Most people have a “teacher who changed my life” story, and most of those stories are heartwarming tales of someone who made a positive difference in a young person’s life.  I have a “changed my life” story too, but mine is less positive.  I grew up knowing exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up: an architect. I was that kid who drew floor plans for fun, made a miniature town in my basement, and spent more time setting up my Barbies’ houses than actually playing with them.  When I was in high school and beginning to look at colleges with architecture programs, my guidance counselor told me that I really shouldn’t be thinking about becoming an architect, because–yes, he said it–I am a girl.  (He threw in that I am not good at math, which is true but, as it turns out, irrelevant.)  In one stroke, Mr. Johnson changed my path in life, and you, like I, may be wondering why I let that obviously incompetent authority figure tell me what to do.  I can’t answer that question, at least not succinctly, but I can say that I was one of those cases where gender firmly closed the gate into a chosen career.  

In the end, instead of becoming an architect, I became an architectural and design historian, which is probably more of a fit for me, although the niggling feeling of what could have been lingers.  And as I studied and then taught design history, guess which story kept coming up over and over?  Women who were marginalized, thrown out, ostracized, and overlooked as designers, and were probably told they were bad at math too.  One of the most obnoxious stories is of Charlotte Perriand, the brilliant French Modernist, who, when she asked Le Corbusier for a job, was told “we don’t embroider cushions here.”  In other words, a firm non, you are a girl.  

But we are talking about America in this project, not misogynist Frenchmen, so I thought I would talk about a few American women who pushed past the Le Corbusiers and Mr. Johnsons of the world and became kick-ass designers.  Most of their stories are still languishing in the shadows of those of their husbands or other partners as you would expect, but they are inspiring nonetheless.  This is a visual story, so there are lots of pictures down at the bottom.  

I have already briefly mentioned Julia Morgan, the California architect who designed Hearst Castle.  Morgan designed something like 900 buildings, and was an accomplished engineer who pioneered the use of reinforced concrete, a material of great importance in earthquake-prone San Francisco.  She was the first woman to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, first woman to be licensed as an architect in California, and although it was too little, too late, she was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architecture’s Gold Medal in 2014.  Morgan never married, worked constantly, and left an impressive body of work for culturally significant institutions like Mills College and the YWCA.  But with all that, she is mostly known as the “little lady architect” who put up with William Randolph Hearst’s increasingly grandiose ideas as she designed massive estates for him over a 30-year period.  

Gender prejudices being what they are, it’s possible that what Julia Morgan didn’t say (at least that has surfaced) is more significant than what she did.  She delivered the goods for Hearst, somehow making the mixed metaphors of his taste into something cohesive, even if it wasn’t what she believed in.  Morgan believed in the simplicity and honest materiality of Craftsman design, and in making buildings that were integrated into their sites.  But, whether she needed the job, or more likely, because as a female in a man’s world, she knew herself to be on thin ice expressing opinions that were too strong or contrary, she gave Hearst his whopping Gothic/Renaissance/Moorish fantasy castle, smiling in all the photos.  I would give anything to know what she wrote in her journal at the end of those days at San Simeon.  

Also in California, but several decades later, Ray Eames, wife of Charles Eames, likewise put her head down and got the job done without making a scene.  Recent scholarship has shown that Ray was every bit Charles’ partner and peer in their iconic designs, like that dashing black leather lounge chair as just one example.  That famous chair, until very recently, was listed in every museum and expensive reproduction catalog as being by Charles Eames, though it was designed by a team of two.  Although Charles and Ray made the “Kazaam Machine” in their garage to bend plywood into sinuous shapes for the Postwar home, creating machines and finding new uses for wartime materials like plywood weren’t considered girly enough, so Ray was never credited.  An equally telling but converse example is the child’s chair which was often credited to Ray, because it is for children, and because it has a small heart-shaped cutout in the back.  More gendered assumptions.  The Eameses had a spectacular career and also a lot of fun working together, but what did it cost Ray to stay humbly in the background?  

Denise Scott Brown, architect, writer, advocate for equity in the architecture profession, and all-around force of nature, watched while her business partner/husband Robert Venturi, with whom she had collaborated on books, buildings, courses, lectures, and everything else, was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1991.  And she wasn’t.  

Then there is Mary Wright, for whom I have particular fondness.  Mary was married to Russel Wright, one of the most important American industrial designers of the 20th century, and although she died young, made significant contributions to American ways of living.  Mary and Russel created a business designing dinnerware and other household items for mass production, and it was Mary who created innovative marketing and sales techniques that made their designs fly off the shelves.  Appealing to the American middle class capitalist mid-century juggernaut, Mary grouped their designs into sets to use for social events that didn’t even exist yet, like ice skating parties, and popcorn suppers, and made their designs integral parts of the American ideal of informal lifestyle.   Just as successfully, she had their designs  sold open stock in places like Macy’s, so consumers could choose their colors, styles, and amounts.  Mary and Russel partnered in designing their New York City townhouse, all manner of simple, sculptural manufactured goods, and their 1940 project called American-Way (about which I wrote my master’s thesis), an effort to sell American handmade objects alongside mass-produced ones.  But–no surprise–she was unacknowledged and unresearched until very recently.   

After Mary died in 1952, Russel lived at Manitoga, their Garrison, New York property where they had begun to build a beautiful Organic Modern house in an abandoned quarry.  Mary’s influence at Manitoga, which is now a museum open to the public and where I worked for a few years as curator and education director, is very much in the background because she didn’t live to see it completed, but that seems appropriate in thinking about women designers.  So although Joey and I have visited the Eames House in Los Angeles and Hearst Castle in San Simeon and have walked by the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, PA, I am pinning this post to Garrison in honor of Mary Wright.  

The story of women in the background is not new or noteworthy, and the same stories could be told in basically every field except maybe teaching and nursing.  So what are possible takeaways?  First, better to be like Morgan, Eames, Scott Brown or Wright and plunge into doing what you know you can and should contribute to the world regardless of the result, rather than like me, who let mansplaining deter me.  

Second, although what these and other women accomplished is magnificent, the self-evident question is what has the world missed out on by all the efforts to squelch, sequester, and silence?  

And how far have we come?  Even though it’s more subtle perhaps, these issues still exist, cutting across all sorts of defining characteristics including race, age, ethnicity, and, of course, gender.  Conversations where one person holds forth while others get words in edgewise; meetings where an older person is ignored for being “old fashioned”; or a federal government made up almost exclusively of old white men in a country where those guys are a minority, are all examples of alive-and-well marginalization.   

But let’s end on an upbeat note.  Jeanne Gang is only 7 years younger than I am, also from Northern Illinois.  Her work in the architecture field is spectacular, not just visually, but also because she cares about sustainability and social justice in design.  Her eponymous firm has won scads of awards, and she is now a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects.  She has done it: soared past the gates and into the architectural pantheon.  I wonder what it took for her to get there, and if she is good at math?