Home and away

Abstract

The West End of Victorian London is normally understood as the centre of the world of work and of institutions of power, ‘the masculine domain of modern, public, urban life’ (Tickner 1987: 14) from which women were excluded.1 But viewed in another way through the experience of the independent middle-class women who lived and worked there, this highly masculinised terrain can be remapped as a site of women’s buildings and places within the urban centre, associated with the social networks, alliances and organisations of the nineteenth-century Women’s Movement. This focus on a single strand is not intended to overshadow other readings of the sexed city, but adds another layer to the meanings of its diverse gendered spaces and their occupants.