Shutting women away in separate homes, each doing her own household's domestic work alone, was the root of their unequal place in society rather than a side effect of it. On this view, giving women votes or rights would not be enough while each one stayed stranded in her own kitchen.
If a woman's subordinate place is built into the physical layout of the home, then equality requires redesigning space itself. These reformers turned a political argument into buildings: houses without private kitchens, shared dining halls, public kitchens, day-care centers and housewives' cooperatives.
Industrial society rests on two separations: the home is walled off physically from public space, and housework is treated as standing outside the real economy. Challenging women's place means attacking both at once, bringing domestic work into public view and into the paid economy.
Cooking, cleaning and child care are labor that should be paid, not done for free out of love or duty. Paying for it was meant to give women economic independence, and the demand drew support from voting-rights campaigners and popular novelists.
Housing and neighborhoods designed around one full-time unpaid housewife keep creating economic and spatial conflicts once women take paid jobs. Without shared community services, the old layout dumps its unsolved work on women and their families, which is why some planners argued for rebuilding neighborhoods around employed women's needs.