The gendered user and the generic city: Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day by Day

Life in France at the mid-twentieth century was extremely patriarchal and oppressive towards women. It is against this context that Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) viewed cities as the sites of great personal liberation, where she had the potential to move freely and make unencumbered decisions about her life. Written during the gestation of The Second Sex, her book, America Day by Day [L’Amerique au jour le jour], a fictionalized account of two journeys taken through the United States in 1947..

On Margins: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration

“On Margins: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration,” builds on the following two premises: that the dynamic of a situated and re-situated perspective is foundational to feminist histories of architecture, and that feminist historiographical approaches destabilize presumptions of fixity that have propelled the writing of architectural histories. Through histories of architectures that emerged from individual or collective acts and experiences of migration, the texts in this collection investigate migration and confinement as drivers for modern architecture and its histories, focusing on works by professionally qualified women architects as well as uncredited makers of the built environment. These architectures of migration bring into view margins—whether architectural, structural, cultural, (geo)political, environmental, or economic. This themed section, as one intervention in the broader “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” collection sited in multiple journals, posits expanded historiographies that emerge from intersections of architecture, migration, and margins. These offer possibilities to restore absences and silences in the historical record and open onto new theorizations and perspectives situated around the world