Urban life on the move Gender and mobility in early modern Amsterdam

In spite of the urban Dutch Republic’s reputed early domesticity, both women and men in Amsterdam’s long eighteenth century were found on the move. This dissertation describes and analyses mobility regimes of both women and men in extensive detail to go beyond narratives of dichotomies between public/private spaces or spheres. Although previous accounts in which women’s lives were seen as taking place in private spheres while men’s lives took place in public spheres have been overthrown over the last decades, no replacement grand narrative of spatial arrangements has taken its place. This dissertation does not pose an alternative grand hypothesis to replace the public/private dichotomy either, but instead, describes and analyses street life and urban mobilities through highly complex everyday practices. Through a spatial database of notarial depositions drawn up for the chief officer of Amsterdam, the spatial practices of both women and men were traced throughout the city to get a more detailed sense of who accessed the historical street and how. There were gendered differences, where men would roam further than women, but more factors than only gender were important to reconstruct the ‘mobility regimes’ of early modern urban inhabitants. Gender, together with social class and materiality shape the way that different people accessed and experienced the street, such as in the form of elite access to coaches, a widely shared non-elite culture of everyday openness and transparency and the morphology of the street network itself.