The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Lynne Walker
was purchased with the assistance of Lady Ducie and of Mrs. Stopford
Brooke. 30
WOMEN’S CLUBLAND IN MAYFAIR
Women’s place in the public sphere was supported and encouraged by clubs
for women, which became a prominent feature of the West End in the second
half of the nineteenth century. They provided feminists both access to the
city, and thus a base from which to promote their agenda, and the facilities,
elsewhere lacking, to meet women’s basic needs. The Ladies’ Institute was
one of the first nineteenth-century clubs where women could eat, read, and
meet their friends when away from home. 31 Nevertheless, even in the early
clubs, membership and location rarely crossed class lines. Some clubs, such
as the New Somerville, the Victoria, and the Tea and Shopping, were located
in Oxford Street and Regent Street; but in the main, women’s clubs were off
the main thoroughfares, clustered in the streets of Mayfair associated with
small, exclusive shops and elegant eighteenth-century mansions. 32
Around 1900, the highest concentration of clubs was in Dover
Street and its continuation, Grafton Street, the Pall Mall of women’s clubland.
As Erica Rappaport has pointed out, the trend was from earlier, consciously
feminist, political clubs to later, more social, apolitical ones. The
idea of private clubs for women was developed by female entrepreneurs,
feminists, and philanthropists; it was popularized at the beginning of the
twentieth century by the department stores, most notably Debenham and
Freebody, Harrod’s, Selfridge’s, and Whiteley’s. The Ladies’ Institute, a
feminist innovation; its latter-day incarnation, the Berners Club; and, most
prominently, the Pioneer Club were, however, models for dozens of clubs
that were set up for middle- and upper-class women who were away from
home working, shopping, or enjoying other urban pleasures. 33
Located on various Mayfair sites over the years, the most long-lived
of all the women’s clubs is the University Club for Ladies (today the University
Women’s Club), with a membership profile in 1898 of “graduates,
undergraduates, students, fee lecturers, and medical practitioners.” 34 In addition
to meeting the needs of women in the city, feminist clubs provided a
private space within the public sphere that produced public women. Their
identity was formed through shared social interactions in a supportive and
stimulating network, and forged in debate and discussion on a wide range
of subjects. At the feminist Pioneer Club, a public identity, negotiated
across gender and class, drew on the status and respectability of their location
in a grand townhouse in aristocratic Mayfair and on representations of
femininity in architecture, design, and fashion. The decorative language of