The things you learn from edited editions of CM Yonge...

Amazingly, and despite my belief that it was a rather improbably broad satire on the shortsightedness of earnest teenage girls, there really was an organisation called S.P.E.W.

It stood for 'The Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women', and was founded by a group of Victorian feminists (the Langham Place group) in the 1880s.