11. Female Retirement Communities Are Still Around Today
Aside from the issues discussed around young women escaping unhappy marriages, another issue that all women faced in the 1800’s and 1900’s was financial survival after their husbands passed away. For lower and middle class women, their husbands may not have left any money behind for them to survive. This was especially important for women who did not have children or family to help take care of them. By joining a women’s community, an elderly woman would never have to be alone. In fact, the original members of the Women’s Commonwealth were able to retire together. The group eventually moved from Texas to Washington, DC, so that they could spread their ideas of women’s communes to the capital. In the early 1900’s, the very small handful of living members eventually died out, but they were still together supporting one another until the very end.
In the 1990’s, a group called Older Women’s Co-Housing brought back this idea that women could help one another survive during retirement. These women don’t like to call themselves an all-female commune, because they don’t like the negative connotations associated with cults, third-wave feminists, or hippies. But the idea is very much the same as what the Women’s Commonwealth was trying to achieve in the 1800’s. Women want to live together, learn together, and help one another financially and emotionally.