What did Emily Henrietta Maude Connor Wilberforce Mary do at Great Smith Street?

The Story

# Great Smith Street: A Monument to Victorian Advocacy Standing before this distinguished building on Great Smith Street, you're looking at the physical manifestation of Emily Wilberforce's revolutionary vision for maternal welfare and women's solidarity—a headquarters that would serve as the beating heart of the Mothers' Union's global mission when it opened in 1925. Though the plaque notes its inauguration in 1915, this very structure represents the culmination of years of tireless organizing by Wilberforce and her contemporaries, who gathered contributions from Mothers' Union members across the world to erect a permanent home for an organization that had grown from a local parish initiative into an international force for social change. Within these walls, thousands of women found community, support, and collective power during the interwar years, making decisions that would ripple across continents and shape how societies understood motherhood, charity, and women's civic participation. When Princess Mary herself came to open the doors on that July day in 1925, she was blessing not just a building, but a legacy—a tangible symbol that women's work, women's voices, and women's organizational capacity could construct something that would endure far beyond any individual lifetime.