The ‘Women of New York’: A Fashionable Moral Geography

The landscape of mid-19–century New York City was marked by pockets of consumer and leisure spaces. I argue that many of the fears and anxieties generated by this visual efflorescence of consumption focused on what became a socially constructed ‘type’: the New York Woman. The association of moral outrage at the dangers of consumption with spaces inhabited by the New York Woman created what I have called a fashionable moral geography. I suggest that this moral coding of the 19th-century city reverberates in contemporary discussion of late 20th-century cities.