Many rooms of one's own: women's cohousing from London to Ticino

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to express her creativity," Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929. Almost a century later, a handful of housing projects have taken that sentence literally and extended it from a single flat to an entire building.

The most cited case is New Ground, in north London, opened in 2016 after eighteen years of preparation. Twenty-six women live there, aged between 58 and 94, in self-contained flats with shared spaces. The residents describe themselves as firmly opposed to ageism and paternalism, and reject the label of retirement home. "It is a matter of friendship and mutual care," they explain.

Germany has a wider network: the Beginenhöfe, present in some thirty cities, house more than five hundred women. The name comes from the medieval lay communities of beguines, who lived together without religious vows. In Ticino the longest-running example is Residenza Emmy, which has taken tenants since 1972.

A longer history than it appears

Alba Minadeo's article in Ticino7 traces a genealogy running through literature and politics. In 1863 Nikolai Chernyshevsky described in "What Is to Be Done?" a cooperative of seamstresses sharing home and income. Fausta Cialente wrote about women living together in a 1966 novel. The Danish feminist commune of the 1970s studied by Pernille Ipsen and the Butler Arms boarding house in St Petersburg, Florida, belong to the same period. In 2019 a South Korean memoir by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo recounted two friends' decision to buy a home together.

The thread linking such different experiences is economic before it is idealistic. Women build up lower pensions on average, have more broken careers and live longer. To that is added unpaid domestic work: about three hours a day more than their husbands. The result is old age with fewer means and more often alone, and a shared house is the practical answer to both.

Not every project comes from choice. In Bosnia and Herzegovina similar buildings were put up as an emergency response after the war, for women left alone with their homes destroyed. In Italy the word mommune describes single mothers living together with their children, while the notion of affidamento developed by the Libreria delle Donne in Milan in the 1980s already described a bond of mutual recognition between women.

Those who live in these places tend to explain the choice without grand words. "Doing good does you good," says one of the residents.