spaces, as a means of softening the abruptness of the shift in identity
that they experienced. In the typing office of the Society for the
Employment of Women, female employees brought their artistic home
interiors into work with them in the form of Japanese prints and fans
that they displayed on the walls. In yet another public environment the
working-class women – originally called ‘Gladys’s’ but later known as
‘Nippies’ – who worked as waitresses in the Lyons tea houses saw a more
rational side of the business than their middle-class, leisure-seeking
counterparts, who merely dined there.^32 Bentwood chairs reinforced that
impression, as they had in Loos’s Café Museum, although a hint of the
‘artistic’ interior was also present in paper lanterns that were suspended
from the ceiling.
By 1914 the new inside spaces dedicated to modern commerce,
work and leisure were fully formed. They were the result of technological 127
The typing office of the Society for the Employment for Women, illustrated in The
Quiver, 1889.