Manoeuvring urban spaces in-between public and private: female agency in early-twentieth-century Gothenburg

ABSTRACT This article analyses female agency in early twentieth-century Gothenburg. It argues that female urban practices were a major catalyst for the transformation of urban space in the port city, which has traditionally been attributed to male-dominated activities in trade, industry and urban politics. Drawing on women’s personal memories and on insights offered by theoretical studies that consider gender and mobility as constitutive elements of urban space, the article focuses on women’s mobile practices in the rapidly changing industrial port city: on female migration, on how women navigated the labour market, and on their perception as home-makers. In doing so, it places particular emphasis on how women acted in the blurred boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces and thereby on one of the major ordering principles of urban life.

the week had to be used to cultivate community with those who also had moved to the city and were employed in the same profession'.Most importantly, though, her narrative is centred around herself as a young woman, getting to know Gothenburg better with time, and navigating the city and its job offers in an increasingly confident manner: 'Change of environment is stimulating, so when a job as "miss in the milk shop" became available, men's and women's underwear [which she had been selling in another shop for some time] had to give way'. 1 This article is about women like Elsa and their agency in early-twentieth -century Gothenburg.I argue that female urban practices were a major catalyst for the transformation of urban space in the industrialising port city, something which has traditionally been attributed to maledominated activities in trade, industry, and urban politics. 2Drawing on memories from women like Elsa and on the theoretical premise that 'gender is fundamental to the ways in which many towns shape themselves', 3 this article explores women's mobile practices in the urban space.I focus specifically on women's behaviours in the blurred boundaries between 'public' and 'private' spaces and thereby on one of the major ordering principles of urban life.In so doing, I contribute to knowledge about the gendered nature of mobility in all its different forms and aspects, including long-and short-term migration, modes of transportation, and shifts in cultural meanings ascribed to inter-urban travel.

Approaching the urban space
Beginning in the 1990s, gender urban historians have emphasised women's presence and agency in the urban space in order to overcome traditional narratives of the 'female home' and the 'male public space'. 4eminist authors have criticised the very distinction between 'public' and 'private' that entrenches women's marginalisation in society. 5More recent research has acknowledged and investigated the porosity and permeability of what had previously been assumed to be rigid boundaries between the 'public male' and 'private female' spheres. 6This article adds to this literature by emphasising female agency precisely in those spaces situated in the blurred boundaries between 'public' and 'private'.While the distinction between 'public' and 'private' spaces may be theoretically problematic, 7 cities are, in practice, organised according to some distinction between 'public' and 'private' spaces. 8t has long been established that private and public spaces overlap and relate to each other in historically variable ways. 9As urban scholar Ali Madanipour puts it, 'public and private spaces are a continuum' and the society and culture and [is] thus fundamental to the construction and reproduction of key society structures'. 18Further, all forms of mobility have 'meanings that extend beyond the physical movements of people or things'. 19Connecting to the constructivist understanding of space and to the argumentation of human geographers, we can posit that mobilities constitute cities to a very large extent.As Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman tell us, '[p]ractices of mobility animate and co-produce spaces'. 20According to mobilities research, these different practices of mobility are deeply intertwined with gender. 21In an historically variable way, gender has affected whether and how people have been able to move, which means of transport they were able to access, and the meanings which have been ascribed to their movements. 22While female mobility has traditionally been viewed as subordinate, more recent research stresses that women were more mobile than previously assumed, and that their movements greatly influenced social formations. 23Echoing the technological historian Tiina Männistö-Funk's research, which shows us that Finnish Turku's urban structure was held together by walking women for over a century, 24 this article demonstrates that women's mobile practices shaped the urban order, and did so by acting on the perpetual renegotiation of the boundaries between public and private spaces, in particular.
Analysing mobility as a social practice and from a gendered perspective, this article follows Colin Pooley's holistic approach on mobility that embraces everyday mobility such as mundane inter-urban travel, longand short-distance migration, as well as a consideration for the means of transport and infrastructures, ranging from travel by foot to steam ships, used for different purposes. 25The three main sections of the article include, first, women's movement to and through the city, second, women's navigation of the urban working world and, finally, women's construction of homes and their moving of houses.Before I embark on the analysis, I will introduce my source material and then provide information regarding gender norms in early-twentieth-century Sweden and on the peculiar gender order that characterised port cities.

Memories
This article mainly utilises written memories of urban (daily) life collected over the second half of the twentieth century.During the 1990s, historians reflecting on the relationship between history and memory began the process of rehabilitating memory as a source for history writing. 26The procedure of reunifying history and memory has more recently received decisive impulses from oral history.To be sure, oral accounts and recorded memories usually span a longer period of time than more contemporarily recorded sources.Hence, changes in values and norms over time together with nostalgic feelings may unconsciously alter perceptions and distort memories. 27Yet, weaving personal memories into the reconstruction of past experiences has made historians aware of the bias that selects, shapes, and filters all source material.For instance, the issues addressed by the city council primarily reflect how the local authorities perceived of their city; and Gothenburg's official archival records generally reflect the patriarchal order of a trading industrial port city, in which female voices and agencies were usually obscured.Due to a lack of formal sources, feminist urban historians have often relied on memoirs and fiction to track the street life of women. 28The recorded memories used for this article allow us to provide historiographical recognition to counter-stories and invisible-made agencies in an early-twentieth-century port city.
This article draws on four different types of memory-material.These include memories recorded as so-called 'jubilee memories' by the newspaper Göteborgs-Tidningen in the 1970s and life stories collected by the Institute for Language and Folk Memory (Institutet för språk och folkminnen (ISOF)) between the 1960s and 1990s, partly as interviews and partly as written accounts.I also consulted questionnaires and memory collections established by the Nordic Museum, 29 and the personal memories posted on the open website Minne sponsored by the Nordic Museum.As not all material has been digitised, particularly without OCR software, I applied different thematic filters.This resulted in the ISOF material becoming the most important source.This archive hosts memorycollections that focus on Gothenburg, whereas the Nordic Museum's collection is centred on memories from people from the countryside.My research encompassed a corpus of 80 memories, from which I extracted and analysed accounts of female agency in urban life.
The memories I used have an important bias: people who answered the questionnaire, agreed to interviews, or submitted their memories to Göteborgs-Tidningen are almost exclusively people who lived in Gothenburg for the remainder of their lives.We do not hear about the numerous women who migrated further after only spending a few years in the port city.These highly mobile people, who contributed to the particularly high population turnover in industrial port cities during the early twentieth century, are silent in almost all available sources.People who shared their memories with the newspaper or research institutes, in one way or another, 'succeeded' in their lives in the big city.Many of them look back with pride, particularly upon the hardships of their younger years.Numerous sources contain peoples' childhood memories, which often embrace their memories of mothers and sometimes of elder sisters.I also included narratives about female figures who, in certain memories, marked the urban space in a peculiar way.These memories about remarkable women tell us how women in the urban space could be perceived.This social imaginary, in turn, influenced how women navigated the city.

Early-twentieth-century gender order
Towards the end of the nineteenth century and influenced by the international 'first-wave' feminism, Swedish society debated greatly regarding women's place in society and slowly started to give official recognition to women in a growing number of (professional) branches.Rooted in the contemporary understanding that the sexes were inherently different, separate schools and institutions that trained women to exercise 'their jobs' as for example midwives or nurses, created a separate 'female sphere' in public life, which significantly reinforced the prevailing gender order.While women's work underwent a professionalisation and relative emancipation from traditional role-models a re-enforced entrenchment of 'female qualities' and 'female tasks' took place.Swedish society would be marked by this paradox well into the twentieth-century's welfare state.The institutional and spatial separation of female and male tasks occurred in Gothenburg as well, which the city council debates from those decades is testament to.Simultaneously, an active feminist movement, which had a major stronghold in Gothenburg, helped to push women's legal status, encouraging dramatic changes during the first decades of the twentieth century: married women earned equal civil rights and in 1921 women were allowed to vote in national elections for the first time. 30othenburg's population doubled within one generation to reach 168 000 inhabitants in 1910, and then almost doubled again to 320 000 in 1945. 31etween 1900 and 1940, massive female immigration made women numerically dominant in the port city.In the crisis-ridden early twentieth century, women entered the urban job market in large numbers, diversified their occupations mainly by entering the expanding (public) service-and medical care sector, but also by gaining employment within the manufacturing industries.Owing to mechanisation, these industries increasingly offered employment opportunities even for unskilled workers. 32Often, women earned more stable positions than men held in the growing, but crisisexposed, engineering industries. 33Gender is crucial to understanding port cities' society and culture. 34However, whereas a rich corpus of literature explores women's history in port towns, 35 little attention has been devoted to the gendered spatial order of these urban places.Port cities' have mostly been analysed based on their geographical locations, their port economy and industrialisation, their transoceanic connectedness and the resulting cultural diversity and, above all, with a focus on their function as nodal points for different mobilities. 36Through these analytical lenses, port cities appear to be urban spaces which have been particularly influenced by often stereotyped masculine actors -the sailor, dockworker, wharf worker, tradesman, clerk, banker, factory owner.This view renders women as playing the role of wives only, or relegates them to a few professional branches, mainly prostitution, house-and care work.However, neither prostitutes nor housewives or maids were passive actors under male dominance.Research has shown that, rather on the contrary, prostitutes were crucial actors for the very functioning of the port-city-system, 37 and housewives in port cities often were the actual heads of the family due to their husbands' long absences from home. 38And, as we will see, maids could deploy a particularly strong urban agency.This article carves out the spatial arrangement of women's agency in the port city to give fresh insights into early-twentieth-century shifting gender relations.

Moving to and through the city
Over the past few decades, migration historians have significantly nuanced the image of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century urban migration as one-directional desperate moves by rural people to growing urban centres. 39Recent research indicates that increasing turnover rather than simple immigration was the main defining characteristic of the urban migration experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.This trend towards increasing mobility, transience, and turnover went along with a diversification in the migrants' background and a growing participation of women in urban migration. 40The increase in female migration holds true particularly for Gothenburg where, in the early twentieth century, many more women than men immigrated, leading to a steep numerical increase in the city's female population.In the first half of the twentieth century, estimates show that close to forty percent of the female urban population was not born in the port city. 41he duration of time the migrants' remained in the city varied in important ways.Usually women who had been recruited as maids from the close hinterland were those who stayed the shortest time in Gothenburg. 42Yet, a number of female migrants, like Elsa, used their employment as maids as a way to gain entry to other occupations on the urban labour market. 43Of course, not all woman who were newcomers to Gothenburg became maids: Alma who arrived to the city in 1900 as an eighteen-year-old, got a job in a tavern near the harbour, something she remembers fondly. 44Before its decline in the 1930s, the domestic service sector had grown steadily since the 1870s, especially in bigger cities and port cities like Gothenburg with its important trading houses that employed many domestic servants. 45Yet, finding work in the domestic service did not always mean moving from the countryside to the city; many women left the city to take jobs as farmmaids.Svante S., born in Gothenburg in 1860, remembers that on market days when farmers came to sell their products, maids and farmhands used to stand at the marketplace, reference letters in hand, waiting to be hired. 46lthough Sweden was formally neutral during World War One, Swedish society was affected by the war. 47Especially in Swedish cities, living conditions deteriorated significantly as a result of a range of different factors: the Allied economic blockade and the counter-measures taken by the Central Powers, a poor harvest in 1916, the Swedish government's inequitable rationing system coupled with rapid inflation, and Prime Minister Hjalmar Hammarskjöld's incorrect belief that Sweden would be able to uphold its international trade.In Gothenburg, out-migration became a strategy of coping with the crisis that found its harshest expression in substantial food shortages. 48Per-Olov's mother, whose husband was a sailor who spent a lot of money on alcohol consumption, had a relative in Lindome, a village situated twenty kilometres south of Gothenburg.During the war, she contacted a recently-widowed relative and asked if he needed any domestic help.He did and the farmer soon after welcomed Per-Olov and his mother to his house.As they arrived in Lindome, Per-Olov recalls, they expressed relief at having escaped the misery of Gothenburg's port district Nordstaden (no 1 on Map 1). 49The back-and-forth-migration between Gothenburg and the countryside also embraced women who travelled in order to fulfil temporarily limited tasks in housekeeping.For example, female farmers commuted to Gothenburg at the beginning of the century to help with the big seasonal laundries in the city's upper-class households, most of which had links to commercial trade. 50These women's out-migration strengthens the analysis that turn-of-the-century urban migration was not a one-way-street but entailed movements in various directions, which involved many women.
Migration movements were most intense between Gothenburg and the neighbouring regions Älvsborg and Bohuslän, where about twenty-five percent of the urban population came from between 1910 and 1930. 51nna and her sister came to Gothenburg from Bohuslän in the 1920s, just like Elsa.Unlike Elsa, though, who migrated to the city seeking employment, Anna and her sister had already secured work at a clothing company before moving to the city and therefore their priority upon arriving was to find a place to live.They rented a room in an elderly couple's two-room flat in the workers' district Haga (no 2 on Map 1).Anna remembers that she and her sister did not feel all too alienated by their new surroundings.Instead, she thought that the lifestyle in Haga was quite similar to what they were used to in Bohuslän: the house had an open fireplace and an outhouse in the courtyard.Most importantly, the doors were left unlocked so that residents sharing the courtyard socialised with one another frequently. 52ourtyards were lively semi-public spaces with women as the main actors and observers, not only in Haga, but also in other workers' or seafarers' districts like Masthugget (no 3 on Map 1).A 'boy from Masthugget' remembers that the atmosphere in the courtyard where he grew up in the 1930s resembled a fishing village -and that 'the old ladies closely monitored the neighbours' habits and sassy children'. 53et, Anna and her sister from Bohuslän left the village-like urban life behind quite soon.She goes on: 'gradually we moved into an apartment on Linnégatan (no 4 on Map 1) with heating and toilet, which we were very happy about, of course'.Anna tells the story of their moving to Linnégatan as an almost natural process by which the city newcomers climbed the social ladder, meaning that they had to live in an apartment, which adhered to the modern city standard.However, Anna's overall narrative is not about her and her sister successfully navigating the city, which obviously they did.Rather, her story is about them losing a cherished lifestyle and sociability, which they experienced not only in rural Bohuslän but also in the working district of Haga.They missed socialising with neighbours on Linnégatan, a place where they did not exchange many words with their fellow residents. 54It can be argued that immigrants, more so than those who were born and bred in Gothenburg, were especially vulnerable to the often-stark contrasts between the different worlds of the city's districts, despite the fact that they were proximally close.Certain neighbourhoods resembled rural spaces, while others appeared almost metropolitan.From their more exposed position, and because they were forced to confront the urban space more directly in their existential search for jobs and accommodation, immigrants had a very immediate contact with the urban space.As it was common for newcomers to the city to share apartments, the urban experience was often imbued with the sensation of living in a semi-private place.
The constant back and forth migration, from the city to the countryside or vice versa, led to a situation in which some family members lived in the city and others in the countryside, which, in turn, generated more mobilitylike in the case of Per-Olov and his mother.As families spread out, their acquaintances and extended families also participated in a commute, as people went to see -or (temporarily) live with -their relatives.Commuting between cities and the countryside has characterised urban centres since early modern times.However, commuting intensified with the establishment of the railway, which occurred in southwestern Sweden at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century.Ingeborg was born in 1900 and grew up in the countryside.She remembers travelling to Gothenburg by train together with her grandmother who had relatives in the city.Her grandmother also had business in Gothenburg, selling fir branches to a florist's shop.Mainly, however, the elderly woman and her granddaughter navigated the city using their family network for support: they visited the grandmother's brother, went to the city museum with him and his extended family, and then took the tram to visit another aunt.This aunt, also an immigrant, owned and ran a popular café-restaurant in Järntorget (no 5 on Map 1), the central square of the workers' and seafarers' district.When her grandmother returned home, Ingeborg stayed a bit longer at her aunt's place and observed the urban life in Järntorget, composed of business and pleasure activities. 55Since she was staying close to the public tavern in Järntorget, which was run by her aunt, it probably felt safe and a little bit like home for Ingeborg -though not entirely.
Arriving in the city even as a frequent visitor usually implied an intense confrontation with the urban world, including experiences of femininity which had to be accommodated with imaginations of male dominance in the harbour.Svante B., who grew up close to Lake Vänern, in the village of Skara during the early 1900s, remembers frequently taking the train to Gothenburg for pleasure as a young man.He recalls being very impressed by a group of female workers who were chatting while packing herring into boxes on board a ship.Svante mocks the 'strong true Gothenburg women' by jokingly using masculine terms and emphasising the women's coarse and loud way of speaking. 56He mentions the episode early on in his memoirs because it deviated so clearly from both his pre-conception of the (male) harbour and of femininity.That a frequent visitor to Gothenburg paid such attention to the women working in the harbour is striking.It attests to the fact that (working) women were not part of the imagination of an early-twentiethcentury port city space.It is also worth noting that the female urban traveller was not given proper consideration by the city authorities: in 1915, when formulating plans for a renewal of public toilets (after a petitioner had claimed that the urinals disturbed the squares' aesthetic appearance), only one proposal, which was not realised, included a rendering of toilets for women. 57egardless, none of the women who travelled to or through the city remembers being 'not at her place' while using public transportation.Rather, even very young women who travelled relatively frequently to the city from the countryside, like Ingeborg, remember their travels as exciting and inspiring.Edit recalls that when her cousins from the countryside came to visit her in Gothenburg during the 1910s, one of their favourite activities was to take the tram to see the city. 58Women from the island Hisingen (no 6 on Map 1), located across the river Göta-Älv, felt secure when taking the tramway into the city centre.Lillemor's mother held her little daughter by the hand when accompanying her to central Vasastaden for her first day of school. 59Fru Larsson, telling us about her mother's work as a maid in latenineteenth-century-Gothenburg, notes that her mother had not been allowed to take the horse-tramway.The reader understands that Fru Larsson herself took the tramway when she was young in the early twentieth century. 60As did Ingrid, who grew up in a widows' home in the 1930s and used the money she earned as a springflicka (run-girls, whom we will hear more about in the next section) to travel through the city. 61Women who came from the surrounding countryside remember themselves or their mothers being at ease in the public space, especially while using urban transportation.Yet, we do not know whether this also holds true for women who migrated to the city from further away or even from abroad.
While short-distance and temporary migration was the most common form of mobility, women also migrated to Gothenburg from further away.Taimi's mother was born in Finland and moved to Sweden during the Finnish Civil War in 1918.Taimi's father, a manual worker, came from Norway and was unemployed throughout the 1930s, meaning that his wife had to support the family by working from home as a seamstress.The family lived in a city-owned block of wooden houses called Tonfisken situated in the industrial eastern part of Gothenburg Gamlestaden (no 7 on Map 1).The Gothenburg municipality constructed Tonfisken in 1924 as a temporary so-called emergency accommodation to remedy the massive lack of affordable housing. 62Taimi remembers that Tonfisken, which according to her had initially been built to house the homeless, soon became home to many urban migrants, most of whom had arrived from the countryside and farther away, like her parents.The block was characterised by what she would describe decades later as 'cultural diversity'. 63ike Taimi, another woman who grew up in Tonfisken remembers the neighbourhood as a place for poor people that was located on the margins of urban society.She recalls that the block was under surveillance of a municipal poor-relief-employee called Bark who always wore the exact same clothes and never spoke a word to the residents. 64Both those who lived there and those who came from other urban worlds perceived Tonfisken as a place of otherness.Elsa K., the daughter of a military sergeant would sneak a furtive glance at the block from the corner of her eye when she went shopping in Gamlestaden, imagining that that was where 'all evil Gamlestaden-boys lived'. 65While perceived as a place of otherness, Tonfisken was also a space in-between different urban spaces, where the living and working worlds met.

Navigating the urban working world
'My father was a captain'; 66 'my father was a military sergeant'; 67 'my father was a sawmill worker': 68 women's and men's memories of their urban lives often start or centre around their father's profession.While their mothers' occupation is also mentioned at times, this occurs less often and seems not to have been significant to these peoples' lives.J. H., remembering his childhood at the very beginning of the twentieth century, simply recalls that his mother may 'at times have been away at work'. 69In Agne's account, his mother's profession and the role she played in his younger years are insignificant to the point that when his father became ill in 1931, he and his brother were forced to enter the workforce at the ages of fourteen and thirteen to support the family.We never find out their mother's occupation. 70Yet, it must have been her who, like many other women, primarily sustained the family during those years of hardship.
When people recount their memories, it is noteworthy that they fail to mention what their mothers worked as or with, even during the interwar years.During this time, many women entered the job market and strengthened their position, shaping a new urban agency in the context of the emerging industrial welfare city. 71As a port city whose economy relied on exports and international trade, Gothenburg was particularly exposed to the international economic crises that marked the first half of the twentieth century.Within the gendered job market, men's employment, which was shifting to the engineering sector, was significantly more volatile than women's, which was dominated by the diversifying public service sector. 72However, well into the twentieth century, many women continued to work in the home, as domestic servants or homemakers, living and working on the blurred boundary between public and private spaces, like Taimi's mother at Tonfisken.
While imagined as an accommodation Tonfisken, situated on the city's outskirts, was seen by its residents as a place where the boundaries between city, industry, and countryside, as well as between workplace and home, were fluid.Recalling her childhood at Tonfisken, one woman born in 1922 emphasises that the block's immediate neighbourhood was an undeveloped green field bordered by a wooded hill.Across from this meadow where usually a horse was grazing, stood, from 1905, Gothenburg's largest mechanical factory, the ball-bearing producer Svensk Kullagerfabriken (SKF).SKF-workers did not live at Tonfisken, but their frequent presence in the meadow where they used to rest, as the woman recalls, established a bond between the housing block residents and the prestigious industrial plant that Tonfisk-residents confidentially called 'Kulan'. 73To some extent, SKF's industry extended to the housing block.Taimi's mother, an immigrant from Finland who was the family's breadwinner, worked from home, making, as Taimi remembers, clothes for the SKF-workers.While her mother certainly did not manufacture clothing exclusively for SKF-workers, the spatial proximity of the factory provided not only work, but also a way for the Tonfisk-residents like Taimi and her mother to identify with SKF.
Rather than being confined to their homes, women who were responsible for taking care of homes and children occupied spaces in between public and private, too.J.H. remembers that his mother, along with other women and their children, would sit on the street in the industrial district Hultmans Holme (no 8 on Map 1) to do her handicraft while watching the children play. 74At the same time, an increasing number of women navigated the growing city during their professional occupations in the urban landscape and, despite the sector's decline beginning in the 1930s, many of them worked as domestic servants. 75omestic servants appropriated the urban grid by travelling the city when doing their shopping or other work-related tasks.Anna, who began working as a maid at the age of twelve in 1890, was first employed by a female tailor.She had to 'run around the city' as part of her job, buying accessories at many different shops.Later, she was employed by different families, and thanks to these regular changes of working-and living places, became accustomed to different urban neighbourhoods. 76omestic servants, who were usually from modest social backgrounds, had direct contact with the city's social structure and its contradictory worlds -which were particularly stark in port cities -, as they frequented families of the middling and upper social strata.Experiences of the material luxury and culture of the port city's trade-related high society could inspire in maids a positive perception of the urban world and their place within it.Anna was periodically employed by one of Gothenburg's wealthiest families.The Carlander family specialised in wholesale and industry, and Anna remembers them fondly.She describes the beautiful furniture of their eleven-room-apartment and mentions that the Carlanders' daughters often visited with King Oskar during his summer visits to the west coast. 77ometimes, the relationship between the domestic servant and her employer could entail tasks besides housekeeping, and these instances occupy an oversized presence in the women's memories due to their exceptional status.It was memorable for Anna that one of her female employers, an amateur artist, once asked her to pose naked as a model for the Valand Art School, a proposal that she vehemently rejected. 78In some cases, being employed as a maid by members of the upper classes could even result in an enduring relationship between people from very different social backgrounds.J.H. remembers that his father's sister had been employed for several years by the 'all-time funniest joker' Lady Lovén, the royal photographer's sister, who one day invited his family into her house on the fine Storgatan (no 9 on Map 1). 79oung women who were not working within domestic service also experienced the city via their professional occupations and some of them travelled the city even more.Nurses employed by the charity-organisation Fredrika Bremerförbund visited their patients at home.These women travelled an average of ten inner-city journeys per day and were granted, in 1920, a municipally-sponsored tram subscription. 80Yet, those who travelled the urban space most were the so-called springflickor (rungirls).Like boys of the lower social ranks who often, as a first employment, became springpojkar (run-boys) in the port district Nordstaden, 81 teenage girls and very young women often found work as springflickor. 82These couriers were employed by shops and navigated between clients and businesses, transporting commodities and products all over the city.They could also be privately employed, like Sonja who did the daily shopping for Miss Jacobsson, a shop-owner in the poor workers' district Landala (no 10 on Map 1).In her memories, Sonja looks back upon her time working as a runner as providing her a welcomed education in social skills that she says she lacked because of her very modest social background. 83Being a springflicka also meant that, even if one lived on the outskirts of Gothenburg in the city district Landala, a young person could become very competent with navigating the entire urban space.
Svea who was born in 1900 remembers that she refused to work as a springflicka, instead consulting an employment agency to help her find a job.Eventually, she found work as a maid.Her mother later handed in Svea's resignation on her behalf after four months of excessively hard work without a single day off. 84Springflickor and springpojkar were well aware of the low social status of their job.Yet, while this occupation was considered as very little worth, and very precarious indeed, springflickor like maids travelled and mastered the city.They used trams on a daily basis for job-related purposes, to the point that Ingrid's mother believed that her daughter's job was wearing out her shoes too much. 85pringflickor became true experts of the city and competent urban actors who operated in the urban space.Whereas errand boys seem to have been mostly running through the port district Nordstaden catering to the port business, girls' running jobs tended to extend beyond the port industry, encompassing the entire city.
While women were strengthening their agency in the urban working world, working in the urban space still meant that one was exposed to the gaze of society, which was imbued with categories of decency with respect to female occupations. 86Next to alcohol-consuming male workers, paternalistic urban reformers were particularly preoccupied with young, especially immigrant, women and the alleged dangers they were exposed to in the growing city. 87These social categories, in turn, marked women's own self-perception as workers.Svea, who started her working life at the age of fourteen but refused to become a springflicka, worked as a maid, a difficult job.She was hired because her employer, a midwife, considered her well-educated and did not see Svea as a 'factory girl' the likes of which she did not want in her home. 88The social status of 'factory girls' could be compared to the often mentioned 'lätsinniga kvinnor' ('careless women').A man born in 1875 recalls that these women frequented the working and seafaring districts of Masthugget (no 3 on Map 1) and Majorna (no 11 on Map 1). 89Like 'careless women', the notion of 'factory girls' was underpinned by the idea of sexual accessibility.John remembers that female workers at the cigar factory had a reputation for being 'frivolous women', not least because they smoked in public, a practice considered to be deviant around 1900.However, as the century progressed, this practice would no longer be cause for concern. 90Despite their self-assuredness and ability to manage urban spaces, women's presence in the city, be it for professional or other reasons, would continue to be imbued with a notion of being exposed -to gazes as well as dangers.Women's attributed responsibility to creating a secure home, for themselves, their families, and for people they took care of would become closely connected to this notion of exposure.

Constructing homes and moving houses
Female agency in the urban space can be described in terms of the sexual dangers that women were exposed to, experiences that often made their way into people's memories from their urban lives. 91In her memories, a woman who grew up at Tonfisken in the 1920s, recalls that residents believed there was a 'mystical man' hiding on the bushy hills around the housing block -but no one had ever seen him. 92Elsa K'.s elder sisters, who were seventeen and eighteen, complained loudly about 'how terrible it was to go home via the port district Nordstaden (no 1 on Map 1) in the evening'. 93While the sexual dangers are more or less implicit in these accounts, they become very explicit in Ch.A's memories.Ch. A. tells the story of his (I assume) mother who, along with many women fell victim to attempted rape.According to Ch. A., a man attacked women in the public park Krokäng (no 12 on Map 1) on the island of Hisingen over a ten-yearperiod from 1915 to 1925.The rapist intimidated women during the day on their regular journeys to the parish office.Ch.A'.s mother was a midwife, and she later recognised the man who had attacked her at a birthing mother's house though she never reported him to the police. 94 search of the OCR-scanned Gothenburg daily press from 1900 to 1930 gives no reference to the Krokäng-rapist that Ch. A. remembers having terrorised the women of Hisingen, so we do not know whether he really existed.However, the newspaper-search fails to provide any significant hits on the theme 'rape' at all, whereas a search for the mention of 'prostitution' results in numerous hits.In fact, public discourse generally framed the sexual dangers that women were exposed to in the urban space in terms of their risk of being lured into prostitution -rather than falling victim to rape.95 Public censorship as evidenced by the local press, in this case, emphasised the immoral conduct of women while the conduct of men was reported neither by the press for public readership, nor by the victims to the authorities.
In the context of a generalised scepticism of the urban phenomenon, which was rooted in the late-nineteenth-century's rapid urban growth and extended well into the interwar years, the 'fallen woman' was a trope that was emblematic of the alleged urban degeneration. 96This narrative of urban degeneration could lead to moral panic, especially regarding prostitution. 97Against this backdrop and in the context of welfarism becoming a major idea within urban politics, municipal authorities, church-and secular charity organisations and private companies created institutions aimed at caring for women perceived as 'fallen' and housing and educating women who were deemed fragile.The municipality founded its own institutions like a home for widows and single elderly women, established in 1930. 98The city sponsored a number of private initiatives, some of which focused on special groups, such as 'morally depraved women' or job-seeking women, and some of which welcomed all women into their 'homes'. 99While they had slightly different purposes, some of them were of a more (moral) educational character than others, the institutions all endeavoured to provide a 'home' to women who were seen as ill-equipped to creating or sustaining their own homes.This was a way to protect them from the impositions and vices that the urban public space allegedly encompassed.
The 'home'-institutions hovered between public and private spheres, and entailed a relatively high degree of social control.This social control mainly concerned the women who lived there, but female employees who worked and lived in these facilities were also subject to it.Although she does not recall how her 31-year-old mother secured a spot there, Ingrid remembers the widows' home where she grew up with her four siblings.The 'home' for young widows was not a care-taking institution; Ingrid's mother was responsible for paying an inexpensive rent and for the children's day-care, which allowed her to work during the day.The widows' home was a semi-public space: Ingrid remembers that the building was comprised of flats for the director, for the nurse, the caretaker, and his family, and for the cook, who was the caretaker's sister.She also recalls that a nursery was in the same building, that a bell rang in the morning as the milk soup was ready, and that no male visitor was allowed in the one-room-apartment after eight o'clock in the evening.In this 'home' where the boundaries between public and private spaces were hazy, both fluid and controlled, Ingrid remembers her mother being 'nervous' as her brothers were visiting her one evening. 100onetheless, it should be stressed that homemaking played a crucial role for most female urban actors, which can hardly be overestimated, especially in the context of the extremely difficult housing market of early-twentiethcentury Gothenburg. 101Similar to other industrial cities, overcrowded houses were a major social problem with two-room-apartments frequently being occupied by more than one family, which created domestic spaces that lacked privacy.Beginning in the 1910s, in particular, as immigration to the city accelerated, 102 housing was in short supply and rental prices rose steeply, to the point that the municipality constructed provisional houses for poorer people, like Tonfisken. 103In such an environment, even people with middling incomes like Elsa K.'s father who was a military sergeant, frequently moved houses within the city; 104 not only landlords and landladies, but also moving companies advertised housing notices in the daily newspapers.Artur remembers his family's move from the island of Donsö, located in the nearby archipelago, to the centre of Gothenburg in 1901.All their belongings, which he recalls were not so many, were loaded on their fishing boat, which they rode right into the centre of the city.Artur's memory of Gothenburg is centred around his parents.For two years, they tried to find safe and decent housing, to no avail.
The family first moved into a one-room-apartment and then moved to a two-room-apartment later that same year; due to high rent, the family moved into a one-room-apartment again the following year.When they arrived with their belongings, the apartment they were to rent was already occupied.The landlord offered them an alternative place, but when they arrived late in the evening, they discovered that the apartment was humid, cold and infested by vermin, in fact, 'uninhabitable'. 105Yet, the family lived there for several months until, in 1903, they moved to the neighbouring municipality, Mölndal, where Artur was still living in 1971. 106Artur recalls that his parents chose which apartments they were to rent together -and did the same when it was time to leavewith the help of a magazine called Hyresblad that listed all available accommodation.However, Artur also mentions that his father used to drink a lot, so his mother may have shouldered more of the actual responsibility of moving.She eventually gave up with trying to make a home in the harsh conditions of Gothenburg's housing market.
Artur's mother never escaped the lack of privacy caused by the constant search for accommodation.Many women experienced a lack of privacy in their own homes as an infringement of their dignity.A recurring example for the violent transgression of privacy and indignity women could experience is the drinking and violence of a husband or partner, which was seen more in port cities because of the presence of a heavy drinking culture. 107tories of husbands or fathers who spent the badly-needed money on alcohol abound in women's memories about their urban lives. 108 former police officer remembers that he once received a call from a woman whose husband mistreated her.He went into their house, crossing the boundary of a private home, to calm down the man, and then, he claims, everything was fine. 109We do not hear the woman's memory of this episode, but can assume that she would not have played it down as the policeman did in his recollection.We can assume that it must have been a traumatic experience to have a police officer come into their home in an attempt to protect the woman from her own husband, not least because it constituted a brutal transgression of boundaries between public and private, boundaries that she was unable to control.
Arguably, controlling the home was an important means for women to strengthen their urban agency, which holds particularly true for port cities.These maritime places shared a legacy of hosting communities of relatively independent women who were married to sailors.They were, and conceived of themselves as, heads of households while their husbands were at sea, and to some extent even when they were at home. 110What concerns seafarers' wives in general holds even more true in the case of a well-born captain's wife like Per's mother.She was the daughter of a German manufacturer and passed her Catholic religion on to her only son who was born in 1901.While her husband was at sea, she 'ran' their home on the elegant Linnégatan (no 6 on Map 1) and allowed her son a great deal of freedom, as Per recalls. 111In the port city characterised by high mobility, creating a home was a recurring task because of the difficult housing situation.At the same time, homemaking in the harbour city offered women more freedom and authority than they would have had in other inland cities.In any case, many women remember their urban experience as closely connected to the making of a home.And, as the different initiatives of 'homes' for women in special situations demonstrate, urban society strongly associated women's place in the city with a decent 'home'.
Women who did not have a regular home or were mostly present in and therefore associated with other urban places situated in between public and private, were looked upon as 'others'.In their memories, people refer to women who 'belonged' to certain urban places as 'female misfits' who, allegedly, aroused public attention. 112Many of the female figures were envisioned as being either deviant in their behaviour, aweinspiring, or even supernatural.The often ill-regarded landlady who exerted harsh control over her housing block is a recurring figure of this kind. 113J. H. and Matilda remember 'Kungsbackagumman' ('the little old lady from Kungsbacka', a small town south of Gothenburg), who was 'well-known' for having supernatural healing skills. 114Spå-Eva who lived and worked on Postgatan (no 14 on Map 1), the central street in the port's entertainment district, is mentioned in several memories for her supernatural skills and for being feared by many urbanites. 115Fru B. who migrated to Gothenburg in the late nineteenth century, remembers Spå-Eva who was able to predict the future by reading cards and coffee grounds. 116Other women who lived in ways exposed to the urban public, may either have been distrusted, like 'smör-Eva' ('butter Eva') who owned a house on her own, 117 or looked upon with pity, like the begging 'misfit' Olska 'who had nowhere to live and no one to live with'. 118he othering of women who had a peculiar presence in the urban space could also apply to women who were identified with their jobs in a degrading manner by using the term 'tant' (auntie): 'parktanterna' ('old dears in the park') who took care of children in the park after school, 119 or 'mjölktanten' ('milk auntie') who lived in the school building and gave the children milk during their breaks. 120All these women were operating in between public and private urban spaces, sometimes visible to those walking by, and other times not.This in-betweenness, the fact that they did not cultivate a 'regular home' was part and parcel of their perceived otherness.For some women their presence in-between public and private spaces may have had emancipating effects, while it brought along experiences of profound insecurity for others.

Conclusion
The source material provides us with short glimpses and possibly transfigured memories of past lived experiences which should be interpreted with caution.With this in mind, the three patterns deduced from the memories, migration experiences, the working world, and the shaping of a home, give some insight into the -in fact much more manifold -ways in which women's practices, many of which were related to some form of mobility, shaped the urban space.To a certain extent, the three patterns emerge because of the choice of thematic filters when searching the memory material.Another social activity that was also firmly anchored in the city space and rich with female agency, yet withheld here, is leisure and pleasure activities.As they allude to in memories, some women may have used urban pleasurescapes to escape their daily urban life and to further strengthen their urban agency -which they were shaping decisively through their mobility, different professional-and homemaking activities.However, while mindful of the bias and parts left out which are inherent to this article's approach, a sense of vulnerability to the female urban actor can be deduced.This vulnerability is hard to pin down but has to do with the very frequent and difficult positioning of women in the blurred borderland between public and private urban spaces.This in-betweenness, though never verbalised in the memories, likely constitutes the most important pattern of female urban agency as well as a crucial feature of early-twentieth-century urban change, which is still underestimated.