Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 (review)

Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth have brought together a stimulating collection of interdisciplinary essays that reveal the multiple ways women engaged in the making of built space in England in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. The collection demonstrates the continuing evolution of the interdisciplinary study of women and gender and a move within design history towards a new definition of the practices and processes that create built space. The editors define the term broadly as "any material or spatial form which may be understood as playing a part in the production, reproduction or contesting of gender identities" (4). Built space is thus seen as produced by a variety of actors and discourses, rather than a single designer. Instead of looking at architects, then, the essays here consider female philanthropists and the working-class women they strove to assist, female socialist activists, designers, journalists and commentators, and, of course, homemakers. The tight theme of the collection allows the editors to explore change across the period. The book introduces a number of individuals and organizations that historians have previously overlooked. Rather than simply restoring these women to the canon, however, the collection argues that they had a crucial impact on the creation of built space and, therefore, that this process needs to be reconsidered in the light of their work.

The principle contribution of this book is to track women's changing relationship with the institutions and government bodies that shaped the making of built space in modern Britain. Two early essays explore the philanthropy of Victorian middle-class women who sought to improve the living conditions of the poor. Darling and Anne Anderson revisit the social work of Octavia Hill and her sister Miranda, arguing that the sisters' drive to ameliorate working-class living through the renovation of existing housing merits further attention. In an essay on middle-class women rent collectors in the late-nineteenth-century East End, Ruth Livesey reveals the tensions between middle-class action and working-class agency. Examining the inhabitants of Katherine Buildings, a new block of "model" dwellings for the working class in East Smithfield, Livesey shows how tenants resisted the machinations of resident "lady" housing managers. Eluding the middle-class ideal of home, tenants claimed the buildings' landings, using them to exchange gossip, money, and sexual favors.

In contrast to the middle-class philanthropy of the late nineteenth century, twentieth-century working-class women were increasingly given a voice in the institutions and government bodies that determined built space. Karen Hunt demonstrates how women socialist activists used domesticity to connect the masculine world of politics with women's everyday needs. Gillian Scott shows how the Women's Co-operative Guild represented the needs of working-class housewives to housing reformers in the interwar period and during the Second World War. Female opinion was also considered in the Board of Trade's efforts to improve design within British industry in the immediate aftermath of the war, as Whitworth's essay on the Housewives' Committee of the Council of Industrial Design illustrates. But this is not a simple history of increasing representation and equality of opportunity. Simultaneously, as Darling's essay on the women involved in the design of the All Europe House establishes, the increasing professionalization of architecture began to exclude women who had forged careers in the broader world of "space-making" in the interwar period. Jill Seddon's study of the architect Sadie Speight shows how even the most talented women struggled to forge careers while fulfilling the obligations of a wife and mother.

A further strength of this collection is its fresh approach to the question of the separation of the public world from the private sphere of home. The volume offers a new take on the way in which women intervened in the discourses and organizational bodies of the state to reshape the fabric of domestic...