Etheldred Browning
Etheldred Browning
1869 - 1946
Founder of Women’s Pioneer Housing
Etheldred was born Edith Anna Browning on 17th September 1869 in Donnybrook, Dublin, the third of four children. She came from an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family included in Burke’s Irish Peerage. Her father Jeffrey Francis Browning (1832-1889) was a lawyer, who served as Solicitor to the Court of the Irish Land Commission. Her mother, Julia Mary Smart (1841-1925) was born in London, the eldest daughter of a Professor of Music. In 1886, she enrolled at Dublin’s Metropolitan School of Art and began using the name Etheldred.
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In the 1900s, Etheldred became a passionate and active member of the suffrage movement in Dublin. She wrote articles and gave talks on a number of women’s issues, including a presentation at the formal opening of the Library of the Irish Women’s Reform League (a non-militant organisation which was concerned with wider social issues as well as suffrage). A report of a joint meeting of Suffrage Societies in Dublin in November 1913, concentrating on the religious, ethical and moral aspects of the women’s movement, noted:
Miss Browning disagreed with the suggestion that they were working to relieve the sufferings of the poor, and said that each of them was working selfishly for her own good to bring out the “real woman”, which was the greatest blessing that could be conferred on humanity.
The following month, she was identified as one of the ‘Ladies Prominently Identified with Suffrage Week in Ireland’, for a feature in the Irish Independent. In articles for the Irish Citizen (the newspaper of the Irish Women’s Franchise League), she wrote passionate rallying cries for women to take their place in all areas of society:
women factory inspectors — women law makers, women police, women on the jury, women lawyers, women everywhere that is the need of our country… rise! You must free all others to be free! (Irish Citizen, August 1913)
During World War One, she carried out research into women’s wages for the Central Committee for the Employment of Women and managed the Dublin Embroidery Industry, as part of Suffrage Emergency Council’s work, along with her friend Florence Lily Carre.
Sometime after the war, Etheldred moved to London. There, she continued her vocal support for women’s enfranchisement and developed a particular interest in the issue of housing. This seems to have been spurred on by Etheldred’s own situation; her writing on the subject is often personal and emotional, as in ‘Ghosts’, an essay for The Common Cause (a suffrage newspaper) that details her experiences of going to a male-dominated lecture on housing organised by the Town Planning and Garden Cities Association:
Everywhere I looked, I saw women, women – and then they faded out. They were but ghosts, ineffectual, powerless ghosts! …Woman’s place is the home – woman is the housekeeper – woman is responsible for the well-being of the children (all the stock phrases rushed to my mind), and yet here was a meeting called to demand, discuss, and plan the very houses woman was to keep, and yet woman was not present to express her wishes, to be consulted, to give her weight to the resolutions – woman was not even honoured with a seat at the platform!
Click here to read the article. Ghosts by Etheldred Browning - Common Cause
In another, ‘How Shall She Live’, she describes the difficulty and humiliation suffered by a single working woman looking for accommodation, with a powerful and seemingly personal point of view. Soon, Etheldred’s thoughts turned to practical solutions. In a number of other articles – including ‘A Practical Programme for the Practical Working of a Housing Committee’, ‘State Aided Houses in the Flesh’ and ‘Women and Town Planning’ – she suggested various ways for women’s organisations to become involved in a national housing initiative.
It seems likely that these articles caught the attention of the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association (GCTPA), as she was invited to join their newly established Women’s Section in 1919. She spoke at the GCTPA women’s conference that ran alongside the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition on 7 February 1920. Etheldred’s time with the GCTPA was a great networking opportunity, through which she met many other like-minded women who were interested in the provision and design of housing, with experience in training housing managers.
In 1920, aged 51, Etheldred decided to personally intervene in the shortage of adequate, appropriate housing for women. Drawing on her contacts from the GCTPA as well as friends and collaborators from suffrage circles, she established Women’s Pioneer Housing in October of that year. All of the other founding members agreed that Etheldred’s passion was the driving force behind the organisation’s mission to develop accommodation for independent working women. Within six months, she built Women’s Pioneer Housing from a standing start to being ready to purchase its first house.
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Yet despite Etheldred’s ambition and determination, the early years of the organisation were far from plain sailing. Funding Women’s Pioneer Housing proved to be more difficult than expected, partly because Etheldred had expected to use government funds from Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s post-WWI ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ scheme but this plan didn’t work out. A full-blown financial crisis ensued in 1921, almost plunging Women’s Pioneer Housing into liquidation. A rescue was made, but Etheldred - who had specified that Women’s Pioneer Housing should be mainly run by women - had to accept that some roles, particularly with regard to raising capital, would have to be carried out by men with suitable experience. Lady Shelley Rolls (a principal investor and later President) wrote in 1937 that Etheldred remained bitterly opposed to the two first male members of the Committee of Management.
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Etheldred remained at the heart of the organisation through most of its first two decades. As the secretary and, for its early years, the sole paid employee, she carried out nearly all the work of the fledgling organisation: she called meetings, wrote the minutes, inspected potential properties and dealt with bankers, surveyors, architects, builders, printers and tenants, both prospective and resident. She had voluntary and ad hoc help from members of the Committee of Management (COM) but her first assistant wasn’t appointed until November 1923.
By 1937, cracks began to appear. Tenants started to complain about Etheldred interfering in their affairs and snooping on them via house caretakers. The COM also noted that she was no longer as energetic as before and were concerned about her ability to take on the management of three new blocks of flats. Having invested so much time and energy into developing Women’s Pioneer Housing, Etheldred didn’t take kindly to the COM’s gentle hints about retirement. Her anger was eventually somewhat abated by the offer of a generous financial settlement, and she agreed to give up her position in October 1938. She stayed on the Committee of Management, but her attendance at meetings grew rarer after the start of World War II. She features as a COM member for the last time in the published Annual Report published in May 1945.
After her retirement, Etheldred moved to Eton to live with her cousin Dorothy Sowter (who had worked as her assistant at Women’s Pioneer Housing and also been a tenant from 1926 to 1938). Her time there was relatively brief and, by 1942, she was back living at Cheltenham Terrace, while there she had a summons for causing a light after dark and was fined 20 shillings. When the war ended, Etheldred and her niece Ruth moved to Wandsworth to live in with her lifelong friend Florence Lily Carre and Florence’s sister Helen. One year later, Etheldred died in Chelsea on 30th April 1946, aged 77.