloe
describes and the immigrants fueling New York
Citys informal economy (Sassen 1987), have cre-
ated-and operate within-global-scale labor
markets.
11. This i s not to downplay the role of intercontinen-
tal social networks in stimulating migration
streams and recruiting workers; the very exis-
tence of clusters of immigrants from Vietnam,
Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in
Worcester speaks to the power of those long-dis-
tance contacts. Once settled in Worcester, how-
ever, immigrants, who often do not own cars,
tend to work locally.
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