In spite of popular suffrage narratives focusing on the phenomenon of the twentieth-century suffrage movement, the early nineteenth century also saw women endeavouring to claim a space in political life. Specifically within Parliament, some women inhabited and defined a ‘female’ site in spite of their official banishment from the public galleries of the Commons. This chapter proposes to reclaim the narratives of those women to highlight their essential role in establishing a female space within Parliament almost one hundred years before the emergence of the mass-organised suffrage movement. Furthermore, it will attest to the integral role that Parliament held in the ‘herstory’ of women’s political emancipation. The ventilator was a small attic space above the Commons and was the only access that women had to political debates in the early nineteenth century. It represented their physical, cultural and ideological marginalisation from public life. However, in spite of its apparent liminality, the ventilator also became a space of nascent female political activity within Parliament. This chapter proposes a close analysis of the three known images of the ventilator to illuminate women’s construction of a female space in Parliament that nurtured an emergent female political identity in the building that was the very heart of patriarchal political power.