Eyes on the Street

by Robert Kanigel

  Friedan, Carson, and Jacobs had something else in common, of course, which is that they were women. However much or little their books might be judged expressions of “women’s thinking,” or “women’s sensibilities,” they surely reflected women’s experience. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the three of them came up, that normally meant working lives not so tied to professional discipline or traditional career arc as men’s were; more often bound to steno pad and typewriter, or to the bearing and care of children; and routinely undercut by the sort of crude sexist barbs Lewis Mumford aimed at Jane in “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies.” (“Mr. Mumford,” Jane got back at him in her Mumford Lecture at City College, “seemed to think of women as a ladies’ auxiliary of the human race.”)

  Even as recently as 2011, critics who should have known better were still calling Jane a housewife. Veronica Horwell, writing in The Guardian, pictured her as pushing a baby carriage after she married Bob. Sir Peter Hall termed her “a middle-class housewife who found her voice.” Well, Jane was never a housewife, not if by that we mean someone who sees her primary role as at home, who is “just” a housewife. Jane was a good wife, and tended the house as best she could, which wasn’t all that great, turning to paid outside help when she could. Aside from brief maternity leaves, she always worked, viewed the great world of ideas and action, of politics, buildings, and books as her natural and settled domain.

  Jane sometimes wound up in the most unlikely places. Here she dances with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Willa Cather, in a mural by Edward Sorel installed at the Waverly Inn, a restaurant in Greenwich Village. Credit 32

  Back in 1971 Jane read Man’s World, Women’s Place, an influential early feminist book by Elizabeth Janeway that took on myths of women’s weakness and women’s power, and had plenty to say about both. In a letter to Jason Epstein around the time her family was moving into the Albany Avenue house, she called it “the first book on the subject of women’s fix that has not just depressed and enraged me, but has enlightened me.” She appreciated Janeway’s ideas about why sex occupied the place it did in advertising and art. “Also a very nice treatment of that bugaboo about women fucking men into limbo if given the chance, and the best (because it is so true) put-down of penis envy.”

  In 1980, Jane shared a platform at Faneuil Hall in Boston with James Rouse, developer of the planned suburban community of Columbia, Maryland. At one point, Rouse invoked the famous dictum of Daniel Burnham, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” But “Jane brought down the house,” recalled somebody there that day, “when she quietly announced, ‘I’m not sure big plans ever did have the magic to stir women’s blood.’ ”

  In the 1990s, as Jane sat for an interview with a Canadian magazine, her interviewer referred to “man’s fundamental propensity to do harm.” Jane interrupted him: “I wish you wouldn’t just say ‘man’ all the time. This is a human thing and it applied to women as much as men.”

  “Believe me,” her interlocutor put in, “I know it applies to women. I use the word ‘man’ in the traditional inclusive way.”

  “Yes, and I don’t like it, because we get a distorted view of who has been doing all these things. Women have been doing them, too, and they’re just as important.” For Jane, women were always central to the working of the world; she liked to imagine the “market mamas” who tended market stalls and oversaw local trade across Africa as “bossy and self-confident, which is all to the good.”

  She didn’t assert herself as a feminist; she just was one. That she had started out as a stenographer, right there with teacher and nurse as a stereotypically woman’s occupation, is immaterial. So is it that for a time she applied a cosmetic cream, “leg paint,” in a shade darker than her natural skin, to mimic nylon stockings, which she despised; or that she whipped up cookies for Christmas; or shopped for her children’s clothes; or that she was this kind of mother or that. The fact is, she was an uncommonly strong and self-confident woman never afraid to air her views or exhibit her reliably superior intellect. Even had she never come to the attention of the world through Death and Life and her Village activism, had she remained “merely” an accomplished editor and mid-level publishing figure, that she was able to establish herself so securely among the Doug Haskells and Ed Bacons, the Lewis Mumfords and Chadbourne Gilpatrics, of This Man’s World of 1958 in itself ranks as an achievement.

  Toward the end of her life, in 2005, Jane wrote,

  Like other women who are neither dolts nor masochists I have always recognized that sociology is based on a tissue of outright lies about the inferiority of women (and others who are not men of Western European descent) and the natural superiority of men. I have not made this an overt cause, but have simply acted as if it is not true, trusting that falsity destroys itself eventually.

  —

  Another way to view Jane Jacobs, unlikely though it might seem, is as gentleman amateur. Think, say, of the Victorian-era English aristocrat of our imagination who, wealth and station liberating his enthusiasms, pursues at leisure his interests in science, literature, or statecraft, holding idiosyncratic views he needs little encouragement to express. Jane might seem to share nothing with him. She was not a man, much less a gentleman. She was never rich. For much of her life, she enjoyed nothing remotely like leisure. Besides, as a writer she was no amateur at all, but a thoroughgoing professional, her family dependent in part on her earnings.

  And yet, she acted in something like this tradition: She read what she liked, in every corner of human knowledge, without letup, as deeply as she wished, as if she had all the time and money in the world. She indulged an astonishingly wide range of interests that she made her own. She fretted that she worked too slowly, that her books took too long to write; but in the end, she gave herself the time she needed or wanted, as if she were a Darwin, that other gentleman amateur, who took twenty years to shepherd On the Origin of Species into print. And when it came time to say what she thought, Jane likewise partook of this tradition. Her writing was never in debt to some governing discipline; astonishingly often, it read as unapologetic, forthright, and fresh. Unblinkered by assumptions and constraints borne of four years at Harvard or a doctorate from Stanford, she felt free to ignore the professionals and academics in urban planning, economics, and philosophy, hewing only to her own ideas. In Death and Life she launched an “attack on current city planning and rebuilding”; even city parks, oases of green seemingly beyond criticism, could not escape Jane’s plain talk. In Economy of Cities, she claimed, counter to almost everyone else, that cities preceded agriculture. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, she debunked two hundred years of received economic thinking.

  The English geographer Peter J. Taylor has called Jane “an amateur in the professional’s den.” As we’ve seen, this often got her into trouble. After all, “unapologetic, forthright and fresh” can be cranky, uninformed, and wrong, as Jane sometimes seemed to her critics. Her disdain for high-handed nostrums, at times for whole professions, like sociology and planning, could seem simplistic. She could sometimes seem a little too eager to write off conventional scholarship or professional practice as worthless or worse. In some degree, she was still the outlaw she was back in Scranton, speaking a little “too” honestly, heedless of the tender feelings of her listeners. Ready to measure all things by her own moral and intellectual compass, she could seem antisocial, or out of touch, or as just not giving a damn. “Ever since I was a little kid,” Jane once told her niece Lucia Jacobs, “I didn’t worry about being thought a fool.”

  But in the end, Jane stands as icon of unfettered, incorruptible intelligence. Formally uneducated, virtually any field she stepped into would have at first seemed unfamiliar and alien to her. Yet by the time she was through with it, it was as if she had rediscovered the world, seen it fresh and for the first time, the dark side of the moon cast in new light. “She is a revolutionary writer in the full sense of the word,” Peter Taylor once said of her. “She does
not enter a field of study to revise or reform it; she turns it upside down”; by his count, she had done that at least three times. “When reading her books I always have a most unprofessional thought lurking at the back of my mind: ‘Sock it to ’em, Jane!’ ”

  —

  If in some ways “revolutionary,” Jane Jacobs was in others surprisingly old-fashioned, even conservative. For all her antiwar, anti-Establishment 1960s credentials, political conservatives and libertarians often embraced her; Death and Life was hailed by the conservative critic William F. Buckley Jr. and listed as one of a hundred favored books by the Conservative Book Club. Her words, as Alex Mazer summed them up after her death, “were more about restoration than revolution.” She admired innovators and entrepreneurs. Many saw in her economic thought strains of the “Austrian” school of free-market economics. Not herself religious, she took her children to church because, as we’ve heard her say, it gave her “the satisfying, in fact inspiring feeling that I was a link in a long, sinewy, living human tradition of being.” Long making her home in a Greenwich Village notorious for one or another breed of naughtiness, she seems to have abstained from most of them. Jane herself embodied the Victorian virtues. She worked hard; she finished what she started. When she berated her opponents in the Village or Toronto, it was often because they’d failed, in her opinion, to live up to entirely conventional precepts of honesty, fairness, and good common sense. “She had the moral authority of an Old Testament prophet,” David Crombie once said of her.

  A charge sometimes laid against her was that, middle-class to her toes, she didn’t acutely feel the weight of injustice that bore down on so many. “She was blind to issues of class and race,” says Herbert Gans. Jane did have populist leanings. She mistrusted the airy pronouncements of the powerful. “If planning is good for human beings,” she said in 1962, “it shouldn’t keep hurting them in the concrete and helping them in the abstract.” She felt wisdom flowed up as often as down, from the many as reliably as from the few. She understood that many people didn’t get a fair deal. She asserted true, right, and good things: “Any child is more important than any idea.” She was good, thoroughly decent. Bigness riled her. So did brute authority, stupidly exerted by the world’s bullies and simpletons. Still, her empathy for the unlucky and oppressed was probably not as urgent as it is among some; she’d been too lucky, too favored by fortune and circumstances.

  Once, Ned Jacobs reports, while in a public hospital to give birth Jane listened to one story after another of hopelessness and pain, money problems and spousal abuse, from women she might not otherwise have met. She lamented, “I couldn’t have survived those things. They would have destroyed me.” And maybe she was right. She had her share of disappointments and frustrations, certainly. But the kinds of trauma, tragedy, and defeat that destroy the soul? No. It wasn’t as if Jane had been coddled, but she’d made it through without suffering life’s most ruinous calamities.

  “Really, I’ve had a very easy life,” she said. “By ‘easy’ I don’t mean just lying around, but I haven’t been put upon, really. And it’s been luck mostly.” This was no pat remark; she seems to have given it plenty of thought. “Being brought up in a time when women weren’t put down, that’s luck. Being in a family where I wasn’t put down, that’s luck. Finding the right man to marry, that’s the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children, that’s luck.

  “All these lucky things.”

  Jane’s family in America went back at least to the mid-eighteenth century; Sabilla Bodine, the pseudonym Jane adopted for her collection of youthful verses, was a real person who lived four generations before Jane’s mother (who, into her eighties, belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution). Jane herself made no fetish of such genealogical links. But in the early 1950s, responding to McCarthy-era probers of her patriotism, she did write freely of forebears who’d belonged to unpopular political parties, fought in America’s wars, suffered in enemy prisons, or through their backbone and industry otherwise helped make the country what it became. Though not preoccupied with her own past, she was proud of her links to the American past, and especially to the deep past of our culture and civilization. To know what Jane really stood for, we’d best turn off the scratchy old LP that squawks of cities and sidewalks and think instead of civilization at its best and most precious.

  In his introduction to its Modern Library edition, Jason Epstein said of Death and Life that it “and especially her subsequent books are…about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them.” Jane’s final published book, Dark Age Ahead, confronted the subject explicitly. We all know of the “original” dark age that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, she says in its first chapter; this was one instance of what she feared, but only one. “In North America,” for example, “we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal culture,” she begins a sad litany. And “whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the splendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago?” All lost. “How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?” Now we were threatened by similarly destructive forces. Her purpose in writing, she tells us, is

  to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning, culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears.

  Jane identified five pillars of culture she saw as “dangerously close to the brink of lost memory and cultural uselessness”: family and community “rigged to fail”; higher education corrupted by its emphasis on credentials, not real learning; science and technology rendered impotent; government out of touch with its citizens; and the learned professions failing to police themselves. Pretty grim, and easy to satirize: here’s your street-corner purveyor of doom and gloom, wailing that the end is near. Then, too, Dark Age Ahead veered toward the generalities Jane had once decried, got caught up in intellectual hobby horses Jane had already ridden to exhaustion. One critic, Bruce Fisher, briskly summed it up as “not the book for which we should remember Jane Jacobs.”

  Still, as Jane made clear right off, her book expressed hope, too, in that she thought threatened cultures could be “rescued.” And that was what her book set out to help do, its source of urgency. Even in some bleak ruined future, she told The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, people would one day want to know “how these ruins were made….It sounds very conceited to say it, but I hope that what I wrote will help people start back.”

  Jane realized that modern civilization at its sunniest and best had smiled on her. She enjoyed a long, full life, earned a goodly share of the world’s plaudits. Within herself she reconciled seemingly opposing tenets of rebel and outlaw on the one hand, and pillar of society, guardian of civilization, on the other. She believed, says son Ned, “that civilization was a remarkable phenomenon,” and that people had responsibilities to preserve it, “that we’re here to work really hard to not slip back into a dark age.” She wasn’t a spiritual person in the conventional sense. And yet, he says, “certainly she had a sense of awe.” For the great pine forests of New Hampshire, yes, but for all of human creation, too. “What a waste,” Ned conjures up her spirit, to see it disappear.

  “Jacobs began by writing about sidewalks,” observed Alex Mazer in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, “and finished with an account of Western civilization itself.” But actually, kindred themes run all through Jane’s books. Try making a list of them, categorizing each by subject—like CITIES, or ECONOMICS, or DIDACTIC DIALOGUES, or MORALS. I did this, listing Jane’s books and assigning each to every category it fit. At first my little exercise seemed silly and sterile—until, in one startling moment of illumination, it wasn’t: for one of my categories I hadn’t even a name at first, just a vague sense of prosperity, growth, and the se
cure, steady tick of hearty, healthy CIVILIZATION. But when I went through each of Jane’s books in turn, beginning with Constitutional Chaff and all the way down to Dark Age Ahead, and then, for good measure, the two books she never finished, each of them (whatever the other categories it might also fit) snugly fit this one as well: each, in substantial measure, was about what civilization needed to survive and prosper, what a culture needed to be vigorous, what human society needed in order to thrive. Jane’s great-aunt Hannah’s tale of Alaska was an adventure story, yes—but also the story of a middle-aged woman trying to bring the light of civilization, as she saw it, to a part of the world that needed more of it. Jane’s account of Quebec set against English-speaking Canada came down to how two national identities could resolve their tensions in a sane and civilized way. Even little Peanutina could seem to epitomize civilization, one species of it, anyway, at its industrious best. In her books, Jane was standard-bearer for those healthy, constructive forces that keep the whole untidy mess of humankind from sinking into chaos and ignorance. With enough close looking and clear thinking, she was convinced, the world could be made a better place. At the end of Systems of Survival, Armbruster hauls out another bottle of champagne, pops the cork, fills the glasses of his friends, raises his own, and offers a toast: “To civilization!”

  Dark Age Ahead was deeply personal for her. While civilization and its shaky pillars can seem a “big” subject, it turns repeatedly to the small, to events in Jane’s own life. It takes us back to her first jobs in Manhattan; to her father’s struggles during the Depression; to Higgins, the little town in that bypassed Appalachian pocket whose handful of residents had forgotten much their forebears once had known.