The flâneur

 "The flâneur is the eternal observer of the modern city, the detached, possibly bohemian (and therefore nobly indifferent to both the lower and middle classes) consumer of the spectacle of the delightful, everchanging, dangerous, teeming city (...) the Baudelairean flâneur is in confident possession of the male gaze, not to mention the male body. In XIX century cities, women were not as free to wander the streets. Their susceptibility to the gaze was a regular indication of their limited freedoms in comparison to men. 

The Paris in Baudelaire's thrall was the Paris that evolved as a result of the vast redevelopment at the hands of Napoleon III's minister of public works, Baron Hausmann, who (...) installed the large, sweeping boulevards for which Paris is now known. With this the concept of public space was born, and with it a new visibility. Such spaces opened up new zones of sociability where, en masse, people were able to indulge their joy of seeing, (...) The expanded parametres and status of roving, free (male) seeing is a chief characteristic of modernity and was integral to the birth of Impressionism, where, if one looks closely, it delineates between private and public space, the interior and the panorama. (...) (in women artists Pollock observes) a difference in the subject matter, the deportment of the figures and the spaces they occupy, prompting the question as to whether there really is a female vision. (...) concentrate a large part of their output on women, girls and children, particularly the mother-child relanshionship. (...)the strictures enforced on the middle-class female are mirrored in pictorial spaces which are in many respects enclosed, whether through tight compositions, the deportment of the female figures themselves, or through priveliging the domestic interior. (...) By contrast, in paintings by men there is a greater oscillation between inside and outside space, with emphasis on the latter. A Pollock notes, the everyday gendering of space- women inside, men outside- affected pictorial representation. "

- Adam Geczy, 2008,  ART, Histories, Theories and Exceptions