8 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–
Gender, Space and Rurality
Amidst the wider spatial turn in cultural theory in recent years the relationship
between gender and space has been the particular focus of attention by a number
of feminist geographers whose work informs the basis of this collection. Femi-
nist geographers’ central concern has been to explore the ways in which cultural
ideologies of gender play a fundamental role in the production, organization
and experience of space. Binary meanings of gender are, as Linda McDow-
ell writes, ‘deeply implicated in the social production of space, in assumptions
about the “natural” and built environments and in the sets of regulations that
infl uence who should occupy which spaces and who should be excluded’.^29 Mas-
culinity is equated with the public spaces of institutional activity, knowledge
production and movement, whilst the feminine sphere is associated with the
private places of domesticity, primarily the home.^30 Th is is not to say that the
public/private binary upholds a sharp distinction between who can have access
to either space, but that the ways in which masculine spaces and feminine places
are inhabited, occupied and moved through diff ers for men and women accord-
ing to the socio-material gendering of those spaces. So too does this perspective
recognize that space–gender relations are not a simple ‘mapping’ of one context
onto another, but rather work as integrated, mutually constitutive processes: as
Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose write, ‘gendered spaces should be understood less
as a geography imposed by patriarchal structures, and more as a social process of
symbolic encoding and decoding that produces a series of “homologies between
spatial, symbolic, and social orders”’.^31 Neither gender nor space represent fi xed
categories of meaning, but rather are malleable constructs that shift in response
to one another: gendered performances operate diff erently depending on spatial
context, and spaces are shaped by the social interactions and gendered dialogues
that play out within them.
Within this wider understanding, geographers have further theorized the
ways in which rural spaces represent unique sites for interaction with gender
identities: as Jo Little writes, there is a ‘particular association between rurality
and gender identity that goes beyond the specifi city of individual places; that is,
there is a shared understanding within rural communities of gender identities’
such that ‘the expectations surrounding gender identities are implied in rural
areas in a way that is part of the social and cultural relations of the countryside’.^32
At the same time, rural spaces present challenges in how the particularities of
individual rural sites interact with a broader category of ‘the rural’, requiring an
awareness both of how gender identities are performed within diff erent rural
contexts and of how ‘a set of characteristics associated with the rural woman
and (arguably less so) the rural man’ extend across the broader category of ‘the
rural’.^33 So too does understanding that the uniqueness of rural environments