the temptress, the whore, the virtuous woman

Wilson in "Into the Labyrinth" talks about the historical view of women's presence in the city as a problem: "the city offers untrammelled sexual experience; in the city the forbidden - what is most feared and desired - becomes possible. Woman is present in cities as temptress, as whore as fallen woman, as lesbian, but also as virtuous womanhood in danger, as heroic womanhood who triumphs over temptation and tribulation...many writers clearly posed the presence of woman as a problem of order, partly because their presence symbolised the promise of sexual adventure...a general moral and political threat" (p.6). Many city planning efforts in the nineteenth century worked to all but exclude women and children from this "infernal urban space". It's interesting to me that a hundred years ago, as Wilson says, sexuality was a "source of threatening ambiguity and disorder in the city", yet now the city in many ways, to me at least, is the symbol of ambiguity, a place of order and chaos, a place where a person can be anything because of that ambiguity (at least much more so than in a suburb or a small town).

Are there still hold overs of this "women as a problem" in cities? Maybe today, the "problem" lies with other social groups - minorities, various economic classes, the LGBT community, the elderly, etc.?