"Parameters of the Public: Commercial and Legal Topographies of Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba" by Marikay McCabe

Marikay McCabe

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation is an investigation into the lives of ordinary women in Havana during the period of the city's urbanization (1834–1868) that reveals, among other things, the fluidity of women in space. This conclusion challenges the analytic division between “house” and “street” (coded respectively as feminine and masculine) that has been foregrounded by scholars of Latin American history. It is argued that the architectonic and social features of the city were suited to the tropical climate and contributed to a porousness between interior and exterior spaces that further undermined the notion of a spatially marked gendered division of labor. In general, this is a study of thresholds: of licit commercial activity, appropriate gender roles, and the limits of colonial sovereignty.

Chapter One, “Social and Spatial Topographies,” sketches the social and physical characteristics of the city's neighborhoods, attentive to areas inside and outside of the city wall. By the mid-nineteenth century, with more than half of the city's population in the extramural area, the wall was both an anachronistic yet meaningful icon. Official efforts to bring a uniform character to the city's neighborhoods were guided and foiled by the parameters of the wall. Exemplary was a 1850s plan to relocate houses of prostitution to an extramural district, while banning them from intramural neighborhoods. Ultimately this policy failed, but ironically after the wall's removal, other social and economic forces convened to sharpen the definition of neighborhoods. Chapter Two examines social anxieties regarding the changing character of work in the context of legal cases dealing with prostitution and vagrancy. It is argued that these two categories were gender-specific expressions of similar concerns regarding shifting understandings of legitimate work and poverty. Chapter Three, “Commercial Topographies,” further pursues the question of licit and illicit work with an examination of the general character of the city's commercial life, including the informal economy, ordinary occupations, and broader questions regarding changing notions of labor, property, and wealth.