ABSTRACT
This chapter presents women who dreamed dreams of their own about home, family, neighborhood, and city. Although it deals with the years between the Civil War and the Great Depression, the story holds significance for planners and policymakers dealing with the present and the future. Traditional arrangement of domestic work made it extremely difficult for single men and women to have satisfying home lives they were forced to live in residential hotels or in single rooms as boarders. The material feminists had much in common with labor unions of their era and communitarian socialists of the nineteenth century. The material feminists' demand for the socialization of housework and child care under women's control echoed labor's campaigns for workers' control in factories and offices. Among the more striking proposals of the material feminists were schemes for cooperative housekeeping as advanced by Melusina Fay Peirce, Marie Stevens Howland, and Mary Livermore.
