Gender, Class, and Space

The social area analyses and factorial ecologies of the 1950s and 1960s have constrained the way in which scholars conceptualize urban space; in particular, one can trace contemporary arguments regarding the social reproduction of class to the notion of homogeneous neighborhoods that emerges from social area analyses and factorial ecology. It is argued that the growth in female labor-force participation, the fact of occupational sex segregation, and other recent demographic trends have important implications for the social geography of the North American city. With 1980 Census data from the Worcester, MA Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, the impact of the gender division of labor on urban social space is described; in particular it is shown that occupational segregation is an important source of intraneighborhood class heterogeneity. The final section of the paper is an exploration of the implications of the findings for theories of social reproduction and for class-based urban politics.