ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rhetoric and arguments used by investigative journalist and social writer Ada [Mrs Cecil] Chesterton to raise support for the Cecil Residential Club for Working Girls on Small Wages, the sequel to her philanthropic Cecil Houses scheme to combat women’s homelessness by offering safe and affordable overnight accommodation. With reference to her series of investigative publications about the reality of working poverty for women in London during the Interbellum, it considers how she represented the city as a place of danger and her Residential Club as a protective environment for young women, and how this restricted young women’s access to the kind of urban exploration of London that Chesterton had made her specialism.
