Breaking New Ground: She Builds (And Hammers, And Walks Beams, And Lays Brick)
New York Times article on Alice M. Durkin, 1912.
By Kate Reggev
Why shouldn't a woman build her own house if she wants to?
I am not embarrassed to say that I have spent many a minute staring at a brick wall, marveling at the thinness of the joints, the various bond types, the intricate diaper patterns (fear not, the term is totally unrelated to baby diapers!), the intentional placement of those moody purple, semi-burnt clinker bricks, and generally just feeling enthralled at coming face-to-face with a craft with such a deep history. In fact, sometimes if I look close enough, I think I can even spot signs of the fingerprints that laid the brick or struck the mortar joint in between units, and I wonder: what are the chances that this brick wall was laid up by a woman?
Spanish-American women plastering an adobe house, Chamisal, New Mexico, 1940. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Unsurprisingly (but still disappointingly), those chances are… quite (extremely) slim. We’ve discussed a few times here on In Ink how part of the reason why women rarely pursued careers in architecture (when they were encouraged to have a career at all!) as opposed to, say, teaching and nursing, was because of its connection to construction and the physical labor it entailed. And if a woman was determined to be an architect, the “right” place for her, if it had to be in architecture, would be behind a desk drawing up plans for a kitchen or closet — not on a construction site, soldering pipes, laying brick, hammering nails, or directing tradespeople.
But even so, there is still a powerful lineage of women in construction that goes back centuries: indigenous women across the globe who were in charge of the construction of their homes; women who worked as laborers and skilled tradespeople on large-scale religious buildings in the Middle Ages; women throughout the twentieth century who built residences, became owners of construction companies, and oversaw major construction projects.
Indeed, the earliest written records of women in construction go back to the 1200s; given architecture’s emphasis on Europe, it’s probably no surprise that the little scholarship we have from this period focuses on Western Europe. Here, we find records of women digging ditches for foundation walls, thatching roofs, mixing mortar, and more — all based on tax records (this would be oh-so-satisfying to my accountant’s ears!).
Spanish-American women plastering adobe house, Chamisal, New Mexico. Close Up, 1940. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
Spanish-American women replastering an adobe house. This is done once a year. Chamisal, New Mexico, 1940. Courtesy the Library of Congress.
For the most part, the women carrying out these activities were low-paid day laborers who were single or very poor married women; occasionally, they were even slaves. Examples include women who were hired in Sevilla, Spain to dig trenches for the foundation of a new city wall in the 14th century; in Toledo, Spain, where women were hired to gather lime and work on the roof of the city’s cathedral; and further west in the French city of Toulouse, where women worked alongside men in the construction of Périgord College between 1365 and 1371. Historical documents describe the women carrying stone and bricks in baskets on their heads (must have been unwieldy and maybe even painful, right?). In several of these cases, scholars have noted that women were paid less than their male counterparts (sound familiar?), but on par with what young boys were paid. Sigh.
Also rare during this period were middle-class women who entered into a trade through the family business of their father or husband, such as masons, doormakers, smiths, carpenters, and other craftsmen. However, since women were traditionally banned from the guilds and apprenticeship structure (remember Johnny Tremain??) that dominated Western Europe at the time, they were not able to enter construction trades in significant numbers — which has persisted to today.
But women have also played a significant part in construction in indigenous cultures such as the Pueblos of modern-day New Mexico, where house-building was led by women. In these communities, although men erected the main timber framing of a home, women did the rest — including maintenance and repairs on the homes. Called enjarradoras, these female plasterers continue a vernacular building tradition that is transmitted orally and goes back to pre-Columbian times, although the craft has sadly been waning in recent decades.
Similarly, the nomadic Maasai tribe in the semi-arid regions of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda has traditionally also relied on women to build their homes. Constructed of grass, twigs, cow dung, and soil and arranged in compounds known as Enkaji, the houses are entirely built by women in the tribe each time the group relocates. Thanks to the thickness of the walls, the circular or oval-shaped homes are cool in the summer and warm in the winter but tend to have low ceilings and few, if any, windows.
And finally, a little closer to home in the United States, over the past 150 years, women have trickled into construction and building trades as they did into the profession of architecture, albeit even less frequently. Newspapers reported on these women as anomalies and sometimes sensationalized their work; in 1923, for example, the New York Herald Tribune announced that Mrs. Florence Thompson was "the only woman bricklayer in the world.” The headline was so unusual that it got picked up and reprinted in various newspapers around the country, complete with a photo to boot. Even sometimes the mere suggestion of women in construction seemed undesirable: "it is hard to understand why the master builders should be interested to [sic] attract women into the building industry," noted one writer in The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1912.
Viola Allen, Mildred Davis, and Mary Bowers pose as construction workers in a publicity photo during the construction of the Fox theater. San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection, San Francisco Public Library.
But intriguingly, by the turn of the 20th century, women from New York to Los Angeles did indeed participate in the physical construction of buildings. Mrs. Pinkie Belle Johnson, for example, was described in a 1906 article in The Los Angeles Times as a "plucky woman-carpenter" who built her own family’s house out of wood boxes and went on to construct several other homes in the area. In New York City in the late 1890s and early 1900s in New York City, the largest female real estate operator was German-Jewish immigrant Clementine M. Silverman, née Cahn, who the New York Times noted "personally superintended her own operations.” Her obituary in the Times in 1911 noted that she was often spotted " walking a beam or scaling a ladder" on her construction sites.
And Ms. Silverman wasn’t alone: by the 1910s, women across the country in various cities were noted as the first — and usually only — carpenter, house builder, or contractor in their respective city. In 1912, for example, Mrs. Ollie McIntosh was the first female carpenter and house builder in Cincinnati, and was quoted in The National Builder asking rhetorically, “Why shouldn't a woman build her own house if she wants to?" In New Bedford, Massachusetts, Mrs. Hedwige Perra first worked in dressmaking, millinery (hat-making), and music, and then became a contractor. The Boston Daily Globe noted in 1913 that she “has held her own in competition with men,” and even included an image of her directing a worker to accompany the article.
Miss Anna Bland working on the SS George Washington Carver, 1943. Courtesy the New York Public Library.
The trend continued into the 1920s and 1930s: Mrs. Emma Johnson of Spokane, Washington, for example, was one of the only female building contractors in the city and had taken out nearly 80 building permits by 1938. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the only female builder was Mrs. Laura B. Wood; in Hartford, Connecticut, it was Mrs. Rose Kanter; in San Francisco, it was Mrs. Grace Perego; and in Boston, it was Miss Alice M. Doxey.
Applying the screen on the inside face of door; Demonstration of home screen door construction; Saint Mary's County, Ridge, Maryland, July 1941. Courtesy the New York Public Library.
In both Chicago and New York, there were women who took on large-scale construction projects, like Mrs. Emma C. Kennett, who was the active head of the Kennett Construction Company of Chicago that completed more than 150 buildings with a total aggregate value of $5 million in 1929. New York had Alice Durkin Walsh, who ran a large general contracting company, Durkin & Laas, that completed several large projects including public schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. At times, she had more than 1,000 laborers on her payroll and was also the only member of the Building Trades Association of New York. Lots to dig into here about these women — and a return to their stories will need to happen at a later time!
What’s interesting to me about these pioneering women is not only that they were unusual in their careers — and even just that they had one — but also that they were married and often had children (I’m curious what their work-life balance was like!). What’s more, they appear to have started these businesses independently of their husbands (although some were influenced by their fathers), and many of them focused on residential projects — again, that same idea of women being experts of the home. In fact, some of these women took pride in their "feminine touches and niceties" that appealed to women, as Mrs. Laura B. Wood of Lincoln noted. "I can tell a man-built house every time," she asserted.
Although the 1940s and the United States’ involvement in World War II meant that women entered the workforce, (including positions that involved physical labor — hello Rosie the Riveter!), at the end of the war women slowly slipped away and continued to be rarely seen in the construction world. And while Second Wave Feminism and state-funded programs encouraging women to go into the construction sector did enable women to “gain a foothold in the late 1970s,” the New York Times noted in 1992, by the 1990s women were seeing their gains disappear and numbers dwindle.
In recent years, the percentage of women in the trades has continued to hover around 3 or 4 percent, but the U.S. Census Bureau’s Economic Census states that women-owned construction firms grew 20 percent between 1997 and 2002. So perhaps although women in the trades continues to remain low, female ownership of construction firms has grown — is that a little bit of a silver lining I see there? Even with these very low numbers, I still like to think that depending on where you are in the world, it is very possible that you’re staring at a building whose wood siding was hammered into place by a woman or whose adobe walls were expertly patched by hand and maintained by a woman — rare as that may be.
More reading:
Women Do Exist in the Construction Trades
Meet the New Wave of Female Builders
“Appropriate to Her Sex?” Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” by Shelley E. Roff
Unfinished Business: Building Equality for Women in the Construction Trades
Omitted from History: Women in the Building Trades
Rodriguez, Anita, and Katherine Pettus. “The Importance of Vernacular Traditions.” APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 22, no. 3 (1990): 2–4. https://doi.org/10.2307/1504320.
Ansuyah Maharaj, and Sharon Edigheji. “Women in Construction: Breaking Ground.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 42, [Agenda Feminist Media, Taylor & Francis, Ltd.], 1999, pp. 82–87, https://doi.org/10.2307/4066045.
Women in the Construction Trades: Earnings, Workplace Discrimination, and the Promise of Green Jobs Findings from the IWPR Tradeswomen Survey
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“Appropriate to Her Sex?” Women’s Participation on the Construction Site in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” by Shelley E. Roff
"Only Woman Bricklayer" New - York Tribune (1923-1924) May 17 1923: 9.
Magurn, E. A. "The Fminine Touch: Woman Builder Wins Success by Putting Her Personality into Five Million Dollars' of Apartment Buildings." American Builder (1923-1930) 47.5 (1929): 66. ProQuest. 27 Mar. 2022 .