The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Lynne Walker
were located within walking distance of their homes in Marylebone and
Bloomsbury. This “neighborliness” was, on the one hand, the social glue of
the women’s movement in central London; on the other, it generated sites
for political activities as well as providing easy access to the public realm on
their doorstep. The apparatus of their “staged identities” as white, middleclass,
British women 6 —the well-ordered home, the “good” address at the
heart of London and of empire, the round of formal introductions, social
calls, and duties, as well as a sense of neighborly connection for those who
lived nearby—supplied the private, social matrix for public, political action.
In addition, the presence and proximity in the city of feminist activists—such
as Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Barbara Bodichon, and
Emily Davies in Marylebone and Emily Faithfull, Rhoda Garrett, and Millicent
Fawcett in Bloomsbury—facilitated projects that developed from
feminist concerns for women’s education, employment, health, and financial
and personal independence. These independent middle-class women
were well-placed to cross and redraw the boundaries between public and
private. As this chapter will explore, they devised tactics based on necessity
and opportunity: working from home, gaining access to the professions,
providing accommodation for their own needs (most notably in housing,
health, and women’s clubs and organizations), and appropriating space for
women on the less-familiar ground of public institutions.
For these women in the late-nineteenth-century city, the intersection
of gender, space, and experience produced control, or at least a sense of
control, of social actions and identity. The positions that they took up remained
deeply contested and within certain boundaries, but opportunities
for developing new identities that differed from the social norm were offered
at various sites in the city, both public and private. Moreover, not only were
their groups and networks critical to the successful struggle for women’s
rights, but their socially lived identities were partly defined by the spaces
they occupied, and in turn their presence produced the social spaces and
buildings that they occupied—a process that was cumulative and reflexive,
a process taking place over time, producing, and being produced by and
within, dynamic gendered space. 7 In this sense, late Victorian women were
producers as well as consumers of the built environment. Their presence
helped determine the spaces provided, the building types constructed, the
needs that were represented, and, most important, how it felt to be in public
space: the ideas people received about themselves and the representations
they were able to make when using architecture and the public realm.