Ženské domovy

This massive H shaped building housed 900 single working women when it opened in 1933. You're standing in front of what was once the most ambitious feminist project in interwar Czechoslovakia. Alice Masaryková inaugurated it. She was the daughter of the country's first president, but also a sociologist, Red Cross founder, and determined feminist who saw this building as proof that women could live independent, modern lives. The Czechoslovak Constitution stated that women were equal to men politically, socially, and culturally. Masaryková wanted to show what that looked like in practice. This building was her answer. Architects Josef Hlaváček and Vlastimil Lada designed it in the functionalist style on the site of an old gasworks. Inside were 900 rooms, plus a theatre, a gym, and a movie theatre with a restaurant. Women came from outside the city for work and could stay up to two years. During World War Two, Germans turned it into a military hospital. After the war, the women returned. At its peak, 1,400 women lived in 850 rooms. The building that once proved women's equality now houses offices, surgeries, a theatre, and a hotel on the top floor added in 2004.