Good afternoon,

I hope that you and yours are okay. Today’s Fem Friday is about women and their relationships to cities; founding, theorising, and living in them. I also hope that you enjoy reading it.

Julia Tuttle was the only woman to have founded an American city, and that city was Miami, so pretty much a big deal. It sounds like this took a lot of determination but it all paid off in the end:

Julia DeForest Tuttle, the “Mother of Miami,” is widely recognized as the only female founder of a major American city. The visionary widow from Ohio bought hundreds of acres at what is now Downtown Miami, moved down on a barge, and eventually convinced railroad man Henry Flagler to extend his new railway to the Miami River.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/12/julia-tuttle-miami-mother-of-miami_n_3262488.html

Jane Jacobs didn’t found a city but she wrote a lot about them. If you have not read The Death And Life Of Great American Cities, the thing that I found the loveliest about it was how based around the home it was – everything that she wrote, really, was about the time after all of the men had left for work, and she was shopping and taking her children to the park. Here is her obituary from ten years ago:

Ms. Jacobs's enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs's prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism – in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/jane-jacobs-urban-activist-is-dead-at-89.html

Olivia Laing has written a whole book about being lonely in cities, and the people who have been lonely in cities in the past. Here is a review of what sounds like a wonderful book:

Recently heartbroken, Laing — approaching her mid-30s, “an age at which female aloneness . . . carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure” — takes up residence in a series of vacant apartments in New York, mostly on the Lower East Side. “What does it feel like to be lonely?” Laing asks. “It feels like being hungry.” And it looks like this: the author wandering the streets alone on Halloween, turning pages in silent archives, crying because she can’t get a set of blinds to close, sprawling on a sublet couch mesmerized by her computer screen. In her public isolation, she resembles, she says, the woman in Hopper’s “Automat.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/the-lonely-city-by-olivia-laing.html?_r=4

Alex.