Spoken To

1915
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Spoken To
B-

On the one hand, I applaud Lucille "Luke" Wright's bravado in going out in public alone, even as late as ten o'clock, despite warnings that she may be "spoken to."  On the other, it brings up all sorts of memories of times that men have yelled out rude things to me, and not "Hey, Baby!" but really crude, sometimes menacing things.  Once I didn't reply to a homeless man, so he called me a whore.  Sometimes I'll ignore it, sometimes I'll even yell things back, but there is always that fear, even after a lifetime as a pedestrian, that someday one of those men is going to attack me violently, that that group of young jerks yelling things out of a car as they pass are going to come back.  The worst that happens to Luke is in Paris she gets whispered to by the same cad who propositioned her aunt twenty years ago, and she puts him in his place with a smile.  She doesn't even get pinched like Claudine.

I remember Woody Allen, of all people, talking about how women who'd been young in New York City before World War II used to go out at night unescorted.  I think there was a time, of which this short story was probably at the beginning, when women were starting to exercise their freedom, even if just to go to lectures and the library, before fear of crime took some of that freedom away.  I've often gone out by myself at night, including in London, but I've never been as blithe about it as Luke.  So I think this is as dated in its very progressivism as Herland.