The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The West End of Victorian London is normally understood as the center of the
world of work and of institutions of power, “the masculine domain of modern,
public, urban life” from which women were excluded. 1 But viewed in another
way, through the experience of the independent, middle-class women
who lived and worked there, this highly masculinized terrain can
be remapped as a site of women’s buildings and places within the urban center,
associated with the social networks, alliances, and organizations of the
nineteenth-century women’s movement. This focus on a single strand is not
intended to overshadow other readings of the sexed city, but instead adds another
layer to the meanings of its diverse gendered spaces and their occupants.
Between 1850 and 1900, members of Victorian women’s groups
and circles experienced and reconceived “London’s heavily patriarchal public
and private spheres” in new ways that offered women opportunities for
“control over their social actions and identity.” 2 Normally, the identity of
Victorian women was closely bound up in the home and their removal from
public life. The “ideal divide” 3 that separated the legitimate spheres of men
and women was deeply drawn between the public (masculine) world of remuneration,
work, and recognition and the private, (feminine) domestic
realm of home and family responsibilities, which were undertaken for love
rather than money. Ideologically, the stakes were high; social stability, the
good order of society, and even human happiness were perceived to be dependent
on woman’s presence in the home. 4
At midcentury, middle-class woman’s place in the home distinguished
respectable femininity in opposition to the prostitute, the fallen
woman of the streets, whom Henry Mayhew called the “public woman.” 5 But
in part responding to changing connotations of public in relation to woman
and in part constituting new definitions of public and woman, independent
middle-class women in London were able to take up public roles without losing
respectability and at the same time change the nature of home and domesticity
to include their work. Leaders of the women’s movement who lived
in London, such as Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,
Emily Davies, Emily Faithfull, and Millicent Fawcett, were able to
build identities as respectable women with roles and activities linked to the
public realm. Working from home or in premises nearby, philanthropists, reformers,
and professionals used their London homes as political bases from
which to address the wider world of public affairs.
This juxtaposition of home and work made the home a political
space in which social initiatives germinated and developed. As we shall see,
feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Barbara Bodichon adapted their
family homes for meetings and other events associated with women’s rights,
while the offices of related women’s organizations, clubs, and restaurants