'Only a Woman' Henrietta Barnett Social Reformer and Founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb Alison Creedon Size: 246x185 Binding: Hardback Pages: 194 Number of Illustrations: 18 Published: 2006 ISBN: 978 1 86077 430 0 RRP: £20.00
	Henrietta Barnett is best known for her role as the founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb, an innovative and imaginative housing development planned to provide attractive and affordable accommodation for all, regardless of income or social class. This ambitious venture was the pinnacle of a lifetime spent campaigning for housing, educational and social reform among the grime, squalor and deprivation of 19th- and 20th-century London. In this first full-length account of Henrietta's life and work, Alison Creedon shows how a brief experience of education inspired a pretty, petulant and pampered child to develop into a shrewd, irreverent and energetic woman whose determination to confront social injustice persisted well into old age. She traces Henrietta's earliest work with the street urchins of Dover and the Charity Organisation Society in Marylebone through to the many years spent in the labyrinthine courts of a Whitechapel shadowed by such figures as Jack the Ripper and countless other thieves, robbers and miscreants. Based on a wide range of sources, this book challenges representations of Henrietta as a wilful and manipulative tyrant by highlighting the ingenuity with which she negotiated the psychological and social tensions generated by the cultural expectations of middle-class married women in order to realise her most ambitious vision: social housing and harmony for all in a pastoral setting far removed from the vice and violence of the East End of London.