The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Feminist Remapping of Space in Victorian London
WORKING FROM HOME
An important tactic that women adopted to negotiate a public presence was
to work from home. In her many campaigns and projects, the artist and feminist
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon operated from her house in Marylebone,
which in 1855, in the early years of the organized women’s movement,
provided a meeting place for the group that petitioned in support of the
Married Women’s Property Bill. 8 From there, the first petition for female
suffrage was assembled and dispatched to John Stuart Mill at the Houses of
Parliament; it was delivered by Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson),
who had been recruited into the women’s movement over tea at 5
Blandford Square. 9
Later, Davies and Bodichon worked successfully for women’s admission
to university examinations and together produced one of the
central achievements of nineteenth-century education: Girton College,
Cambridge, which opened in 1873. For this venture, Bodichon’s house was
again called into action as an examination hall for the first candidates and
later functioned as a place of entertainment and moral support for Girton
students. 10 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson herself gained personal support,
introductions, and encouragement at Bodichon’s house for a career in
medicine, helping her to become England’s first female physician. After
qualifying, she followed a pattern similar to Bodichon’s, setting up both her
home and place of work over the years on various sites in the West End.
After their first meeting, Bodichon sent Davies and Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson off to the English Woman’s Journal, the voice and center of the
women’s movement, which then had an office on Prince’s Street, Cavendish
Square. Bodichon funded the journal and was a founding member of the
Langham Place group, as the network of women who wrote for the journal
and were associated with its related projects were known (after its most famous
site). In three different locations in the Oxford Street area (Prince’s
Street, Langham Place, and Berners Street) and in various combinations, a
loose alliance of associated groups were housed with the English Woman’s
Journal (later the Englishwoman’s Review), including the Society for Promoting
the Employment of Women (SPEW), the Ladies Sanitary Association,
the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and the Ladies’
Institute. 11 That these organizations drew on the identity of the journal, and
each other, as well as enjoying the advantages of a central site and a familiar
place, is demonstrated by the way they either stayed with the journal over
the years or spun off into nearby streets.
Like education and property rights, employment for women was a
major theme of the movement; the Society for Promoting the Education of
Women took practical steps to help women gain marketable skills and find