“Open Only To Women”: Three Early Female-Focused Design Schools
The New York School of Applied Design for Women course catalog, for the 1910-1911 term. New York School of Applied Design for Women Collection, Pratt Institute Archives.
By Kate Reggev
For virtually all designers, the educational experience received in formal academic environments is among the most formative periods in their careers (all-nighters, painfully harsh final reviews, and close quarters in studio can be a particularly unique educational cocktail!). But sometimes it’s hard to remember that for most girls and women in the United States, access to an education was unlikely, if not almost entirely inaccessible, until the late 19th century. In fact, it wasn’t until 1918 that every state required students to complete elementary school — and (fun fact!) half of the nation’s children at that time attended one-room schools.
But for those few women who were interested in studying architecture — something that was typically only taught at the college level or above in the late 1800s and early 1900s — options were limited (remember when we discussed some of that here?). Although some colleges and universities agreed to admit a handful of women to their architecture programs by the turn of the twentieth century (including land grant universities like Cornell and Massachusetts Institute of Technology), most schools refused to admit women for a variety of reasons.
Enter: the creation of design schools “only open to women,” as one 1920s publication described them, often thanks to particularly stubborn female students or particularly visionary female patrons. These schools, formed for a variety of reasons and with a range of goals for their students, all had one thing in common: a desire to educate women and to establish a learning environment where they would be surrounded by their peers, rather than ostracized as the lone female in a room of men. This typically created an atmosphere where women thrived, supported each other, and even found future business partners that they would later establish firms with.
Design drawings exhibited at the New York School of Applied Design for Women, 1903. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
One of these early design schools was the New York School of Applied Design for Women (NYSADW), established in 1892 by philanthropist and painter Ellen Dunlap Hopkins with a focus on vocational training for women in New York City. The idea was to provide women, particularly poorer and immigrant women, an affordable and practical education in the arts and design with coursework and training in a whole host of fields including needlework, metal work, furniture, silk patterning, wallpaper design (who knew coursework in wallpaper design was a thing?), interior decoration, and, importantly, architectural drafting.
What’s particularly remarkable to me about the school was not only its mission to prove that an education in the arts could provide for gainful employment (many of its graduates earned respectable, livable salaries at a time when women earned pennies on the dollar), but also in its consideration to employ female professors. In 1909, for example, more than two-thirds of the instructors were women, meaning that the female students were not only surrounded by other women, but they were also learning from someone who understood the challenges that women in the workforce faced; it’s likely that former students also returned as instructors themselves.
And by 1915, the director of the architecture and interior decoration department was prominent architect James Monroe Hewlett, with coursework taught by two female instructors: his employee Anne Dornin, a recent graduate from Columbia’s School of Architecture, and Ruth Gardner Robinson (then called Mrs. Elbert G. Treganza), who previously worked at famed Tiffany Studios.
By 1910, the school had an enrollment of more than 500, and over 4,000 students had attended classes there. Among the architecture department’s many graduates were Mary Nevan Gannon and Alice J. Hands, who met at NYSADW in 1892 and later formed the first partnership of women architects in the United States. By the 1940s, the school was incorporated as the New York-Phoenix School of Design, and by the late 1970s had become a part of Pratt Institute, where its archives are still held today.
“Training Women as Gardeners,” Boston Globe, October 26, 1913
Cover of early 1920s brochure for the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Less than ten years after the founding of NYSADW, the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, Gardening, and Horticulture for Women (quite a mouthful!) opened in 1901 as one of the first schools opening the profession of landscape architecture to women. Located in Groton, Massachusetts and founded by Judith Eleanor Motley Low, the daughter of a local wealthy businessman, the school provided a two year curriculum that mixed lectures with practical experience on the school’s own 17-acre campus, which included meadows, orchards, gardens, greenhouses, and an administration building. In fact, the gardens were largely the work of students, enabling them to physically create, experience, enjoy, and even maintain their own designs (I can only imagine how enormously inspiring and gratifying this must have been!)
Even more inspiring to me was the school’s belief in their students and their abilities. The school’s brochures throughout the 1910s had ambitious plans for their graduates: "At the end of her two years be sufficiently proficient to enter as an assistant in a landscape architect's office, with a view to getting further practical experience and, ultimately, opening her own office." For those whose interests lay less with the technical aspects and more with being outdoors with plants, they developed a modified curriculum that would be appropriate for those who sought to work in school gardens, town or village improvement civic leagues, or become teachers of practical horticulture in girls' schools or colleges.
What’s more, although the school’s patrons were largely male, by the 1910s, they employed primarily female instructors who attended colleges and universities including Radcliffe, Cornell, and even alums of the Lowthorpe School itself. Unlike the NYSADW, the program remained small — in its first few years, there were fewer than ten graduates a year, which slowly increased to a few dozen in the following decades but typically remained below 40.
Aside from size, the schools differed not only in the scope of studies, but also in terms of their student body. While NYSADW was an urban school with a somewhat philanthropic mission to help poor and immigrant women earn a living through the arts, the Lowthorpe School was based in the countryside and had a tuition that was about double that of NYSADW ($100 — plus $30/month for housing — versus NYSADW’s $50). As a result, the Lowthorpe School’s students tended to be wealthier or at least came from families of some means that could pay for their education and, if they weren’t local, their room and board.
Either way, the school produced some of the earliest female landscape architects, many of whom became pioneers in the field and worked across the nation (although I should mention, I have yet to find a woman of color who attended the school). Edith Henderson (class of 1934), for example, practiced in Atlanta for more than 60 years, while Gertrude Kuh (class of 1917) worked in the Chicago area into the 1960s. Elizabeth Lord (class of 1929) and Edith Schryver (class of 1923) established the Oregon firm of Lord and Schryver in 1929 and designed more than 250 gardens throughout the state, and Jane Silverstein Ries (class of 1932) was the first woman to pursue a career in landscape architecture in Colorado, and had a long and prolific career that spanned nearly 60 years.
Students at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, circa 1905. Courtesy of Collection Development Department. Widener Library, Harvard University.
But despite the existence of these two schools — along with a trickle of women accepted into public and private universities in the United States (the California School of Design in San Francisco had its first female graduate in 1891; RISD, in 1897; Drexel in 1906, Syracuse in 1907, and Columbia in 1913, for example), the need for opportunities for women to study architecture and landscape architecture only continued into the 1910s.
Students at Work at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture, circa 1905. Courtesy of Collection Development Department. Widener Library, Harvard University.
Indeed, in 1916, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture was established when Katherine Brooks, a 1915 graduate of Radcliffe College, wanted to study at Lowthorpe but first sought to take architectural drafting at Harvard. When she was refused because of her gender, she began taking private classes with one of the professors; word got out, and within a year four additional female students and another professor joined, creating an informal program that was looked down upon by Harvard students but proved to be highly successful: some of its earliest graduates included landscape architect Rose Greely (class of 1919), the first female landscape architect licensed in Washington, D.C, and pioneering modernist architect Eleanor Raymond (class of 1919), among others.
While NYSADW offered coursework in a range of arts-related subjects and the Lowthorpe School emphasized a hands-on learning approach to domestic and landscape architecture, the Cambridge School equally balanced architecture and landscape architecture. Early curricula included classes in design, horticulture, history, construction, freehand drawing, modeling, and office practice (I suppose we all need some practical knowledge) as well as industrial housing and town planning, giving students a well-rounded education. The idea, according to the early (male) professors of the school, was that students would work for a well-known architect or landscape architect for at least two to three years after completing the coursework before potentially starting their own private practices.
A problem soon arose, though. Despite the students’ rigorous training at The Cambridge School (and typically even before, when students had attended elite schools like MIT and Radcliffe), it was extremely challenging for their recent female graduates to find positions at firms. Indeed, founding professor of the school Henry Atherton Frost noted that he found “the practicing landscape architects more cordial and receptive to the idea of hiring women than the architects."
Sadly, even though the academic environment created by the school was a supportive one, the “real world” of the 1910s and 1920s provided a different experience. As Dorothy May Anderson, a 1930s graduate of the program, explained in her seminal book Women, Design, and The Cambridge School , "The students had become so accustomed to being taken at their own worth, to being measured by what they could do, not whether they were men or women, that they found hunting for jobs discouraging."
Students of The Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture conducting site surveys, 1939. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Smith College Archives
Although Anderson commented that job opportunities improved for the school’s female graduates over time, the school had other issues to deal with. After struggling to formalize its ties to accredited schools like Harvard, Radcliffe, and Columbia throughout the 1920s so that it could grant its students formal degrees to practice as licensed architects, in 1934 the school finally found a partner in Smith College. The school became an independent graduate school located in Cambridge that conferred degrees and received funding through Smith. However, a short 8 years later in 1942, the school was forced to close because of financial difficulties; at the same time, perhaps ironically, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design began to accept women. Today, the school’s archives are housed at Smith College.
Ultimately, all three of these schools became absorbed by other academic institutions, often ones that had no gender restrictions: NYSADW into Pratt, Lowthorpe into RISD, and Cambridge into Smith and then later Harvard (sort of…). This wasn’t uncommon, either: by the 1950s and 1960s, most formerly all-male schools had opened their doors to women, making the experience of learning in a room surrounded by all female students increasingly uncommon. Today, there are no longer any design schools — to my knowledge, at least — that are only open to women.
If I’m honest, I have mixed feelings about this: on a personal note, as a graduate of Barnard College, an all-women’s college affiliated with Columbia, I have personally benefited from both all-female and gender-mixed classroom environments and felt that both supported me and helped me develop in different ways. It does, however, make me wonder what kind of learning environment and studio projects a design school with all-female or non-binary students would create and how it might differ (or not!) from those of the past.
In case you ever want to read more...
Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture records at Smith College
Women, Design, and The Cambridge School by Dorothy May Anderson
Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture Brochure, 1901
The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture edited by Sonja Dümpelmann and John Beardsley