"Straightening Out Tangles": The Women In Architecture Of The Roaring '20s
January 4, 1931 article about Anne Dornin in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle Magazine
By Kate Reggev
One of the hardest things to do when you’re researching is… finding the thing you’re actually looking for. Case in point: to find early female practitioners of architecture, you really have to dig — in old copies of historic journals in hopes that their work was published under their full name (not just their initials, as we know!); in the pages of old school yearbooks (or that there were photographs of the entire class that revealed their gender); or, if you’re casting a really wide net, in the census records.
A beloved tool for genealogists and historic researchers alike, census records are a great way to find early female architects and gain insight into their lives over time, typically in increments of ten years when the federal census was done (although currently only records from 1940 and earlier are easily accessible on sites like Ancestry.com). Through the census, it’s possible to see where people lived, who they lived with, what their occupations were, and, depending on the year, a range of other information like their race, family origins, and even whether they owned or rented their home. It’s also possible to gather intel on broader questions about their daily lives: Who were their neighbors? Did they live in a working class or upper class neighborhood, based on the occupations of those around them? Was it an ethnic enclave? Where did their parents come from, and what language might they have spoken at home?
A long look back at the 1920 census for New York State alone reveals that there were hundreds (if not thousands!) of women who worked in or studied architecture. The majority of these women working in the sector earned their keep as secretaries, stenographers (a job that essentially entailed transcribing speech in shorthand), clerks, bookkeepers, and similar administrative roles that were common for women at the time — and were, of course, critical to the running of a successful office, even though they were not “technical” staff.
By 1920, there were, however, several dozen New York women — at least 50, by my account through research — who were actively engaged in the practice of architecture across the entire state. So what were their lives like? What types of projects did they complete? What was their family background, and did they continue to work after marriage and perhaps childbirth?
Anne Dornin working on a theater, 1931. Brookyln Daily Eagle Magazine.
Of course, each of their stories, projects, and lives are unique, but there are certainly some general trends that can be noticed. Most of the women were in their teens and early 20s if they were still studying, while most who worked as draftswomen or architects were typically in their 20s, 30s, or 40s. Anne Dornin, for example, was 35 years old at the time of the 1920 census and was living on West 123th Street with her sister Margaret, an actress in motion pictures, and her sister’s “partner.” Helen Williams. Anne and her sister were originally from Virginia, but both were able to take advantage of the opportunities (and perhaps also the unconventional lifestyles) of New York; Anne attended Columbia and, in 1915, was the second woman to graduate from the architecture program. During her long career in architecture, Anne taught at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, a design school for women founded in the 1890s, worked for architect James Monroe Hewlett, and acted as designer and construction superintendent for several Loews theaters in Calgary, Ohio, Boston, St. Louis, and more. under prominent theater architect Thomas Lamb. A 1922 article in the St. Louis Post - Dispatch covering the city’s new Loew's State Theatre, for example, chronicled how she “ran the office for her boss” Thomas Lamb and her ability to “straighten out tangles” when things went wrong on a construction site.
Most of these women practicing in the 1920s were also single: those that were in their 30s and 40s may have remained single by choice and would likely have been considered past traditional “marrying age.” On the other hand, those in their 20s often worked for several years before marrying and then ultimately not resuming work in the field (remember, societal norms of the time selectively accepted single women in the workplace, but nearly universally shunned middle-class married women from working outside the home — especially in “rough” fields like construction). Architect Katherine Rose, however, appears to have been one of a handful of exceptions. In 1920, she was living on Wool Street in Queens with her husband Edward and two daughters. As an immigrant who came from Germany in 1884, she ran her own architectural office, and it is perhaps her status as an immigrant rather than as an upper-class woman of local background that enabled her to continue her work.
Ruth Bramley Dean house, 150 East 61st Street, New York, New York, 1923. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Many of the women appear to have been led to architecture as a profession because of the influence of their families, in particular their fathers, and sometimes even collaborated or went into business with them. For example, by 1920, Anna Backhaus (née Hoffman) worked as an architect with her father Jobst, a German immigrant who completed dozens of tenement buildings throughout lower Manhattan and the East Village and was known as a “tenement architect.” Anna’s husband was employed in real estate, perhaps as a carpenter or builder (census records vary on this point), and she likely entered the field thanks to her father’s job and may have even apprenticed under him (or her husband!) to learn drafting, design, construction, and other architectural skills.
And despite the early belief that women architects were best suited to design homes because of their supposed “innate” knowledge of the domestic sphere, the female practitioners of architecture in 1920 worked on a range of project types beyond the domestic into the public realm, ecclesiastical design, and landscape architecture in particular. Several women specialized in landscape architecture, such as MIT graduate Marian Coffin (1876-1957), who lived on East 92nd Street with her mother in 1920. By that point, 40-year-old Marion had been working on her own account for 15 years, completing projects for the East Coast’s elite country homes thanks to her family’s upper-class connections and was acting as the University of Delaware’s appointed landscape architect. Ruth Dean (1889-1932) was another female landscape architect who had her own firm by 1920, when she was living on East 55th Street. Ruth went on to complete the landscape design of several distinguished Long Island residences and later contributed to the redesign of Bryant Park in 1934.
Photograph of Ethel Bailey Furman, in Ethel Bailey Furman Papers, 1928-2003, Accession 41145, courtesy of the Library of Virginia.
Ethel Bailey Furman seated at the center at the 1928 Hampton Institute's Negro Contractors' Conference. Ethel Bailey Furman, Papers and architectural drawings, 1928-2003, Accession 41145.
However, another major trend for the women found working in architecture in the 1920 census was, not surprisingly, their race: virtually all women working in architectural practice in 1920 were white. Of course, this shouldn’t be too surprising: NOMA recently announced that there are now 500 living Black female architect attain licensure, back in 1920 there was, according at least to census records, a grant total of one African American woman working or studying architecture in New York: Ethel Bailey Furman (1893-1976). A native of Virginia, Ethel became involved in the field because of her father, the second licensed Black contractor in Richmond, Virginia. By 1920, the remarkable Ethel had remarried and had, according to the census, moved to Harlem with her two children, undertaken architectural training with a private tutor, and was likely working for her builder-contractor father. She later returned to Richmond with her children and second husband, where she was probably the first practicing African-American female architect. In the ensuing decades, she designed over 200 churches and residences (!! talk about prolific!!) in Virginia, along with two churches in Liberia.
So what do we make of all of this information, and why does it matter? Why should we care about a few dozen female architects who were practicing exactly 101 years ago? For one thing, it helps us better understand the traditional narratives of who deserves to be researched, discussed, and seen as role models or precedents for our own trajectories and work. Do we all really only need to know about Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanford White, and Le Corbusier, even though the reality is that it is highly unlikely that any of our careers will even remotely look like theirs? It is critical to know more information about the everyday: the little-known women who designed our homes or religious buildings, the female landscape architects who created our public spaces and gardens, the women who shaped our cities, even if they are little-known or ultimately succumbed to the pressures of the time and left the profession.
Just as significant is, however, also a recognition of the problematic: how little things have changed over the past 100 years, particularly with respect to the lack of racial diversity in architecture. While I was pleasantly surprised at how the data showed that women in architecture in 1920 came from a range of economic and ethnic backgrounds — more than a third were immigrants or the children of immigrants (then again, more than 20 million immigrants moved to the US between 1880 and 1920, so it shouldn’t really be that unexpected) — the near-complete lack of representation of non-white women was disappointing, although by no mean unanticipated. I wish I could say that we have come a long way since then, but as many are aware, economic and racial diversity continue to be issues that the field struggles with due to a variety of factors that the AIA has outlined here. While looking back helps us develop a more nuanced understanding of the past, it’s the present and the future of the field that need to take action.
Intrigued and want to learn more? Here are a few resources:
African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945, edited by Dreck Spurlock Wilson
Built by Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, by Selden Richardson, Maurice Duke (ed.),
The First American Women Architects, by Sarah Allaback
The Ethel Bailey Furman Papers and Architectural Drawings, 1928-2003, at the Library of Virginia
Long Island Landscapes and the Women Who Designed Them, by Cynthia Zaitzevsky