Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Women’s Pioneer Housing was founded on friendships between women, often forged during the campaign for suffrage. The founders and early pioneers encouraged their friends and family to join them in this new venture. Their vision was that living in WPH homes would give women the freedom to make their own life choices.

WPH reflected the desire felt by many modern women to break away from traditional, patriarchal family set-ups – and therefore escape the control of husbands, fathers, or brothers. Instead, these women sought new ways of living, with partners, friends, female family members, or independently.

Two of WPH’s early committee members - feminists Lady Rhondda, and Helen Archdale - met during the First World War and shared a background in suffrage militancy. During the 1920s, when Helen was the first editor of Lady Rhondda’s Time and Tide magazine, they had an intense relationship, sharing a country home for several years and living in the same apartment block in Chelsea.

Similarly, a number of WPH tenants shared flats with other women friends. Some may have been in romantic relationships, certainly, some were lifelong companions.

Edith Mary Flux and Alice Parker, both teachers, were tenants for twenty-five years at three different WPH properties until Alice’s death in 1959. Edith Mary lived on in her WPH flat for a further twenty-five years; WPH’s Mary Flux Court is named after her.

Family bonds were also crucial to WPH’s staff and tenants. Three of Etheldred Browning’s cousins - the Joachim sisters - contributed to WPH’s development. Maud Joachim, a well-known suffragette, and Geraldine Russell were early investors. The third sister, artist Nina Balfour, created the ‘Matilda’ image in 1924 which is still used as WPH’s logo today.

There are family groups of women among the inter-war tenants, including three generations of one family. Henrietta ‘Sophie’ Stanger, the widow of the MP who led the second reading of the Votes for Women Bill, was a tenant, as were her widowed daughter Helen Yorke Robertson and her granddaughters Elizabeth and Jean. Elizabeth Robertson was married from 16 Bramham Gardens. In the 1950s Jean Robertson MBE broke through the glass ceiling at the Foreign Office, becoming a diplomat in Bolivia.

If tenants married, they were required to leave WPH accommodation as it was strictly ‘women only’.

The exception to the ‘women only’ rule was the female caretakers employed by WPH, who were often married with families. They usually lived in the basement flat of the houses, with the husband working elsewhere in a manual occupation such as a railway porter, labourer or driver. Jeannette Kelley was the caretaker at 5 Clanricarde Gardens in the early 1930s, living there with her husband Harold and their children. When she moved on, her sister-in-law Hylda Munton took over as caretakers.