Womontown: How a group of 80s lesbians built their own community to escape the patriarchy

“We really just wanted to live in a neighborhood where we were accepted.”

In the late 1980s, two women set about creating a lesbian community in Kansas City, Missouri. The result was Womontown, an urban community of over 70 women that spanned a 12-block radius and contained 28 homes and 14 apartment buildings.

“We just started imagining, what if we could just walk hand in hand, freely, down the street, a bunch of lesbians all in this neighborhood,” said co-founder Mary Ann Hopper in the 2022 documentary, Womontown. “And I thought, well, if we can do the work, I could imagine that it would maybe be fun to live here.”

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The journey began when Hopper’s partner, Andrea Nedelsky, decided she wanted to stop paying rent and bought a relatively cheap house in the Longfellow neighborhood. Nedelsky was used to living in the inner city, but Hopper, who was from the suburbs, was worried they would be regularly heckled and constantly hear gunshots in the distance.

Hopper and Nedelsky had frequented lesbian festivals and events and had felt the freedom of being themselves in those spaces. They wanted to make a home where they felt the same way.

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While some women-only, LGBTQ+, and lesbian-only communities already existed, they tended to either be very small or more rural than Nedelsky was willing to settle for.

The couple wanted to form a conscious women’s community to escape the patriarchy, but their creation of Womontown was also a sound economic move.

In the 1980s and 90s, women were unlikely to secure a loan from a bank without a husband or parent to approve it. With the gender pay gap on top of that, expensive homes were out of reach for many. “When you want to rent, you don’t say, ‘Hi, I’m moving in with my girlfriend or my partner or whatever,” Hopper explains in the documentary. “So you kind of had to be covert about everything because of harassment.”

The pair worked to recruit other lesbians to move to the area, and many were wowed by the relatively affordable property, noting they could get a “three-story shirtwaist house” for under $20k. They reached out to people they knew, including those they met at festivals and events, and they placed an ad in Lesbian Connection. Over time, people moved to Womontown not only from local areas, but also from Hawaii, California, and New York.

The whole community pitched in to remodel homes and help newcomers unload. Nedelsky and Hopper bought their first apartment building, which was near one of their homes, from a “slumlord” and were able to fill the units with like-minded lesbians instead of the people who threw beer bottles at them and yelled threats from their balconies.

Sandy Woodson, the documentarian behind Womontown, told NPR it “was cool” that Womontown was “a way of improving a neighborhood without gentrifying it.”

“These women weren’t coming in and fixing up the houses so they could sell ’em for a lot more money,” Woodson said. “They were fixing them up so they could stay there and have a community.”

While it has been called a queer utopia, Womontown was not without strife. Nedelsky noted that while a lot of allies supported them, those against their existence could be vicious. They also had issues with nearby inhabitants expressing misguided concerns that the lesbians would turn their kids gay.

But they worked together to ensure that they had a safe environment where they could truly be themselves. Woodson explained that the residents would walk their dogs at night to ensure there was always a watchful eye on the neighborhood. People purchased old postal trucks, painted them purple, and left them in front of houses so it was less clear whether or not anyone was home. “If somebody wasn’t home and you park that vehicle in front of that house, somebody might think that there’s somebody home and not break into the house.”

Sadly, Womontown’s heyday was relatively short-lived, and while some original residents still live there, it largely dissolved by 1995. For Nedelsky and Hopper, who both worked full-time, the effort of paperwork and activity planning became too much and came to feel like a second job.

Resident Barbara Lee worked to keep the community going, but found that it was too much for one person and that the residents’ interests were too disparate. “I just felt like I was driving the bus and it got real quiet, and then suddenly I turned around and there was nobody on the bus,” Lee explains in the documentary.

However, Sue Moreno, who still lives there, notes that a part of the reason for people leaving was because of larger societal changes in how women are treated. “You could get a loan, buy a house as a woman, get a credit card, and establish a business,” Moreno said last year. “And little by little, centimeter by centimeter, you saw things changing.” While some people have moved away, she felt that the legacy of Womontown would remain. “It was, and still is, Womontown.”

In 2023, Kansas City declared itself a sanctuary city for the LGBTQ+ community. While the city’s conversion therapy ban was overturned earlier this year following the Supreme Court ruling in Chiles v. Salazar,  they are working on a rewritten ban that they hope to reinstate.

While Womontown faded from wider social history for a while, it is becoming better known, thanks in part to the 2022 documentary and a  historical marker for the site erected in 2024.

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