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The gendered geographies of the New Woman and the Dublin tramcar: the ‘Jolly Flapper’ incident
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Date
2024
Authors
Linehan, Denis
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Publisher
Manchester University Press
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Abstract
At the turn of the 20th century, the tram system in Dublin became a key site for commentary on the values and behaviour of the New Woman. Following their introduction, trams became a new kind of urban space in Dublin, public but also intimate sites that brought men and women into new forms of proximity and intimacy, which required ongoing cultural negotiation and constant moral revision. While women were largely excluded from the production of railway space, their occupation of these new mobile territories - where they brought onboard a mixture of new and conventional roles- over time displaced patriarchal claims to public space. Tram systems were spaces of intense sociability and modernity in which the modern Irish woman became a spectacle in motion. In this chapter, I bring into conversation scholarship on the gendered histories of public transport, with new work in cultural studies that casts the relational and overlapping characteristics of infrastructure as social and political assemblages. Using this approach, I revisit the Dublin trams' social, spatial and gendered modalities after Irish Independence to interrogate their modernity. In all these cases, the disruptive capacity of New Women ensured the tram became a site where she was constantly located, criticised, and also identified as a symbol of resistance. The chapter offers a close reading of the 'Jolly Flapper' episode, a long series of letters published in The Evening Herald in the autumn of 1928. These exchanges drew a debate about the new claims women made to public space via their treatment on the trams, into a more comprehensive discussion. In this episode, the vitality and agency of New Women are revealed, overturning many of the established narratives about the cultural and social disenfranchisement of Irish women during this period and revising our understanding of the Irish Flapper.
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Keywords
Dublin , Tram , New Woman , Modern Irish woman , Resistance , Jolly Flapper , Evening Herald
Citation
Linehan, D. (2024) 'The gendered geographies of the New Woman and the Dublin tramcar: the ‘Jolly Flapper’ incident', in Hogan, E. (ed.) Locating the Irish Flapper. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
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© 2024, Denis Linehan.