The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Feminist Remapping of Space in Victorian London
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Unlike the usual architectural history of London, which focuses on architects
and their monumental buildings, an approach that retraces and remaps
the sites and spaces of the nineteenth-century women’s movement prompts
narratives of women’s lives and experience. It takes us into the domestic
sphere; into the gendered spaces of Victorian architecture; to sites of
long-demolished buildings associated with the suffrage movement, philanthropy,
women’s education, and entry into and employment in the
professions; and to a variety of architectural and social projects devised by
women clients and patrons.
Although using the home for political ends was not new—it was
familiar from antislavery campaigns 43 —the politicized home was a powerful
political space for women. By blending public and private spheres
through the conjunction of home and work, these women created new social
spaces that challenged the traditional division between the public male
institutions and the private female place of home.
While the home became both center and origin of women’s organizations
and networks, the activities of these nineteenth-century feminists
were not, as we have seen, restricted to domestic space or identities. Public
space, such as the offices of the English Woman’s Journal and its associated organizations,
was claimed and utilized to promote feminist goals and projects;
by extension, such claiming normalized women’s presence in the city.
This concentration of women in the city, combined with their privileged
backgrounds and positions, helped secure access to the public sphere and facilitated
women’s participation in public life and the development of a public
ideology for women.