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Where Are the Women Architects?
By Despina Stratigakos PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-8029-4
CHAPTER 1
May Women Practice Architecture? The First Century of Debate
The question of women's absence from architecture has a surprisingly long history. In July 1872, women's rights advocate Julia Ward Howe gave a lecture on women artists to the Victorian Discussion Society in London. She wondered why architecture had no female practitioners, given what she saw as their aptitude for the field and potential contributions. "An architect ought to have taste," she reasoned. "Women ought to agitate to be articled to some of our architects, many of whom, unfortunately, have neither taste nor ideas, and could do nothing but calculate the bricks wanted, and the profits to be made." Howe's assumption that women possessed an innate sense of beauty and loftier spiritual and moral inclinations than profit-minded men reflects deeply held cultural notions of femininity in the Victorian period. For Howe, women's imaginative capacities and their natural disposition "for the higher functions of life" made architecture an occupation better suited to their characters than medicine, with its study of disease and anatomical dissection, to which, she noted with dismay, her female contemporaries dedicated themselves with "so much zeal."
Despite lobbying for women's inclusion in architecture, Howe was thus shaped by the ideals of her time. The finest women artists, she maintained in her speech to the Victorian Discussion Society, were also "the very best daughters, wives, and the most tender mothers." Even as they achieved success in their new vocations, these women "never forgot the broom, the frying-pans, the blankets and the sheets — those indispensable adjuncts of a comfortable household, over their paintbrushes, color, and canvas." The insistence that women would not forsake hearth for career was not an uncommon assertion made by early suffragists, partly because it helped to assuage both male and female anxieties about a disruption in the "natural" order of the sexes. At the same time, many such activists genuinely believed that a woman's value, both at home and in the public sphere, was rooted in her biological differences, particularly her supposedly inborn domestic and maternal nature. Seen from this perspective, women would contribute to the greater social good by bringing their "essential" womanliness, honed by rocking the cradle and sweeping the floor, to the public sphere rather than by leaving it behind to become more like men.
When, in 1880, Margaret Hicks became the first women to graduate from Cornell University's new architecture program, newspaper reports about her echoed Howe in wondering why women had not entered the profession "long ago" and in assuming that woman architects would remain closely tied to the domestic sphere — if not by brandishing a broom, then by designing the closet for it. "If anyone knows what a house should be," reported the Washington Post, "it is the woman who is to live in it." The Cincinnati Enquirer went a step further in suggesting that female designers limit their interventions to the nonpublic, housekeeping areas of the home: "If the woman architect will devote herself to kitchens and cellars, and closet-rooms and servants' sleeping-rooms, the world will be better for her appearance." Hicks herself, while not departing entirely from domestic concerns, had larger ambitions: her graduate thesis addressed tenement housing reform.
Those determined, however, to keep architecture a male preserve were unwilling to make any such concessions. Opponents to integration were numerous, they often occupied powerful positions, and they were decidedly vocal in their resistance. In 1902, Thomas Raggles Davison, editor of the British Architect, published an article titled "May Women Practise Architecture?," in which he concluded that they may not. Like many other male critics, he assumed a chivalrous tone, presenting himself as the protector not only of architecture but of women as well. For in his view, the traits with which nature had endowed a woman and made her so irresistible to a man were precisely those that made her unsuitable for the building profession. In particular, Davison argued that women were "temperamentally unfitted" to the "production of good architectural design," their "lightness of touch," "changeability," and "charming" decorativeness lacking the masculine "strength of handling," "steadfastness of view," and "judicious reserve" needed for architecture. He maintained that "in the supreme and essential qualities of fine architecture a woman is by nature heavily handicapped." But then came the chivalrous silver lining: "May we not say — as a mere man of course — we are glad it is so, for that which is deterrent to her higher attainment in the practice of the art of architecture makes for her chiefest charm and glory as a woman."
In Germany, Karl Scheffler, a popular and influential architectural critic, published a treatise on gender and creativity in 1908 in which he similarly defended the inequality of the sexes in the realm of art while largely dropping Davison's chivalrous veneer. Women who contradicted nature and recklessly pursued artistic productivity, he claimed, paid the price with their femininity. They became "irritable hermaphroditic creatures" who might suffer from a hypertrophy of the sex drive, leading to prostitution, or, more often, from lesbianism, which he warned was "terribly rife" among women artists of his day. Beyond the personal and social costs of such deviancy, the arts themselves were put at risk. This was particularly true of architecture, which Scheffler considered among the most masculine. "Woman," he thus declared, "must stay very far away from architecture." Indeed, Scheffler believed that men with feminine qualities must also be discouraged from entering the field. The following year, writing about the nature of an architect's work, he emphasized the exalted masculinity required. "Our times," he asserted, "are anxious for men who are at once capable of idea and deed." The architect pursues "a man's supreme yearnings" and possesses "great, masculine qualities." Rugged, energetic, autocratic, he is, Scheffler contended, "a man of action."
Two years later, German architect Otto Bartning echoed these sentiments in his 1911 article "Should Women Build?" Like Davison before him, Bartning was distinctly unenthusiastic about the idea, claiming that women produced feminine or weak architecture because they listened all too readily to the client. A collaborative approach to design, he insisted, undermined the masculine ideal of the architect's autonomy. In particular, Bartning rejected the participation of the housewife in the design process, arguing that her "often troublesome wishes" destroyed the "strict lawfulness" of the plan and led to the dominance of the "marginal" over the "fundamental," which he termed "feminine" architecture. In his view, strong architecture emerged from a definitively masculine process that was necessarily adversarial: the architect realized and imposed his vision in the face of "struggles, adversity, [and] misunderstandings." Ultimately, however, Bartning was concerned less with women architects than with their insufficiently virile male colleagues. He critiqued the "weakness of our contemporary architecture," arguing that what "our architecture needs to recover is truly not female architects but rather supremely manly men."
The strong resistance to women's efforts to integrate architecture, which extended beyond individuals to educational policies, school admissions, and professional associations, had a deep and lasting impact on the profession. Not only did it discourage and denigrate any so-called feminine traits in architectural practice, such as cooperation with the client, but it also raised the bar for men by producing a hypermasculine professional image defined by aggressive heterosexual virility. Howard Roark, the über-macho protagonist of Ayn Rand's hugely influential 1943 novel The Fountainhead, embodied the new ideal in fictional form. Roark, a "brilliant" architect, is represented as heroically violent, claiming his rights through masculine brutality. When his greatest work is defiled through compromise, he dynamites the finished building; scorned by a beautiful woman, he wins her over by a vicious sexual attack. Roark was, literally, a tough act to follow, and the novel possessed a cultlike status among architectural students for decades after it was published. By exalting such "heroes," early discourses against the feminine in architecture served not only to box out women but also to box in men.
Unsurprisingly, women architects resented being portrayed by their male colleagues and the media more broadly as sexual degenerates at worst and broom-closet designers at best. On rare occasions, the press itself acknowledged the discrepancy in views. "Women architects, it is said," as the Baltimore Sun reported in 1911, "resent the association of their names with closets. 'Just as if we couldn't build anything but closets,' one of them snapped the other day, 'and just as if any sensible man architect couldn't make all the closets that are necessary.'" Women architects occasionally went to great lengths — or heights — in their attempts to shift perceptions. In 1911, for example, Fay Kellog, a successful New York City architect, insisted on being interviewed while standing on "a perilously swinging beam," nine floors up, of a skyscraper that she was constructing. When Kellog was asked whether there were any special fields particularly well suited to women in architecture, she answered, "I don't think a woman architect ought to be satisfied with small pieces, but launch out into business buildings. That is where money and name are made. I don't approve of a well-equipped woman creeping along; let her leap ahead as men do. All she needs is courage." That Kellog herself possessed such courage was emphasized by the reporter's own terrified description of the architect happily swaying high above a New York City street.
Already within the first decades of entering architectural practice, women broadened their public image beyond the domestic sphere by designing buildings at worlds' fairs and other high-profile exhibitions. Most were pavilions showcasing women's work, which began to appear regularly at such fairs by the end of the nineteenth century. The widespread phenomenon of women's exhibition pavilions in the United States and Europe reflected growing efforts in Western countries to improve women's social and economic status by demonstrating in concrete, visible terms their contributions to hearth and nation. Women's buildings designed by women appeared at, among other venues, the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (by Sophia Hayden), the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta (by Elise Mercur), the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (by Sara Ward-Conley), the 1913 Leipzig International Book Fair (by Emilie Winkelmann), and the 1914 German Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (by Margarete Knüppelholz-Roeser). The Haus der Frau or women's pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition — an event considered by historians to be a watershed moment in the development of modern architecture — caused a stir because of its severe and boldly unornamented forms, prompting some design critics to argue that the pavilion's lack of "feminine grace" made it unsuitable as a women's building and to ridicule it as an architectural masquerade in men's clothing. Recalling Bartning's earlier criticism about architecture's need for supremely manly men, one vocal critic employed the masculine reputation of the women's pavilion to rebuke the male architects of the other exhibition buildings for not being, by comparison, manly enough. Twenty years earlier, Hayden's design for the Woman's Building at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition had been criticized on polar-opposite grounds. While its "femininity" was considered appropriate to a women's building, it was also blamed for producing a weak and timid impression, especially amid the other, "masterly," male-designed fair buildings.
Such judgments about gender and style reveal the difficult position women architects had to navigate in avoiding accusations of designing in a manner that was excessively feminine or masculine — terms that were, in any case, elusive and highly subjective. Although, as noted earlier, the policing of architecture's gendered borders also served to discipline men, who were compelled to better perform their heterosexual masculinity, the work of male architects was rarely judged on the basis of gender alone. A notable exception was the discourse on men's failings in domestic design and the consequent need for women architects. But even there, male architects' shortcomings were blamed less on an incapacity inherent to their gender and more on men's lack of interest and expertise, which, presumably, could be remedied if they tried (although trying too hard in this respect might make their masculinity suspect). In those rare cases in which a male architect's work was criticized for being "too feminine," the flaw was typically considered to lie with the individual, not with the gender itself (hence the demands made by Bartning and others that male architects "man up"). By contrast, a woman architect who was considered a professional success was often seen to have achieved this despite her gender.
In the same period of exhibition building, women architects also entered and won numerous prestigious architectural competitions, further bringing attention to the broad range of women architects' work. In 1894, for example, two young women barely out of their teens, Alice Hands and Mary Gannon, who formed the United States' first female architectural partnership, won the competition for the Florence Hospital in San Francisco. When built, their design was lauded as "the finest and most practicable sanitarium on the Pacific Coast." In 1907, Emilie Winkelmann, the first woman to open an architecture firm in Germany, won a competition for a large entertainment center near Alexanderplatz in Berlin. She earned high praise for her ingenious design solution for the irregular plot, which had stumped her male competitors (as the Residenz-Casino, it became one of the city's most famous dance halls of the Weimar era). Two years later, in 1909, London-based Ethel Charles, the first female member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, won a competition for a church design in Berlin over two hundred other architects. In 1915, another female architectural partnership, Anna Schenk and Marcia Mead, won a City Club of Chicago competition that asked architects to design an urban neighborhood center anywhere in the United States. Their project proposed a redesign of a one-mile-square area of the Bronx to provide residents with services closer to home, such as social clubs, parks, and schools. In 1928, a collective gasp was heard in the architectural world when the winner of the international competition for the new Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford-on-Avon, one of England's most prestigious public buildings, was revealed to be a young woman and recent graduate of the Architectural Association School in London, Elizabeth Scott. Her simple, functionalist design — an important early example of modernism in England — was selected over the proposals of seventy-one male architects competing from Canada, Britain, and the United States. Scott's victory was widely reported in the international press with headlines such as "Girl Architect Beats Men."
But despite such successes, stereotypes of women architects as the profession's misfits, best consigned to domestic or interior design, proved stubbornly resistant to change. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century and into the 1960s and 1970s, appeals continued to be made in the North American and European press for women to take up architecture in order to ameliorate poorly designed housing — "like cures like," it was said. Women architects had long decried the limitations of this strategy; in 1891, Louise Bethune, who had opened a highly successful architecture firm in Buffalo the previous decade, warned that house building was the "worst-paid work an architect ever does," a sentiment later echoed by Fay Kellog. The housing boom in the decades after the Second World War, however, seemed to offer lucrative new possibilities to women architects who marketed themselves as domestic specialists. A 1966 Chicago Tribune feature on Jean Wehrheim, a licensed architect with a successful residential design practice in Chicago, described her as an "attractive, vivacious young homemaker" and quoted her encouraging more women to consider a career in architecture: "'We have a natural inclination for designing homes,' she said. 'Men seem to prefer big projects, like offices and public buildings, but I know what I am doing when it comes to designing a kitchen.'"
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Excerpted from Where Are the Women Architects? by Despina Stratigakos. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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