Abstract
The first large-scale experiment in cooperative housekeeping in the London suburbs was initiated in 1909 by Mrs. Alice Melvin (see Plate 18). Melvin was an enthusiastic supporter of the garden city movement and had planned a number of working women’s hostels.1 She saw cooperative housekeeping as a means of decreasing the amount of domestic work performed by wives, solving the servant problem and ensuring that wives were able to take an interest in non-domestic matters. She lived in a large red-brick terraced house in Finchley, surrounded by other tightly-packed rows of houses.2 In October 1909 she was asked to give a lecture on cooperative housekeeping, and it was this event which stimulated her to formulate a plan for putting her ideas into practice:
For fifteen years the idea of co-operation in housekeeping has been simmering at the back of my head, but it did not take shape till last October. I was asked to explain my dream to the Finchley Women’s Guild.3
The response to the lecture was so great that the Brent Garden Village (Finchley) Society was formed in 1910, with the object of buying the Brent Lodge estate in Finchley and building a cooperative village.
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Notes and References
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1898), Women and Economics, Unwin, London, p. 243; see Chap 5, p. 70 above.
Meredith, M. (1911), ‘Housing of Educated Women Workers’, The Englishwoman, Feb, vol. 9, no. 26, pp. 159–64; see p. 162. See also
Benoit-Levy, Georges (1911), La cité-jardin, Cités-jardins de France, Paris, vol. 3, pp. 65–6.
Davin, Anna (1982), ‘Foreword’, pp. ix–xxiv in
Chew, Doris Nield, Ada Nield Chew, Virago, London. See pp. xix–xx; The Freewoman showed the breadth of feminist debate, and was published from Nov 1911 until Oct 1912.
Low, B. (1912), ‘Two Practical Suggestions’, The Freewoman, 15 Feb, vol. 1, no. 13, p. 252;
Starling, B. W. F. (1912), ‘Cooperative Housekeeping’, The Freewoman, 22 Feb, vol. 1, no. 14, p. 273;
Chapman, Dorothy (1912), ‘Group-houses’, The Freewoman, 29 Feb, vol. 1, no. 15, p. 291;
Edwards, A. Herbage (1912), ‘Group Houses’, The Free-woman, 7 March, vol. 1, no. 16, p. 312. Edwards probably lived at Fernbank, one of the first Woollatt Home houses to be built (the plans were approved in July 1911); it stood almost opposite the Lodge, and still exists today.
The Standard (1911), ‘Domestic Drudgery’, 15 Nov; The Standard (1911), ‘No Housework’, 16 Nov, p. 4; Melvin, Alice (1912), ‘Abolition of Domestic Drudgery by Co-operative Housekeeping’, The Free-woman, 11 April, vol. 1, no. 21, pp. 410–12.
Melvin, Alice (1912), ‘Cooperative Housekeeping and the Domestic Worker’, The Freewoman, 4 April, vol. 1, no. 20, pp. 386–7; Melvin, ‘Abolition’.
Rogers, F. W. (1911), ‘Towards Better Co-operative Housing’, Garden Cities and Town Planning, June, NS vol. 1, no. 5, p. 131;
Culpin, Ewart G. (1913), The Garden City Movement Up-to-date, Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, London, p. 60.
Oliver, Kathlyn (1912), ‘Cooperative Housekeeping’, The Freewoman, 20 June, vol. 2, no. 31, p. 98 (see also reply from Alice Melvin);
Oliver, Kathlyn (1912), ‘Cooperative Housekeeping’, The Freewoman, 4 July, vol. 2, no. 3, p. 137.
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© 1988 Lynn F. Pearson
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Pearson, L.F. (1988). Alice Melvin of Finchley. In: The Architectural and Social History of Cooperative Living. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19122-2_7
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