The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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jobs. Like the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science,
SPEW helped direct women into new fields; for example, the Ladies Tracing
Society (established 1875) provided training and employment in an office
in Westminster for women to copy architectural plans. 12
Members of the Langham Place group collaborated on projects that
were motivated by feminist politics, philanthropy, and business necessity,
and these mutually beneficial activities were developed and facilitated by
the proximity of home and work. A resident of Bloomsbury (10 Taviton
Street), the printer and philanthropist Emily Faithfull served on the
women’s employment committee of the National Association for the Promotion
of Social Science. She established the Victoria Press in Bloomsbury
(Great Coram Street) with the feminist and SPEW member Bessie Rayner
Parkes, who edited the English Woman’s Journal (which the Victoria Press
published). 13
Unlike Emily Faithfull, who followed her profession on a number
of sites a short walk from home, Emmeline Pankhurst on moving to London
in the 1880s initially made arrangements similar to those of earlier generations
of women: she put home, work, and family together by living over the
shop. After three years of selling arts and crafts products on the Hampstead
Road, 14 Emmeline Pankhurst and her family moved to Russell Square (number
8, demolished; now the location of the Russell Hotel). There, she again
combined public and private space—but this time to political ends, adapting
her house for meetings of the Women’s Franchise League (an organization
that, contrary to its name, addressed a variety of social and political
problems and included men among its members). In Russell Square, Mrs.
Pankhurst gave birth to her fifth child, directed the upbringing of two other
leaders of the Edwardian suffrage movement (her daughters Christabel and
Sylvia) and received a stream of highly politicized visitors, described by her
son Richard Pankhurst as “Socialists, Anarchists, Radicals, Republicans,
Nationalists, suffragists, free thinkers, agnostics, atheists and humanitarians
of all kinds,” from Louise Michel (La Petrouleuse) to William Morris. 15
A stone’s throw from the Pankhursts’ was 61 Russell Square (now
the Imperial Hotel), the home (1881–1891) of Mary Ward, the writer and
philanthropist who founded and built the Passmore Edwards Settlement in
nearby Tavistock Place. 16 A great believer in higher education and a member
of the council of Somerville Hall, Oxford’s first college for women, from
its opening in 1879, she nevertheless later became an active antisuffrage
campaigner and suffragists’ bugbear. 17
Like her neighbor Mrs. Pankhurst, Mary Ward worked from home.
From a small study, she produced her best-selling book Robert Elsmere
(1889), about a clergyman who refound his lost faith through social work