| Sumario: | This article makes three interrelated arguments. First, it is possible for a working-class woman to walk in the city and experience the urban spectacle as a detached, even leisurely observer, and when she does, she may be engaging in an act of pleasure rather than an act of resistance. The concept of flânerie as described by Charles Baudelaire captures this pleasure particularly well. Second, this pleasure, however, has long been associated with the privileged male figure of the flâneur, which has contributed to a scholarly failure to acknowledge the significance of pleasure in working-women's lives. I therefore propose reconceptualizing flânerie from the occupation of "the flâneur" to a mode of pleasure that everyone has potential access to. The broader methodological point here is that some concepts that are currently gendered and classed merit redefining if this helps us see other subjects' experiences for the first time. These arguments will be made for a Western European setting, prompted by the literary memoir of Neel Doff (1858–1942). Third, while these pleasures are undeniably accessible to Doff's protagonist, they occupy a different position in her life than in Baudelaire's characters' lives. Doff's protagonist has to bend her work time into leisure time to attain it. Moreover, her social position makes her truly at home in Jewish and (sex) workers' street-oriented subcultures. While moving within those environments, therefore, she temporarily loses her faculty of detached observation. She is certainly able, but sometimes also forced, to flit in and out of her flâning pleasures.
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