Women’s Pioneer Housing is a unique partner of the Citizens project. Set up by women suffragists and suffragettes nearly 100 years ago, it became London’s first post-war housing service for single working women and today it continues to defend its original purpose: to cater for ‘professional and other women of moderate means who require individual homes at moderate rents’. [1]
Housing was in crisis after the First World War and single working women were particularly hit hard. Although London had plenty of large empty houses, very few smaller homes were available for rent and women’s drastically lower salaries left them at the back of the queue when a rare vacancy arose.
Even today, irrespective of the changes in social attitudes and legislation, single working women remain unduly disadvantaged when it comes to housing. Despite maintaining over a thousand homes for women in west London today, Women’s Pioneer Housing annual reports continue to reveal how demand for the service is constantly exceeded by its supply. Indeed, the escalating cost of renting or buying a home in London is challenging for both men and women, but with a lifelong gender pay gap women are left distinctively deprived.
The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ONS) show that in London two years ago, the pay gap for full-time workers was 11.9 per cent compared to 9.4 per cent across the UK. [2] In two years little has changed and so the history of Women’s Pioneer Housing should find a sympathetic audience.
A preliminary pilot study, led by freelance writer Lisa Thompson and a team of U3A volunteers, has sketched an outline of who was involved in the agency’s early years and the impact it had on helping women break new ground in the workplace during the interwar period.
This has uncovered a long-neglected chapter in suffrage history. The link between suffrage and housing has gone largely unnoticed and yet Women’s Pioneer’s story is proof that both militant and law-abiding suffragists considered the agency important enough to put aside their political and ideological differences. For instance, it has been discovered that Lady Rhondda and Geraldine Lennox who belonged to the WSPU sat alongside more law-abiding women such as Ray Strachey who “was very critical of the WSPU leaders and their militant tactics”. [3] What we see here is suffragists and suffragettes putting to practical use their experience of organised protest built up during the war, when they frequently found themselves working side by side.
This pilot study has also revealed a very strong connection with women’s war time work, with almost all of Women’s Pioneer Housing founding members involved in recruiting women at government level or into voluntary organisations established during the war.
The Great War had given many, admittedly mainly middle class, women an opportunity to demonstrate their capability in jobs previously only performed by men. They were determined to stop the clock turning back and the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act, in theory, granted women access to professions that had previously been closed off to them.
The fuller picture was much less encouraging. Thousands of women continued to be made redundant following the Great War and nearly one in three women were affected by its losses. [4] Left with no choice but to provide for themselves, these women struggled to hold onto employment and find a home they could afford on a drastically lower salary than their male counterparts.
Even women who managed to remain employed were frequently denounced for profiting at the expense of ‘breadwinners’ and returning heroes. In desperation, they returned to the agencies that had helped recruit women during the conflict. These agencies featured many of Women’s Pioneer Housing figureheads who recognised that for women to succeed in their work, they needed an affordable, comfortable and dependable home.
Central to this was the now unknown figure of Etheldred Browning, an Anglo-Irish suffragist who had moved to London and was working at the Garden Cities & Town Planning Association. Her role highlighted the contribution of women to improving the supply and quality of the new homes Britain so badly needed. Despite also having campaigned on behalf of women’s employment in Ireland, she appears in no footnotes of the suffrage movement in either Ireland or Britain.
Browning was aware of many grand houses in central London, the upkeep of which depended on cheap female labour, that were now vacant. As of October 4th 1920, she and her supporters set about raising money to buy, and convert into flats, houses in Kensington, Belgravia and Chelsea. Programmes like Downton Abbey likes to focus on Britain’s grand town and country houses. This time, they come into play as homes for a much less privileged group.
If a current funding bid is successful, Women’s Pioneer Housing plans to expand upon its pilot study to examine how the service protected and progressed women’s advances in the ‘new’ professions in the years up to the Second World War. The project will also, for the first time, study extensive archive records that have sat largely ignored in Women’s Pioneer’s safe for decades.
Meanwhile, in collaboration with the Citizens Project, original case files will be explored using their database of over 1500 women who rented from Women’s Pioneer Housing in the interwar years. The women associated with this housing service, as volunteers, investors, employees and tenants, offer a diverse and colourful picture of the impact of suffrage on women’s changing roles. Women’s Pioneer Housing also hope to explore the crucial connection between the service and wartime employment further.
The Citizens team is excited to be the forerunners in exploring this aspect of the history of post-war professional working women. Over the next year, we will be making a short film to feature online, including it eventually in our MOOC with Parliament.
The suffragists won the vote, but we’d be letting them down if we didn’t carry on the fight for equal rights with men in all spheres. Until that happens, the need for a women’s housing service remains true.
By Abbie Evans.
Abbie Evans is a Citizens Project / SEMDP intern and History student at Royal Holloway, University of London.
[1] “About Us”, Women’s Pioneer, 2017 < https://www.womenspioneer.co.uk/about-us/ > [accessed 10 August 2017].
[2] Sadiq Khan: London Gender-Pay Gap Is ‘Unacceptable’”, London City Hall, 2017 <https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayor-london-gender-pay-gap-is-unacceptable> [accessed 12 August 2017].
[3] June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 355.
[4] Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London: Virago, 1978), p. 371.
