Only demi-paradise? Women in garden cities and new towns

Ebenezer Howard's vision of garden cities assumed that women would play a crucial part in them, not only as homebuilders but also in civic life. Yet in the first garden cities, and in the social movement based on Howard's ideas, less and less attention was paid to enabling them to do so. When state new towns became an important element of the post-Second World War reconstruction, they were managed predominantly by men. Moreover, the physical and economic development strategies applied were based on a conventional and unquestioned gender division of labour. This paper reviews some of these outcomes and the social and policy context which generated them.