ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at walking as an eighteenth-century elite activity and discusses the ways in which health played a role in women’s walking in England. A particularly English pastime, walking played an important role in social lives and guaranteed a suitable amount of daily exercise for anyone interested in a healthy life. ‘Yesterday was a busy day with me, or at least with my feet & my stockings’, wrote Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra Austen on a Sunday in April 1805, perfectly describing a great part of the upper-class elite’s London activities. Walking gave women and men alike the means to contest urban space: gendered, but also class-related, tensions were played out in this space.
Walking emphasized women’s relationship to their environment. This chapter argues not only that eighteenth-century walkers gave different meanings to urban and country walks, but also, especially, that these differences were intriguingly gendered. By comparing walking in the country to urban walks, the meanings of urban geographies and gender mixed in a fascinating way: women wandered and strolled in urban space for a myriad of reasons, and in places where they hardly were expected to be seen.
