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「The historical feminine rough equivalent of the flâneur, the passante (French for 'walker', 'passer-by'), appears in particular in the work of Marcel Proust. He portrayed several of his female characters as elusive, passing figures, who tended to ignore his obsessive (and at times possessive) view of them. Increasing freedoms and social innovations such as industrialization later allowed the passante to become an active participant in the 19th century metropolis, as women's social roles expanded away from the domestic and the private, into the public and urban spheres.

Twenty-first century literary criticism and gender studies scholarship has also proposed flâneuse for the female equivalent of the flâneur, with some additional feminist re-analysis.[10][11][12]

In less academic contexts, such as newspaper book reviews, the grammatically masculine flâneur is also applied to women (including modern ones) in essentially the same senses as for the original male referents, at least in English-language borrowings of the term.」