Women's role in U.S. architecture can be seen from several perspectives: women are homemakers, and women are members of the architecture and design professions; women construct transitory gardens and shelters, and they commission or produce permanent buildings and landscape designs.
The architecture profession in the United States has its roots in the nineteenth century, when it was solely a male pursuit. The first architecture schools were storefront operations for carpenters, such as Asher Benjamin's New Hampshire school of the 1790s. Universities did not include architecture departments until after the Civil War. MIT did admit women to its architecture program as early as the 1880s, but Harvard's was closed to women until 1942. In 1915 the Cambridge (Massachusetts) School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture was founded to train women; Eleanor Raymond, a student there from 1917 to 1919, enjoyed a successful forty-five-year career in Boston.
After World War II more U.S. architecture schools admitted and trained women. Civil rights legislation of the 1960s and feminist analyses of the 1970s encouraged some architecture schools to adopt a policy of admitting 50 percent women; schools without such policies average about 30 percent women students and 10 percent women faculty. Salaries for women professional architects were about 50 percent of equally trained men's salaries in the 1960s and increased to about 85 percent of men's by 1993. Only 8.91 percent of AIA members are women, and only 0.64 percent of them are people of color.
Women have been recognized since the nineteenth century as key contributors to domestic architecture, especially to interior design. Nineteenth-century authors claimed that women had the best ideas for house design, since the house is traditionally a women's workplace as well as her home. Women's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century contributions to making house architecture more functionally successful are exemplified in Dolores Hayden's Grand Domestic Revolution. Attributed with special talent for the interior, professional women thus became specialists in residential architecture or interiors. Some, like Patricia Conway, head of interior design at a major architectural firm, applied their talents to office interiors for skyscrapers of the 1980s.
Nonprofessional women have made informal, "folk," or transitory architecture in diverse settings. Mollie Jenson built "Art Exhibit," a series of outdoor monuments, beginning in the 1930s. She worked in concrete and covered her surfaces with broken shards of ceramics, glass, and other colorful materials from her farm near Eiver Falls, Wisconsin. A 1980s homeless woman, Pixie, erected a tent, flower vase, doll bed, and doll to ornament her appropriated empty-lot garden on Eighth Street, in New York City.
Today there are more well-known professional women architects than ever before in U.S. history: Susanna Torre, Diana Agrest, Sharon Sutton, and Adele Santos provide role models for women entering the profession. Professional landscape architects such as Diana Balmori and Martha Schwartz carry on a tradition dating back to turn-of-the-century women landscape designers such as Beatrix Farrand. Since the 1960s these women have run their own professional practices, served as deans of architecture schools, written important books and essays, and produced a new generation of designs.
Elizabeth C. Cromley
See also
Housing;
Suburbanization;
Urbanization.
