The Not-Seen

The following article appears in the current issue of our magazine, The Architectural Historian, which goes out exclusively to members twice a year. To join the SAHGB click here. Elizabeth Darling is Reader in Architectural History at the School of History, Philosophy and Culture, Oxford Brookes University. She is the convenor of the recently established SAHGB’s Women in Architectural History Network. For more information and to get involved email info@sahgb.org.uk. Dr Darling has overseen the addition of ten twentieth-century women architects to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She reflects on the fact that this isn’t a ‘hidden history’ but one that, despite being seen by some, has gone wilfully not seen by others.

Elizabeth Darling
@ArchHistDarling

East Wall, Gerrard’s Cross, Bucks, 1935-6, Elisabeth Benjamin for Arnold Osorio. Courtesy of Lynne Walker

Norah Aiton and Betty Scott. Courtesy Lynne Walker

Towards the end of 2018, I was invited by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to serve as specialist advisor on a series of new entries that would record the lives of several of the first generation of women to practise as professionally qualified architects in Britain en masse. The invitation was a response to the centenaries of the expansion of suffrage in 1918 and the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which, though it did not have a direct impact on a profession not yet fully legally restricted to those who had passed certain examinations, did signal a sea change in attitudes towards women in the professions more generally. It also formed part of an ongoing initiative by the Dictionary to include more women and people of colour among its entries. 2018-2019 has seen 375 women added to its pages, and to date there are now just over 700 entries on women in the ‘art and architecture’ category (versus just over 5,000 men). 

The new entries that I oversaw were published in July 2019. There were ten in all, the authorship of which was shared among me, Lynne Walker and Rebecca Spaven, and they augmented previous sets of additions on women architects (and related fields) which began in 2004. 

Shawms, Cambridge, 1936-38, Justin Blanco White for George Rushton

Each entry shed light on the changing nature of architectural practice in the twentieth century. Although architecture’s relatively late legal professionalisation (registration acts were not passed until the 1930s) meant that there were technically no formal barriers to a woman becoming an architect, the institutional masculinity (and hence sexism) of the discipline and its training methods meant that women practitioners were few and far between until the second decade of the twentieth century, although women were (and remained) active and influential as clients, writers and reformers of the built environment. It was the combination of the shift to training in architecture schools, rather than in pupillage, with decades of feminist agitation for women’s education and entry to the professions, that produced the women that the new entries commemorated. They began the slow process of redressing the gender imbalance in the profession and, in so doing, made space for the generations of women who followed them. Equally importantly, they did much to shape the nature of the profession itself.

Offices for Aiton & Co, Derby, 1931, designed by Norah Aiton and Betty Scott. Courtesy Lynne Walker

Winifred Ryle (1897-1987) and Gillian Cooke (1898-1974), for example, both formed professional partnerships with their architect husbands, a mode of practice which, as Lynne Walker notes, has been a significant phenomenon of twentieth and twenty-first century architecture (the work of Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry is an important mid-century example). Teaming up with other women practitioners was also characteristic of this generation. This might be in practice, as in the case of Norah Aiton (1903-88) and Betty Scott (1904-83): their factory office for Aiton & Co in Derby (1930-31) is a major example of industrial modernism in the UK. Or, it might be to campaign for issues associated with practice. Sometimes that was directed towards improving the status of women in the profession: in 1932 Cooke and Gertrude Leverkus (1898-1989) were instrumental in the formation of a Women’s Committee of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which was concerned to represent their interests at a time when more women were becoming architects. 

Alongside this, a wider feminism underpinned a concern to improve society through architecture more generally. Jocelyn Adburgham (1900-79), Jessica Albery (1908-10) and (Margaret) Justin Blanco White (1911-2001), all of whom graduated in the early 1930s, were determined to use their skills as architects for the public good, joining with social reformers in other disciplines (health, housing, welfare) to develop prototypical solutions to the pressing social problems of their day. Their contemporary, Irene Barclay (1894-1989), whose entry was commissioned separately and written by Carrie de Silva, might also be mentioned here as an example of an allied professional – one of the first two women to qualify as a chartered surveyor – who worked in the voluntary housing sector to campaign systematically for better social housing. In wartime, both Adburgham and Albery contributed to government committees on reconstruction while Blanco White worked in Middlesbrough as part of the team which, through research and consultation, re-planned the city. They did much to establish the post-war image of the architect as a research-led, user-focused and technologically informed practitioner. Indeed, all three women (as well as Elisabeth Benjamin, 1908-99, another of the new entries) were notable for their interest in pushing technology to its limits and their interest in prefabrication: all key elements of modernist architecture from the 1940s onwards.

Justin Blanco White as depicted in a book of caricatures of AA students, 1934. With kind permission of AA Archives/Library

This expanded view of practice can also be seen in the writing careers enjoyed by many of the women. Doris Robertson (1899-1981), in particular, combined her design work with journalism, writing extensively as a design expert for women’s magazines, while Adburgham, Albery and Blanco White wrote consistently on their research in technology and design for the architectural press. All three also added town planning qualifications to their architecture degrees, skills they believed integral to their practice as a modern professional.

Today, much is made of the fact that women (architects or not) have been ‘hidden from history’. As someone who has spent much of her career writing about women’s contributions to the built environment, I am convinced that this is not the case and that there are those who refuse to, or somehow cannot, see what is in plain sight, rendering women not hidden but rather ‘not seen’.  These new entries contribute to the process of reiterating how long women have been active and influential as practitioners of architecture. Moreover, by being included in the national biographical document of record that is the ODNB, my hope is that their historical visibility (and others, as this process of inclusion continues) is writ large and rendered impossible not to see. But it is only part of a wider diversification and re-thinking of how we write historically about women.

This might begin with the archive: the ability to remember, to know, and to see women’s presence in architecture is often hindered by the way the archive has been formed. After all, who decides what goes into an archive? Historically, these decisions have been gendered and centred on particular ideas about what and who matters in history (the individual rather than the collective, the privileged rather than the working classes). In the architectural archive, for a long time the idea that this might contain only drawings (the building’s proxy) privileged the physical act of design over the many other processes that make up a building or architectural culture more generally. A more inclusive archive, cataloguing methods that foregrounded process rather than product, as well as a pro-active policy of collecting the papers of women-led practices or women clients, would embed the idea that women’s historical legacy is significant. It would add documentary heft to the genealogy we know exists.

An expanded view of what constitutes architecture is also important: a concern for client or patron, user or critic, the mediation of the building as much as the ‘actual monument’ itself, simulates the nature of the production (and consumption) of architecture, downplays the idea of the individual genius, and brings a whole range of diverse actors and hitherto little-listened-to voices into the historian’s purview. By self-consciously hearing and seeing other voices we can progress the discipline.

If these observations emerge from my experience as an historian of twentieth-century British architecture, I do not doubt that, with variations and nuance, they apply to earlier periods as well (all those wives who paid for their architect husband’s adventures in design but who historians have chosen to ‘not see’). The broader points also pertain to the profession of architectural history itself, which is long overdue a concerted effort to diversify itself in the same way that the ODNB has its entries.