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N 1944, novelist Ernest Hemingway sent this telegram to Martha Gellhorn: “ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR WIFE IN MY BED?” His crotchety pith captures the nub of the argument in Lauren Elkin’s memoir-infused account of women’s attempts to gain the same rights to wander untroubled and unnoticed through cities that male flâneurs have always possessed.

The French term flâneur — from the verb Flâner, to wander — was first used in 1585, and entered common usage in the early 19th century to mean well-off men who like to stroll in the city. Since French is gendered, the term was only applied to men. Paris-based American feminist Elkin uses women artists’ experiences from the early 19th century onwards, including her own, to develop her idea (the opening chapter is an excellent essay in its own right, so if short of time, just read that).

Elkin complains that, historically, strolling women have not been as easily invisible as men, but are watched, followed, approached, commented on (she might have added that old women are generally invisible). “We would love to be invisible the way a man is… But if we’re so conspicuous, why have we been written out of the history of cities? It is up to us to paint ourselves back into the picture.” She cites the curious fact that in Edinburgh there are twice as many statues of dogs as of women.

Ford Madox Ford wrote in 1905 that walking is crucial to (male) artistic development; that a novelist must “pass unobserved in the city if he himself is to observe”. Says Elkin: “The great writers of the city… they are all men… you’ll also find them writing about each other’s work, creating a reified canon of masculine writerwalkers. As if a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.”

Her challenge given, the middle chapters offer absorbing accounts of women who bucked the trend. Selfconfessed “tramper” Virginia Woolf ‘s essays and novels documented the glass pavement that early 19th-century