The Incredible True Adventures of the Architectress in America

Gabrielle Esperdy


Left: Ms. Magazine, inaugural issue, summer 1972. Right: Faculty and students of the Women's School of Architecture and Planning Summer Plan, 1975. [Images courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]

Forty years ago this summer, Ms. fabricated its debut every bit a monthly mag for feminists, appealing to "an audience of the converted, or at least the willing prospects." 1 Outcome #1 hit the newsstands in July 1972 with headlines that trumpeted the editorial agenda: Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir, paid housework, body hair. On the cover was a full-color analogy promoting Wonder Woman for President, inked by legendary DC Comic artist White potato Anderson, depicting the superheroine equally larger than life, in red, white and bluish with her golden tiara and magic lasso, towering higher up a tidy Main Street. Inside the issue, the National Organization for Women, in its offset public service advertizement, provided a whammy of a tagline: "Womanpower. It's much as well skilful to waste." With sly humor, the ad argued that women in the workplace should exist judged past their qualifications, not their appearances. "In a world where women are doctors, lawyers, judges, brokers, economists, scientists, political candidates, professors, and visitor presidents, any other viewpoint is ridiculous." two

You accept undoubtedly noted that architects are missing from that long list, merely at that place were plenty of women in the profession in 1972. In fact, at that very moment, many of them were brandishing sufficient womanpower to make a feminist superheroine proud. Women were creating feminist spatial practices and redefining compages itself; women were bringing feminist voices to existing systems and institutions and challenging the architectural establishment; women were forming new feminist alliances and addressing their own professional needs. The 40th ceremony of Ms. Magazine is the perfect occasion to revisit their amazing adventures fighting for gender equality in American compages.


Ms. Mag, At present public service annunciation, July 1972. [Image courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]

Mid-century Prelude

Past 1951 Joseph Hudnut had been around long enough to know a matter or two almost women — at least as students of architecture. He'd been dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1936 and had spent the decade earlier that at Columbia, which had been accepting women into the architecture program since 1910. There were women architecture students at Harvard, besides, though the school didn't let them to matriculate until 1942 — and then largely as a pragmatic response to declining male person enrollment during the state of war. Anne Griswold Tyng was amid the first to graduate, receiving her Masters in 1944. Even earlier, though, Hudnut would have encountered women studying architecture around Harvard, at Henry Atherton Frost's Cambridge School, officially an bookish unit of Smith College, but staffed with members of Hudnut's own faculty. 3 In either case, the class roster was impressive, and some stayed in Cambridge every bit practitioners after receiving their degrees, e.g., Eleanor Raymond, a pioneer of solar house blueprint; Sarah Pillsbury Harkness and Jean Bodman Fletcher, founding partners (with Walter Gropius, et al.) of The Architects Collaborative.

So past the early '50s Dean Hudnut was well positioned, he believed, to comment on the suitability to practice architecture of what he described as that "uncertain, coy and useful co-operative of the human being race," a.chiliad.a., women. He was besides well positioned, as a leading educator, to have his words on the subject area taken seriously. By his ain admission information technology was a "chivalrous impulse" that moved him to write in defence of women as designers in the pages of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. His self-stated goal was to refute the professional prejudices women confronted at mid-century even, equally Hudnut put information technology, "in the midst of our nowadays rage for social equality and justice." Today this seems an over-optimistic (to say the to the lowest degree) view of the early postwar period, only information technology seems that the nascent civil rights movement and "off-white bargain" ideology of the waning years of the Truman assistants prompted Hudnut to give compages's woman question some serious thought and to publish a two-part article titled "The Architectress." 4

In that afar and more than genteel era, when women wore gloves and men wore hats, was architectress every bit blench inducing as it is today? Probably not, though information technology is worth mentioning that the next most recent usage quoted in the OED is from 1860 (the ane before that, referring to female parent nature as "the first architectress," dates back to 1651). To give Hudnut the do good of the dubiousness, architectress was probably a convenience, less cumbersome than "woman-architect" or "lady architect" and fiddling different from actress or waitress even if, to a contemporary ear, it sounds as off-key as sculptress or adultress. Of class, Hudnut doesn't mention any of these occupations in "The Architectress." Instead, he compares the difficulties women faced in architecture to their relatively greater success in medicine, politics and bus driving. If women had made headway behind the bicycle because of a shortage of male drivers during the war (this goes unstated; it must have been considered self-axiomatic), they had made strides in other fields for more nuanced reasons; and Hudnut's deft explanations get to the heart of his arguments well-nigh the time to come of the architectress in America.


Left to correct: Joseph Hudnut [From Harvard Magazine]; Sarah Harkness and Jean Fletcher [From TAC]; Anne Tyng [From Anne Griswold Tyng Collection/The Architectural Athenaeum/Academy of Pennsylvania]

Hudnut attributes the success of women every bit politicians — this was their second generation in the U.Due south. Congress — to "our very rhetorical consciousness developed from the Declaration of Independence of woman as a (political) man being." Even if information technology tests credulity, Hudnut'due south optimistic interpretation of the national character goes downwards easy. We want to believe in it. His interpretation of the female grapheme is harder to swallow. Women accept progressed in medicine because "their very ancient competence equally baby-sitter" was hands transferred to the roles of nurse and so doctor. Information technology then followed, in Hudnut's schema, that women would progress in architecture once comparable innate abilities were by and large recognized.

In Hudnut's stance, these abilities included natural competence in manipulating human behavior (feminine wiles), a faculty for anterior and empathetic reasoning (women'southward intuition), and tact and conviction in matters of qualitative judgment (superior taste), all of which translated seamlessly into the art of client relations that was so critical to success in architecture. Hudnut, who admitted that as a immature professor he had been susceptible to "the long eyelashes" of a female person student, went so far every bit to state that he "shouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be woman's special and restricted sphere." Simply he did identify a predisposition for party planning as some other inborn and relevant female person skill. This was exemplified by Miss E., who had arrived at Harvard past way of Chicago and Smith and spent four years organizing fêtes charrettes of the highest caliber, arranging for music, decorations, cakes, ice creams, even gin to spike the punch. Seeing Miss Eastward. "at her drafting tabular array on the morning of a fête, sending out her committees in all directions," no ane could doubt "the capacity of a woman to manage the universe." Though Hudnut gives Miss E. ample credit for her organizational prowess, he remains silent on her skills as a designer.

Elsewhere, however, Hudnut emphasizes that if given the opportunity, "woman will show the equal of man" in all aspects of the profession: in art, business, and technology, in drafting details and sizing I-beams and engaging "that higher realm of the creative process which nosotros call pattern." That women "do not ask for as high a wage as men" was a nice bonus. (Hudnut overlooked the possibility that women might have been paid lower wages, rather than asking for them — something Architectural Record had already documented in 1948. 5) Fifty-fifty the well-nigh old-fashioned practitioners — the ones guarding the "masculine cocktail party" of the drafting room against an onslaught of women wearing "close-plumbing fixtures slacks" and "white sweater[s]" — could meet the value of cheap talent. But no matter how low were their salaries, or how tardily they worked into the night, or how many miscellaneous indignities they suffered, there was still a monumental obstruction confronting women in compages: union and family.

Some women, Hudnut conceded, had used marriage to advantage, forming successful professional partnerships with their husbands. The Fletchers and the Harknesses of TAC are contemporaneous examples that would take been familiar to Hudnut. half dozen In "The Architectress" he highlights the instance of the talented Miss van One thousand., who married "the near attractive, dumb, and ancestor-endowed man in her course," and had him drum up business organisation while she stayed at the office doing the blueprint work — in Hudnut's view, a perfectly sensible arrangement that "joyously defeats the conspiracy of society confronting the adult female-architect." Other women used marriage to salve themselves of "budgetary tyrannies," finding husbands wealthy enough to underwrite their architecture vocations. Hudnut saw no trouble with this approach either, fifty-fifty noting that marrying for money was 1 of the profession's "most venerable traditions."

The real problem, in Hudnut's view, was that "patterns of union" did not sit comfortably with "patterns of architecture." A successful architecture practice required the uninterrupted development of both business and art, making information technology difficult to accommodate pregnancy, childrearing and "the promotion of husbands." Women could piece of work as draftsmen and nonetheless discover time for "housekeeping and maternity," just this wasn't the same every bit being an architect. Still, Hudnut left the door to the pattern studio slightly ajar: if women devoted themselves to exercise earlier having children, they might reasonably expect to resume when their children were grown. Architecture favored maturity. Thus information technology might get the "refuge and solace" of women who would otherwise find themselves, at 45, with "goose egg to put into their lives but bridge, cocktail parties, and Florida."

It's not clear what impact — if any — Hudnut's observations had in the early '50s. seven Ellen Perry Berkeley has asserted, non happily, that the term architectress was in cursory usage mail service-Hudnut; but his articles prompted no letters to the editor or follow-up reports. 8 In fact, no one bothered to comment on them in print for some other 25 years, and by then times had changed. Hudnut assumed that well-nigh of his readers were architects and, by extension, men, and it'southward easy to imagine them smirking knowingly at his chummy, old-boy tone. Even when Hudnut is supposedly exposing the foibles of the male institution, and its absurd assumptions most women in the drafting studio, it's hard to tease out the satirical from the serious. In 1980, the editors of New Space for Women were clearly not smiling when they declared the articles "loathsome and patronizing." nine

Some other iii decades on, "The Architectress" fails to incite such indignation, probably because today the article seems then hopelessly out of engagement. The sexism is appalling, the peddling of negative social stereotypes contemptible; simply if Hudnut was a progressive architectural educator, he was also a privileged, white, heterosexual man, circa the mid-20th century. This isn't an acceptable excuse — Hudnut was simply the messenger anyway (and he was supportive of women in practise) — merely it does contextualize the casual misogyny of "The Architectress" and make it more comprehensible from our safe distance in the early 21st century.

There is danger in that distance. Gloria Steinem calls it "the Mad Men issue." 10 It's that convenient haze of nostalgia that allows us to wait upon — and even enjoy — shocking situations in the contempo past considering we are so convinced that such situations would exist impossible in our more than enlightened present. Thus is sexism in the compages profession in the eye of the last century rendered safe for consumption at the get-go of this century, at present that women have designed important buildings, won Pritzkers, made partner, become deans, gotten tenure and, in the U.s.a., correspond approximately 20 pct of practicing architects. No i would question women's considerable advances in the six decades since "The Architectress." But those advances didn't happen overnight and they didn't happen without attempt, organizing and activism. They didn't happen without feminist architects in the 70s "doing information technology for themselves."


Life Magazine: Special Report on Remarkable American Women, 1976. [Paradigm courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]  Julia Morgan, right, was the sole architect to appear in the outcome. [Epitome via Wikipedia]

Consciousness Raising

In the Bicentennial year of 1976, Life devoted a special issue to the achievements of American women since the Centennial. Of the 166 "remarkable American women" profiled in the magazine, there appeared only ane architect. It was, of course, Julia Morgan, who was celebrated non as an accomplished designer with a strong "creative impulse" only as one of the "winners in a human being's earth" who managed to take hold of "a share of the power" despite overwhelming social constraints. That compages was and then scantily represented in the outcome is not surprising: bated from icons like Morgan, few American women designers had accomplished sufficient prominence in the profession — and fifty-fifty fewer had achieved it outside the profession — to merit inclusion alongside such historical and contemporary cultural luminaries as Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem. What is surprising is the caste to which Life's editors recognized the sexist condition quo, observing that "among the professions talked about on these pages, perhaps none even today is a more exclusively male preserve than architecture." 11 If whatsoever of the women paging through that issue of Life were architects, maybe they smiled in recognition or, more probable, sighed in exasperation at such a truism — particularly if they were amidst those architects who had already been working to cease to that exclusivity and dismantle that preserve. And for those women architects and activists, in that location was, maybe, no more egregious embodiment of the profession every bit a male preserve than the American Institute of Architects.

Officially, the AIA had been open up to women since 1886, when Louise Blanchard Bethune became its first woman fellow member. Unofficially, women were often deterred from joining local AIA capacity and encouraged to join women'due south auxiliaries instead; and it seems that some women didn't realize that they were even eligible for membership, specially if they weren't registered. 12 (This isn't so surprising when we remember that women were denied membership in Alpha Rho Chi, the architecture fraternity founded in 1914.) Past the 1970s, merely one percent of AIA members were women (250 of 25,000). To be sure, since AIA membership is voluntary and non necessary for registration or practice, women could avoid the organization as they saw fit. But they could hardly ignore the AIA's influence and importance every bit the largest architecture organization in the nation, as the profession'south standard-bearer in America, and as a critical resource for advancement. It was for all of these reasons that a group of determined architects in the early 1970s decided the moment had arrived to demand that this oldest of boy's networks in architecture accommodate the girls as well, not only in proper name but in fact and in action. By 1973, they were fix to bring their demands to the attention of the full membership of the AIA.

In the spring of that year, the AIA's Resolutions Committee met to deliberate on which resolutions should be considered at the almanac convention in San Francisco in May. Submitted by local chapters, the resolutions covered various bug — from the pressing challenge of energy conservation to the more mundane matter of behest for government contracts. Information technology was the job of the half dozen-member committee to refer resolutions to the convention with recommendations for approval or disapproval, or without comment. The 2nd resolution under consideration, co-sponsored by local capacity in New York Metropolis, Boston, and New Jersey, dealt with the "Status of Women in the Architectural Profession." 1 of the resolution'due south pb authors was Judith Edelman, a Columbia graduate and a partner in Edelman and Saltzman Architects, known for its award-winning renovation of ix Upper W Side brownstones into the 9G Cooperative Apartments. Edelman was also the first woman elected to the executive commission of AIA New York, and although "distressed to observe the AIA such an exclusive gentleman'due south lodge," she believed that to avoid the Plant would exist to avert total participation in the profession. If women hoped "to make their presence felt," it was essential, Edelman felt, that they be active in the AIA. The purpose of the resolution on the status of women was to encourage that activity. 13 The preamble put information technology bluntly: "In club at large we are in the midst of a struggle for women'southward rights brought into abrupt focus by the current feminist motility. AIA and the architectural profession have not responded to this climate of modify." 14


Members of the System of Women in Compages, 1973. [Image courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]

By the early '70s, the results of this climate of alter were noun across the nation: Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act guaranteed equal employment opportunities for women; Lyndon Johnson's 1967 Executive Order 11375 included women in affirmative activity; Title IX of the 1972 Pedagogy Amendments Human activity ended gender discrimination at colleges and universities and that same year Congress passed the Equal Rights Subpoena. fifteen Conspicuously it was not unreasonable for American women (or at to the lowest degree those white, centre-class American women most active in the feminist movement) to be optimistic — fifty-fifty to feel an unparalleled sense of forward momentum. Nor was information technology unreasonable for American women architects — in those days less than four percentage of all practitioners — to desire and demand that the profession acknowledge the progress and so sweeping across America, not simply in federal legislation but in grass-roots organizing as well.

The early '70s indeed saw a wave of such grass-roots activism every bit women architects, frustrated by the apparent unresponsiveness of the professional establishment, followed the lead of the rise feminist movement and organized independent groups to further their goals — notably the need for professional equity and equality. Particularly in major urban areas, both coastal and mid-western, where the bulk of women practitioners were concentrated, they centrolineal to create professional communities that would ascertain their identities as architects by validating their experience equally women. But while these groups operated outside the establishment, they were still, to borrow the term sociologist Maren Lockwood Carden used in a 1975 Ford Foundation Study, "establishment-related," considering they were dedicated to transforming the architecture profession rather than proposing radical alternatives to architectural practice. sixteen For many women in the early '70s, activism was an inside/outside proposition: they would piece of work to effect change inside the AIA itself even every bit they devoted their energies to contained feminist architectural organizations.

In Los Angeles, the feminist ferment reinvigorated the last surviving affiliate of the national architectural sorority founded in 1915; information technology reconstituted itself every bit the deliberately inclusive Association for Women in Architecture (AWA-LA), expanded its program of scholarships and exhibitions, and conducted an employment survey of 50.A. firms. 17 On the contrary coast, 1 of the primeval of the newly formed groups was Women Architects, Landscape Architects, and Planners, or WALAP, organized in November 1971 by Dolores Hayden, so still a student at the Harvard GSD (and now a professor at Yale). Past the fourth dimension of its beginning open up coming together in spring 1972, WALAP was agitating to brand the design professions more responsive to the realities of women's lives, eastward.one thousand., advocating for flexible work schedules and for registration credit for part-time practice. The group's work enjoyed national exposure when Architectural Forum published an commodity written collectively past WALAP members in September 1972. 18

WALAP's commodity appeared along with a groundbreaking account of gender discrimination in the profession written by Ellen Perry Berkeley. "Women in Architecture" may non take been the first article in the American compages press to accost the topic but,pace Hudnut, information technology was certainly the nearly comprehensive to date and was notable for its refreshing frankness, lack of condescension, and focus on new activist groups. 19 And then a senior editor at Forum, Berkeley was also a founding member (forth with Judith Edelman) of New York Urban center'southward Alliance of Women in Architecture (AWA), which had been running workshops on education, career counseling and discrimination since the summer of '72. Berkeley did non pull punches every bit she examined, both anecdotally and with the scant statistics bachelor, the dismal situation of women in the profession. She was especially difficult-striking in her assessment of the AIA, which she criticized not simply for failing to grapple with bigotry but also for denying that bigotry even existed in the field. Not simply did Berkeley quote AIA leaders making uninformed statements ("I'm not aware of our schools discouraging women," said one official; "At that place'south no discrimination at all," said another); she also seemed to relish the adventure to skewer them in the process. Berkeley concluded that this kind of disingenuous denial couldn't perhaps last; she expressed hope that women practitioners' demands were probable to be heard at the upcoming convention in San Francisco — the theme of which was "the claiming of modify and growth" 20 — and that the Plant was "at least peripherally aware of the new women's movement in architecture." 21


New York State Clan of Architects Convention, Women in the Profession seminar, 1973. From Empire State Architect, December 1973. [Image courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]

"Women in Architecture" gave the nascent movement real momentum. In fact, the Organization of Women Architects, founded in the Bay Area in the autumn of 1972 and yet in existence today, credited Berkeley's impassioned piece as its early inspiration. 22 Notably, when the OWA formalized its organizational construction, it rejected the top-downwards hierarchy exemplified past the AIA; instead of a president/vice president model, it adopted a horizontal, steering-committee structure that emphasized cooperation and consensus-building. OWA members shared experiences, both professional and personal, and brainstormed virtually how to balance the demands of their careers equally architects and their lives as women. The system offered intensive support, helping members to get licensed (fifty-fifty providing personal coaching for registration exams), to observe jobs, and to increase their visibility both within the field and amid the public. More significantly, the OWA decided to collect concrete information about Bay Surface area women in architecture and centrolineal design fields and to establish a resource "data bank"; information technology then intended to employ this information to encourage local, male-dominated firms to rent women. 23

Simple contact with other women practitioners was crucial as well: Lucia Bogatay, a San Francisco architect who joined in 1973, underscored the sense of professional isolation that drove the group to organize when she recalled that the OWA helped her "finish feeling like a freak" for existence an architect. 24 Fifty-fifty an architect equally successful as Natalie de Blois, who claimed to have never felt overt sexism during her long career as a senior designer with SOM, recalled the satisfaction of "getting together with like[-minded] women, and supporting them in whatever way nosotros could" through Chicago Women in Compages — another group founded in the early on '70s and still around today. 25

To the Convention and Beyond

The OWA was never shy about its consciousness-raising agenda, nor most its intention to entrance hall forcefully when tens of thousands of AIA members gathered in its hometown for the '73 convention, merely months after the group first met. To that end, the OWA secured a booth in the exhibitor'south hall to display an eight-foot-high photomural depicting what the San Francisco Relate described as "fifty smiling women architects." Likely the first instance of a women's organization participating directly in an AIA convention, the booth was intended, as the OWA put information technology, "to evidence this predominantly male system how many women in that location are, a way of having us all there, more or less in the flesh." 26 Meanwhile, the AIA's Resolutions Committee — chaired past Richard F. Hansen of Iowa — was besides preparing for the convention; it was debating whether to include "the Status of Women in the Architectural Profession" on the official agenda. The resolution requested that the AIA address four urgent bug, three external and 1 internal: 1) under-representation in a profession which exemplified "an extreme in male domination"; two) inequality in opportunity caused past discriminatory hiring policies and the persistence of gender stereotypes throughout the edifice manufacture; 3) inequality in pay; and 4) discrimination by omission, evident in the AIA's own ranks, which counted few women as officers, directors and chairpersons, or even every bit members of committees and award juries. (Does it go without maxim that the commission considering a resolution on the condition of women was comprised entirely of men?) 27

At the business concern meeting of the convention, on May 9th, committee chair Hansen read the resolution "on the status of women in the architectural profession" and moved that information technology be approved. But somewhere between the initial distribution of the committee's report and the showtime of the coming together, the diction of the resolution had changed, subtly but significantly. Somehow all references to the AIA's previous lack of action or culpability — the statement that the "AIA and the architectural profession have non responded to [the prevailing] climate of change," for instance — were removed from the preamble. What remained was a more generalized call to include women in the Plant's existing efforts to "redress the inequities of racial minorities." Still, the resolution was not without teeth, explicitly mandating that "the AIA have activity to integrate women into all aspects of the profession equally total participants," and that information technology conduct a written report on the issues and study the findings to the board of directors. 28

In acknowledging gender inequality in the profession, these provisions all but guaranteed that the resolution would generate controversy, if not procedural maneuvering, on the convention flooring. Preservationist Giorgio Cavaglieri of the co-sponsoring New York affiliate seconded the motion to approve the revised resolution, and then Anna Halpin, besides of New York and a resolution co-author, stressed the importance of "implementation" and not merely "lip service" in social club to make similar time to come resolutions unnecessary. 29 At which indicate King Allen of San Francisco, AIA young man and by president, argued that the electric current resolution wasn't even necessary because the profession had already started to alter — to pass it would just "accentuate the difference." Ultimately he did offering grudging support, but only upon learning that one of the Institute's "lady members" hadn't been permitted to sign copies of a book she had co-authored considering but men were immune to sign books displayed in the exhibit area. Amid the full general laughter that followed this chestnut, Allen proposed an amendment to the resolution: he wanted to eliminate the call to remove sexist language from AIA documents and publications, arguing that it was undignified and would practise nothing to "advance the position of women in the profession." 30 Despite opposition from the resolution's sponsors, Allen's amendment passed without further annotate.

It seemed the resolution was ready to be put to a vote, merely then the AIA treasurer, Elmer Botsai, of Hawaii, took the floor to speak against it, acknowledging that he risked existence viewed as a male chauvinist — a annotate that patently provoked more laughter than acrimony. At first Botsai framed his objections as points of practicality: he argued that federal affirmative activeness and equal employment laws made it redundant for the AIA to take a position. Only when he then claimed that the resolution was not "in the best interest of the AIA," that it amounted to a "maternity resolution," and that it addressed concerns that were neither the "responsibleness" nor "fault" of the Establish, his display of male person chauvinism unwittingly underscored exactly why the resolution would not be redundant at all, and why it was so important that it be approved. 31

And once the voting finally began, it became credible that Botsai was hardly lone. After an initial phonation vote was declared too shut to telephone call, the AIA president, Scott Ferebee of Due north Carolina, asked for a evidence of hands; when this too revealed no clear majority, Ferebee asked members to stand up and be counted. Every bit this was getting underway, a roll call vote was requested from the flooring; when the votes were finally tallied, the resolution had passed, despite what supporters recalled as "stiff opposition." 32 The AIA had at present officially pledged to improve the condition of women in architecture.

Every bit it turned out, passing the resolution was the like shooting fish in a barrel part; implementing its goals would prove more difficult, and not because of the recalcitrance of the AIA as an institution but because of the entrenched sexism of the AIA membership as a profession. Still, when the newly created "Women and Minorities" Subcommittee of the Personnel Practices Committee convened in February 1974, iv of its eight members — veterans of such alternative organizations equally the OWA, the AWA, and the CWA — were determined to brand a difference, and they set to work on the mandated report 33 The key component was a survey of practicing architects (ane,600 women and 1,100 men), who were asked most their education, work history, income, marital condition and professional person memberships, too equally their attitudes toward the profession, experiences of discrimination and ideas virtually equal employment opportunities. The final report, presented starting time to the AIA board and and then to the 1974 convention in Washington, D.C., was unequivocal. 34 As it concluded: "Dramatic evidence is at present before us substantiating the allegations of discrimination confronting women architects." 35 The statistics were revealing but non unexpected: roughly 99 per centum of male respondents were registered compared to 62 per centum of women; 67 percent of men were firm principals or partners compared to 29 percent of women; men earned, on average, xl percent more women. More remarkable were the women'southward comments about their professional anxieties — topics ranged from sexual harassment, to the drinking glass ceiling, to the sense of being unwelcome in the AIA — and about the frustration, disillusionment, anger, regret, paralysis and cynicism that followed so predictably from the experience of discrimination.

This 1974 study became the basis for a more detailed Affirmative Action Plan, which the subcommittee — now elevated to the condition of an AIA Chore Force — completed in December 1975. This afterwards document, presented to the membership in a special study in January 1976, credited the women'southward movement for providing "the impetus for women architects to speak out and … take action to redress the inequities experienced by women in the profession." 36 It as well emphasized that the Found's contempo progress was due mainly to "achievements at grass roots levels" — that is, the work of local capacity, such equally AIA New York'southward sponsorship of the 1974 exhibition Women in Compages (which Ada Louise Huxtable reviewed favorably in The New York Times). 37 The Affirmative Action Program too noted that local capacity were increasingly partnering with women'south architecture groups. It commended these groups — WALAP, AWA, and OWA amid them — for offering alternative communities, and for sponsoring activities such as the Women's School of Planning and Architecture, which offered its beginning summer plan in Maine in 1975 (and would operate until 1981), and the 1974 West Coast Women's Design Conference, at the Academy of Oregon, where Denise Scott Brown gave the talk that would later exist published as the influential "Room at the Top: Sexism and the Star System in Architecture." As a issue of these emerging networks and new events, women were no longer forced, as the Affirmative Action Plan put it, "to live in complete professional isolation."38

Despite this progress, the Task Force fabricated it patently clear that to integrate women fully into architecture there was still much to be done — by the Plant, the schools, the accrediting boards, business firm principals, even past women themselves. Women, the Action Plan argued, would need to address "the public image of the builder," identified every bit a "problem area" because it was then overwhelmingly identified with men; to alter this image, the report argued, women should work to "increment public awareness of the contribution of women architects in the blueprint of the built environment." Another problem area was "the breach of women architects from the AIA," which had not "developed in a vacuum" and would non exist "resolved overnight." Nonetheless, the Task Force was confident that during an initial four-year period (1976 to 1980), affirmative action would yield profound change. The first step was for every AIA chapter to undertake "a candid analysis" of its handling of women to reveal "covert tool[s]" and "mutual practices" of discrimination. The Task Forcefulness was unflinching about the Constitute'southward responsibility; unless it acted decisively to integrate women, the historical perception of the American Institute of Architects, as an "exclusive lodge for white male architects," would persist as contemporary reality. Declining to deed would not harm simply the organization; it would "shortchang[e] our whole profession." 39

In the years following the Affirmative Activity Programme, women in American compages stepped increasingly into the spotlight in a serial of groundbreaking exhibitions and publications. Notable early on works include Susana Torre's Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Gimmicky Perspective, a 1977 Brooklyn Museum exhibition and book; and, from the aforementioned year, "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture," Gwendolyn Wright'due south contribution to Spiro Kostof's classic study, The Architect: Capacity in the History of the Profession. These projects of feminist scholarship had their own momentum, and the notices they received in the professional person and pop press represented precisely the kind of good publicity-cum-affirmative activity that the Task Force had embraced. 40

For its role, the AIA continued to promote women'due south professional integration in these aforementioned years. In 1976, it removed sexist language from its career materials and called on manufacturers to cease using nude and scantily clad models in product literature and ad; in 1978, it resolved to concord the annual convention only in states that had ratified the Equal Rights Amendment; in 1979, information technology established a "nationwide network" to foster discussion of women'south issues; and in 1981, it launched a high school outreach plan to encourage women and minorities to enter the field. Finally, in 1983, a decade subsequently the passage of the resolution on the condition of women, AIA President Robert Broshar declared to the national convention that "women are entering the profession in a significant number." While he was not yet ready to proclaim an cease to the "battle" for inclusion that began in the 1970s, he was confident that "architecture is not the male domain it has been in the past." 41

Ane wonders why he was so certain. At that moment, the latest statistics almost women in the field would take been gleaned from a 1981 replication of the original 1974 survey, this fourth dimension conducted past the AIA Periodical, and from a 1983 follow-up by the Affirmative Action Committee; and each survey provoked skepticism near the extent of women'south progress. While more women were earning degrees (17 percent for the available's, 21 percent for the master'southward), inbound the profession (vi.7 percent of the field in 1980), and joining the AIA (5.9 percent of its members), the surveys also establish that women connected to lag well backside men in condign registered (56 percent of women compared with xc per centum of men) and that, more than always, they were suffering the effects of discrimination in the office and the academy (56 percentage at work, 46 percent at schoolhouse). 42

These ii women'southward surveys were not connected to the biennial surveys the AIA commenced in 1979 to collect information near the size, staffing, projects, acquirement and compensation of member firms. Indeed, it was not until 1991 (coincidently, the yr Denise Scott Brown was not awarded the Pritzker Prize forth with Robert Venturi) that the AIA finally included gender on its questionnaires. Past and then information technology could report that among member firms, where men outnumbered women by a ratio of three to ane, women accounted for 8 percent of licensed architects, 25 percentage of interns, and twenty per centum of technical staffers. They also accounted for a whopping 71 pct of non-technical and authoritative employees; in short, not exactly the presence in the profession that Judith Edelman had called for back in the activist '70s. 43 Nonetheless, afterwards that year, when the AIA membership elected Susan A. Maxman of Philadelphia as its president, a milestone was reached; when Maxman took office in 1992, the first woman president in the Establish'southward 134-year history was considered a significant story by no less thanThe New York Times.


Elevation, left to right: Ellen Perry Berkeley. [From Elderberry Press]; Dolores Hayden. [From Serious Ladies Looking Skillful]; Natalie de Blois. [Courtesy of Gabrielle Esperdy]. Bottom left, Denise Scott Brown. [From The Invisible in Architecture, Roemer van Toorn]; lesser right, Judith Edelman. [From ESKW/A]

Embracing the Architectress

This past jump, ii decades after a woman became AIA president, Judith Edelman was asked if she thought the 1973 resolution she had co-authored on the status of women in architecture had been effective. "I didn't think so, for many years," she said. "I just don't know. But I think it got women across the country to know each other and to exist involved with each other's diverse situations. And information technology was quite interesting in that respect." And so hither nosotros are in 2012, with decades of progress towards women'southward full participation in architecture behind us, and a central architect-activist of the '70s and '80s seems more interested in the networks and communities that resulted than in their statistical accomplishments. Possibly this is the best way to appraise the legacy of that era. No i would deny that women have advanced considerably, making room for themselves in architecture as designers, educators and advocates. This is axiomatic in the work of private practitioners, scholars and leaders, and also in ongoing initiatives of the AIA (and related organizations like the AIAS, NCARB, NAAB and ACSA), the Organization of Women Architects and Blueprint Professionals, and, in the past decade, the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. To borrow (inevitably) the '70s-era Virginia Slims slogan, "You've come a long way, infant."

Just not far enough. Gimmicky statistics about women in architecture in the U.S. vary widely. Nigh generously, it is possible to claim that betwixt 20 and 25 percent of practitioners are women; withal, this figures drops when only licensed architects are included: women account for xx percent of licensed architects at AIA member firms, but simply ten to 15 percent of licensed practitioners in the profession. It is in the schools, both undergraduate and graduate, that women have made the greatest advances. Since the mid-2000s, women accept comprised over 40 percent of graduating students in accredited programs. 44 Which means, of grade, that there exists a big gap between the number of graduates and the number of professionals. How to ready this? Astonishingly, many of the solutions currently proposed — streamlining the internship and registration procedure, allowing for more flexible piece of work schedules, counseling women to assume leadership positions at firms and the AIA — are identical to those which activist women architects rallied around four decades ago. 45

How did we get here (again)? I would argue that besides oftentimes today, despite ongoing efforts to achieve diversity and inclusivity, there is a tendency, especially in the backwash of '90s-era identity politics, to efface gender difference and to avoid the F-word, effectively disallowing the conjugation of "woman" + "architect." 46 Simply if the electric current climate of divisive politics and cheeky punditry is teaching us annihilation, information technology is that gender deviation is live and thriving, equally political tool and rhetorical device, and that in architecture, as in the larger culture, nosotros ignore it at our own peril. Maybe the time has come to build those women'south architectural networks and communities anew. We can't return to '70s-style feminism — the influence of disquisitional theory, queer theory, and even mail-feminism and postal service-theory, has been too profound. Merely we can still learn a affair or 2 from our sisters back in the solar day, and their old-school grass-roots techniques are hands transferable to the new media of this century.

So let me conclude with a minor proposal that borrows strategically from the history of '70s organizing and activism. Let'south mentor a new generation of architects who are as proud to be women as they are proud to be designers. And permit'southward starting time by taking back the "architectress," by infusing that blench-inducing, condescending, mid-century term of opprobrium with some born-this-style, boot-ass, grrrl-power, retro absurd. Imagine Architectress t-shirts and Architectress tattoos, Architectress blogs and Architectress fansites, Architectress flash mobs and Architectress meetups. Imagine Architectress going viral. Imagine Architectress superheroine activity figures on the shelf adjacent to Architect Barbie.

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About the Serial: Women in Architecture

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Author'south Annotation
Notes
  1. Linda Charlton, "Feminists vs. the Media: Signs of Change," The New York Times, March 14, 1972.   See as well "Ms., A Magazine for Feminists," The New York Times, Oct 28, 1971.
  2. National System for Women, "'Hire him. He'due south got nifty legs.' [advertisement]," Ms., July 1972, 46.
  3. On the Cambridge School, see Dorothy May Anderson, "The Cambridge School: An Extraordinary Professional Education," Compages: A Identify for Women (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1989). On Hudnut's tenure at Harvard, see Jill Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus Legacy at Harvard (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).
  4. Joseph Hudnut, "The Architectress," Journal of the American Plant of Architects (March 1951): 111-16 and (April 1951): 181-88.
  5. Come across "A G Women in Architecture, Office I," Architectural Record (March 1948): 105. See also note seven.
  6. Gwendolyn Wright discusses them briefly in "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture," The Builder: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford, 1986): 292.
  7. Ii surveys bracket the decade. In 1948 Architectural Record worked with compages schools deans and the national sorority Blastoff Alpha Gamma, also known as the Association of Women in Compages, to compile a listing of women who had studied architecture in the U.S. and to survey their professional person activities. See "A K Women in Compages, Part I," 105. This article also included a portfolio of work, as did "A Thousand Women in Architecture, Part Two," which appeared in the June issue. In 1958, Rose Connor, a California practitioner and AIA fellow member, scrutinized records of Architectural Registration Boards in all l states and concluded that 320 registered architects were women; this was 1 pct of all registered architects in the US. See "Women in Architecture Timeline," Almanac of Architecture and Design, eds. James P. Cramer and Jennifer Evans Yankopolus (Atlanta: Greenway Communications, 2005): 398. Also in 1958, Pietro Belluschi, then dean at MIT, wrote discouragingly nearly architectural opportunities for women, concluding that simply "the exceptional 1" would succeed. The New York Life Insurance Company commissioned "Should Your Kid exist an Architect" equally part of a career planning serial for parents, publishing it in pop magazines like Life and Look and circulating information technology as a brochure.
  8. Ellen Perry Berkeley, "Introduction," Architecture: A Identify for Women, iii. Berkeley describes the term equally "condescending" and Hudnut'due south articles equally "savage." Berkeley'due south journalism is discussed below.
  9. Gerda R. Wekerle, Rebecca Peterson, David Morley, eds., New Space for Women (Boulder: Westview Printing, 1980): 216. Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright described him equally "smug" in "Architecture and Urban Planning," Signs one (Summer 1976): 923.
  10. Meet Alex Strachan, "Gloria Steinem: 'This Generation of Women is More Feminist than We Always Were," National Post of Canada, August nineteen, 2011. See also Meghan Casserly, "The Mad Men Event: What'due south the Bargain with Other Era Sexism?" Forbeswoman Blog, Forbes Magazine Online, March 24, 2012,
  11. "Remarkable American Women, 1776-1976," Life Magazine Special Written report (1976): 27.
  12. This history is described in "Job Force on Women in Architecture of the Personnel Practices Committee via the Commission of Professional person Practice," Women in Architecture: Report to the AIA Board of Directors (Washington: American Institute of Architects, 1974): iv, 12.
  13. AIA Resolutions Commission, Report of the AIA Resolutions Committee (Washington: American Plant of Architects, 1973): 3. Meet AIA Archives, Records of the Resolutions Commission.
  14. The Equal Rights Subpoena was passed past both houses of the U.S. Congress in 1972 and endorsed by President Richard Nixon; but it failed to be ratified by the requisite number of states (38) before the mandated deadline of 1982, and as a result did not become an amendment to the U.Due south. Constitution.
  15. Maren Lockwood Carden, Feminism in the Mid-1970s: The Non-Establishment, the Institution and the Future (New York: Ford Foundation, 1977): 7-8. Carden's report makes no mention of women's architecture groups. Radical alternative organizations include several well-documented feminist spatial experiments in and around Los Angeles, such equally Womanhouse, organized by artists Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago in 1972 as part of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts; the Woman'southward Edifice, founded by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Arlene Raven in 1973; and the Women'southward Design Programme at CalArts that de Bretteville launched in 1971. See Sandra Sider, "WOMANHOUSE: Cradle of Feminist Art," Art Spaces Archives Project, 2010. On the Woman'due south Edifice, come across The Woman'due south Building, and also Jori Finkel, "Remembering the Landmark Woman's Building," Los Angeles Times, xv January 2012. See also Patricia A. Morton, "The Social and the Poetic: Feminist Practices in Architecture 1970-2000," in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones (New York & London: Routledge, 2003): 277-282.
  16. On the history of AWA-LA see the grouping's website. Meet also Berkeley, "Women in Compages," 49.
  17. WALAP, "The Case for Flexible Piece of work Schedules," Architectural Forum 137 (September 1972), 53, 66. Contributors are identified in a footnote and included Joan Forrester Sprague and Sarah Harkness, both also agile in the AIA.
  18. Berkeley, "Women in Architecture," 46-53. In addition to WALAP, Berkeley discusses the Women's Architectural Review Movement (WARM), the Brotherhood of Women in Architecture (AWA), and Women in Environmental Design (Wed), too as l'Union Internationale des Femmes Architectes (UIFA), an international system founded in 1964.
  19. Come across "Address by AIA President S. Scott Ferebee" in 1973 AIA Convention Transcript, n.p. [unpublished typescript, The American Found of Architects Archives].
  20. Berkeley, "Women in Compages," 46, 50.
  21. Inge Horton, "Presentation on the History of OWA at the Colegio de Arquitectos in Quito, Ecuador," OWA Newsletter, July 2003.
  22. See Joanne Williams, "Constructing an Prototype," California Living, August 15, 1976. Come across too OWA Newsletters, 1972-1976 [International Annal of Women in Compages, Ms88-080].
  23. Quoted in Ruthe Stein, "Women Architects in the Flesh," San Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 1978, N19.
  24. Betty J. Blum, interviewer, Oral History of Natalie de Blois, Chicago Architects Oral History Projection (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2004), 108-9
  25. Stein, 19. The AIA provided Berth #815 free of charge to the OWA, though members weren't sure if this was because the institute realized "it was fourth dimension to face up reality" or simply wanted to "make a expert impression."
  26. On the office of the New York City, Boston and New Jersey sponsoring chapters, the resolution was to some extent an attempt to rectify past failures, notably at the 1972 convention in Houston. There, women's groups from New York and Boston had submitted (with their chapters' endorsement) a final-minute proposal for "consideration and activity" on women in the profession. The proposal was denied resolution condition and non taken to a vote of the full membership precisely because information technology had not been brought earlier the committee prior to the convention. And while the fact of the "consideration and activity" proposal was noted in the Houston convention transcript, its content was not. Ellen Perry Berkeley concluded that information technology had been "swept under the carpeting." Whether or not this was truthful, it seems articulate that the 1972 proposal became the basis for the 1973 resolution. See Berkeley, "Women in Compages," 51. Run into as well 1972 AIA Convention Transcript [unpublished typescript, The American Found of Architects Archives].
  27. As with the contradistinct wording of the preamble, the linguistic communication of the final resolution, regarding the mandated study, had also been inverse — and weakened — from that of an before version. Where the previous version charged a written report group with making actual policy proposals to ensure that "the profession and practice are entirely open to women," in the final document the group was now challenged merely with "considering" the formulation of such policies, e.1000., encouraging women to go architects and to become involved in the AIA, eliminating sexist language in AIA documents, and initiating an affirmative activeness plan that included women. See "Resolution No. 2 — Revised Copy," reprinted in Chore Force on Women in Architecture of the Personnel Practices Committee via the Committee of Professional person Practice, Women in Architecture: Study to the AIA Lath of Directors (Washington American Institute of Architects, 1974), north.p.
  28. 1973 AIA Convention Transcript, 119.
  29. 1973 AIA Convention Transcript, 120-21.
  30. 1973 AIA Convention Transcript, 123.
  31. Quoted in Task Forcefulness on Women in Architecture, Condition of Women in the Architectural Profession: Task Forcefulness Report (Washington: AIA, Feb 1975), 1. In the final tally, the vote was 996.85 to 627.21. See 1973 AIA Convention Transcript, 154. Since people nowadays at the 1973 vote recall it beingness very close, it seems obvious that this broad margin was due to a quirk in the curl telephone call voting arrangement past which each member present is permitted to cast an equal portion of the number of votes accredited to his or her chapter. In other words, a very large affiliate, like that of New York City, could cast all of its votes as long as at least one fellow member of the affiliate was present.
  32. These members included Judith Edelman, founding member of the AWA and co-author of the 1973 resolution, and Natalie de Blois, a founding member of Chicago Women in Architecture, who had just been fabricated an AIA Fellow when she joined the subcommittee, taking the identify of Joan Sprague, herself a founder of the Women'due south School of Planning and Architecture. The other subcommittee members with a history of activism were Marie Laleyan, a founder of the Arrangement of Women Architects, and Jean Young, a founder of Seattle'southward Sisters for a Human Environment.
  33. At the Washington convention, the subcommittee staffed a berth that became 1 of the busiest in the so-called "Marketplace of Ideas," serving as meeting place and drib-in center for AIA members and other attendees interested in, or just curious nearly, women in compages. While copies of the study were non bachelor at the berth — it is unclear whether this was due to lack of funding or to the unwillingness of the AIA to release what it regarded as a piece of work in progress — Judith Edelman, Marie Laleyan and others notwithstanding managed to go its facts and figures into apportionment through slide shows, video record presentations, and i-on-one Q&As. The subcommittee also organized two workshops to explain its findings and future plans, which included, about significantly, using the report every bit the foundation for a full-fledged affirmative action plan to integrate women into the AIA and the profession as a whole.
  34. Survey results are quoted in Task Force on Women in Compages, Affirmative Action Plan for the Integration of Women in the Architectural Profession and the American Found of Architects (Task Force Report Submitted to the Lath of Directors, December 1975), 33, 34.
  35. Affirmative Action Plan, 1. Run across also "Women in Architecture: A Special Report," MEMO: Newsletter of the AIA, January 1976.
  36. In the review, Huxtable mentions the resolution passed at the 1973 AIA convention as well equally the survey conducted by the Women and Minorities Subcommittee. Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Letterhead is Solidly Male," The New York Times, May 19, 1974.
  37. Affirmative Action Plan, 37. On the Women'south School of Planning and Architecture, see Leslie Kanes Weisman, "A Feminist Experiment: Learning from WSPA, Then and Now," Compages: A Identify for Women, 125-33. See also Cristina Cerulli and Florian Kossak, "Educator, Activist, Politico: An Interview with Leslie Kanes Weisman," field: 3 (December 2009), vii-xx, specially pages viii-xv. Denise Scott Brownish's essay was published in Architecture: A Place for Women, nearly 15 years later she wrote it. The full text is bachelor here.
  38. Affirmative Activity Program, 10, 37, 35-36. "Women in Compages," i.
  39. Susan Torre, ed., Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective; the exhibition was on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Fine art in March-April 1977. Come across as well Ada Louise Huxtable, "The Last Profession to Be 'Liberated' by Women," The New York Times, March thirteen, 1977. "The Woman behind the T-Square," Progressive Architecture 58 (March 1977): 37-57. Gwendolyn Wright, "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture," The Architect: Chapters in the History of the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977): 280-308.
  40. On the ad ban, see Proceedings of the 1976 Convention of the American Institute of Architects, 115-117. On the ERA, meet Proceedings of the 1978 Convention of the American Constitute of Architects, 254 and 275. On women's networking, encounter Proceedings of the 1979 Convention of the American Constitute of Architects, nine. On high schoolhouse outreach, see Proceedings of the 1981 Convention of the American Institute of Architects, 12. Boshar is quoted in Proceedings of the 1983 Convention of the American Institute of Architects, 32-33 [AIA Archives].
  41. Nora Richter Greer, "Women in Architecture: A Progress (?) Report and a Statistical Profile," AIA Journal 71 (Jan 1982: 40-41. The results of the 1983 survey are reported in Women in Architecture Committee, Progress Update 1985: The Integration of Women into the Architectural Profession (Report Submitted to the Board of Directors December 1985).
  42. American Institute of Architects, 1991 AIA Firm Survey (Washington, DC: American Constitute of Architects, 1991), 1, 55, 57.
  43. Some of the nigh reliable numbers are now over a decade old. Run across Kathryn H. Anthony, Designing for Diversity (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). For an engaging visualization that attempts to brand sense of the gimmicky numbers (but is not wholly successful because it mixes U.S. and U.K. data) see Megan Jett, "Infographic: Women in Architecture," Arch Daily, March 12, 2012. See also Sherry Snipes, "Developing the Pipeline," AIA Programs & Initiatives. On enrollment statistics see National Architectural Accrediting Lath, Annual Reports on Accreditation.
  44. For a summary of contemporary issues, see John Cary, "Architect Barbie Builds a Dream Home, but Her Profession Needs a Makeover," Christian Science Monitor, August 8, 2011.
  45. See Sherry Ahrentzen, "The Space between the Studs: Feminism and Architecture," Signs 29 (Autumn 2003): 179-206. Ahrentzen, "The F Word in Architecture: Feminist Analyses in/of/for Compages," Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices, eds. Thomas A. Dutton, Lian Hurst Isle of mann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 71-118.
Cite

Gabrielle Esperdy, "The Incredible True Adventures of the Architectress in America," Places Periodical, September 2012. Accessed 01 May 2022. https://doi.org/x.22269/120910

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