Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers
2 INTRODUCTION to cave to log cabin women have always worked to create safe nurturing and healthy environments for their families and communities and there is early evidence that shows women assuming the role of builder In 16th-century France Kather ine Briçonnet designed and supervised the building of the Cha teau de Chenonceau between 1513 and 1524 while her husband was away fighting at war In 17th-century England 19-year-old Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham traveled and studied architecture in the Netherlands and Italy while on her honeymoon She later set up an architectural office and designed Wotton House in Buckinghamshire and possibly 400 other buildings Sir Chris topher Wren now known as England’s greatest architect may have studied under her and created 18 churches with the help of her designs before he went on to build more than 50 churches including St Paul’s Cathedral in London In Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America author Sally McMurry presents many home plans designed by women which were published in 19th-century farm journals The 1847 house plan by Matilda Howard of Zanesville Ohio won the 20 prize from the Committee on Farm Dwellings for the New York State Agricultural Society Mrs Howard’s design provided detailed instructions on site and room placement materials and cost Mrs Howard explained In the construc tion of this plan it has been my object to combine utility and beauty as far as practicable with the labor-saving principle After Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 she and her sister Catharine wrote The American Woman’s Home in 1869 Their book lays out the domestic concerns of the 19th century and details a house plan with particular attention paid to areas often ignored by male designers of the 19th century such as the kitchen Various chapters concern the need for exer cise both physical and mental fresh air gardening hygiene
INTRODUCTION 3 clothing reform removing binding corsets and the ventilation and heating of the home In the late 19th century women from middle-income fami lies if they worked outside the home were typically expected to enter nursing teaching or writing professions In her pop ular self-help book What Can a Woman Do Mrs M L Rayne wrote about the careers that were socially acceptable for a woman They included medicine law agriculture manufac turing business dressmaking education and the arts Careers in architecture engineering and landscape architecture were not mentioned Women from wealthy families were told to use their extra energies by doing charity work The medical com munity in 1900 even gave excess energy and overuses of intel lect a name neurasthenia or nervousness The neurasthenia cure for men was to send them out west to rope cattle hunt and hang out with cowboys A few men who went west for the cure were writer Mark Twain painter Thomas Eakins and Theodore Roosevelt Meanwhile the cure for women was for private doctors to seclude them possibly in bed with no visitors no books and a bland diet This was the pre scription for reformer Jane Addams and writer Edith Wharton In 1900 when 29-year-old Martha Brookes Hutcheson decided to enter the new program in landscape design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT her parents begged her to change her mind for fear that her decision would affect their social standing They even offered to send her to Europe to allow her to design their family estate But Martha said I was fired with the desire in spite of the fact that it was considered almost social suicide and distinctly matrimonial suicide for a woman to enter any profession Martha ultimately chose to attend MIT though she circled the block three times before getting the courage to climb the steps to the university
4 INTRODUCTION The government was indirectly instrumental in changing the role of women in architecture and related fields thanks to the Morrill Act created in 1862 and signed by Abraham Lincoln The Morrill Act granted government land to colleges for free Although the Morrill Act did not require that institutions open their doors to women by 1890 every state included the admis sion of women in its land grant charter This enabled women to get college degrees to start working professionally in the areas of architecture engineering and landscape architecture among other fields Soon thereafter women began making headway in those industries In 1873 Mary L Page became the first woman to earn an architecture degree from the University of Illinois In 1890 Sophia Hayden became the first woman graduate from MIT’s four-year architecture program In 1904 Marian Coffin graduated from MIT as a special student from the landscape architecture program In 1905 Nora Stanton Blatch Barney became the first woman to receive a degree in civil engineering from Cornell University An article in the 1901 New-York Daily Tribune titled Occupa tions of Women What the Field of Architecture Offers to the Well Trained Practical Woman reads It must be obvious that women have a more intimate knowledge of the requirements of a home than men usu ally have They know of necessity why bedrooms should be properly partitioned not merely divided by portieres which leave the occupant of each room at the mercy of every trifling noise in the other Their personal experi ence teaches them that fully one-half of the comfort of a house or apartment depends upon the closet room They would never think of building a small apartment house in such a way that butcher and baker and candlestick
INTRODUCTION 5 maker must carry their goods up the front stairs as I have seen done The architect engineer and landscape architect all work hand in hand to create a building and its environment In 1893 respected art and architecture critic Mariana Van Rensselaer brought new recognition to the garden and defined the land scape architect as a gardener an engineer and an artist who like an architect considers beauty and utility together In an article written by turn-of-the-20th-century landscape architect Beatrix Farrand titled The Garden in Relation to the House she explained that the arts of architecture and landscape gar dening are sisters not antagonists The work of the archi tect and landscape gardener should be done together from the beginning not as too often happens one crowding the other out Working in concert the architect the engineer and the landscape architect build our world whether steel beam by steel beam or stone by stone Women throughout history have made and continue to make increasingly important contributions to this realm and it is both vital and fascinating to look back at women’s history while looking forward to the amazing archi tectural achievements sure to come
