Architecture and Urban Planning Author(S): Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright Source: Signs, Vol

Architecture and Urban Planning Author(s): Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright Source: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1976), pp. 923-933 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173242 Accessed: 19-10-2016 15:20 UTC

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This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms REVIEW ESSAY

Architecture and Urban Planning

Dolores Hayden and Gwendolyn Wright

Architecture has been traditionally a gentleman's profession, and architects have perceived women not as professionals but as passive clients, be they appreciative or intractable. As one smug architectural educator wrote about "The Architectress" in 1951: "I have included all that an architect needs to know about that uncertain, coy, and useful branch of the human race. ... Architects do not like to employ women in their offices; contractors do not like to build from their plans; people with money to spend do not like to entrust its expenditure to a woman."' Urban planning and landscape architecture have shared this bias against active women practitioners and outspoken women clients. Even today we hear talk about the "man-made environment," and "man-environment relations" from members of these three design professions. Women as designers and as users of environments have been the focus of more work by feminist historians and sociologists than by architects, planners, or environmental historians.

We would like to thank Ann Vitiello for her valuable assistance in preparing this essay. 1. Richard Hudnut, "The Architectress,"Journal of the American Institute of Architects 15 (March-April 1951): 111-16, 181-88. For discussions of the Prairie School's attitudes toward women as clients see H. Allen Brooks, Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contem- poraries (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 336-40, and Leonard K. Eaton, Two Chicago Architects and Their Clients: Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw, with an appendix by Elizabeth M. Douvan (Boston: M.I.T. Press, 1969), esp. pp. 232-34.

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This essay will describe current areas of research concerning women in architecture and the physical aspects of urban planning and will suggest areas in which additional research is needed.2 It will provide a selective discussion of significant recent work rather than attempt a comprehensive bibliography. The first section deals with women's participation in the design professions; the second with the impact of environmental design on women's lives and work.

Design by Women

Although only a tiny minority of architects have been women, there are many individuals whose lives and work merit study by feminist historians. At present, we know of only one book that treats this subject: Doris Cole's From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture. An illustrated, journalistic survey of the work of many women pioneers in this field, the book encompasses Indian builders, writers on domestic economy, self-trained women, and professionals.3 Cole, a practicing architect, identifies domestic design as the field where women have made their greatest contributions, and she argues that the profession should give greater attention to this field of endeavor. Gwendolyn Wright considers women's marginal participation as an aspect of the hierarchical structuring of the architectural profession in her essay, "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Architecture." She analyzes the ways that the design professions historically have maneuvered women into marginal roles, attributing to them personality types to suit this marginality-the exceptional woman, the anonymous architect, and the architectural adjunct (consultant, programmer, critic). She compares these limited roles to collective building efforts by women outside the profession.4 Two studies now in progress promise to give fuller explana- tions of the profession's willingness or unwillingness to absorb the first two generations of university-trained professional women architects in the United States: Susan Berkon deals with the training and practice of women in the Brown Decades (1865-95); Judith Paine is engaged in an oral history project recording the lives and work of several dozen retired women architects, many of them now in their eighties and nineties.5

2. In this essay we are concerned chiefly with architecture and physical planning. We are not extending this essay to include the full range of sociological, economic, and political issues a multidisciplinary planning review might cover. 3. Doris Cole, From Tipi to Skyscraper: A History of Women in Architecture (Boston: I Press, 1973). Cole is now working on a book about the Cambridge School, an all-female architecture school. 4. Gwendolyn Wright, "On the Fringe of the Profession: Women in American Ar- chitecture," in The Architect: Historical Essays on the Profession, ed. Spiro Kostof (New York: Oxford University Press, in press). 5. Susan Fondiler Berkon, "The Professional Woman Architect in the 'Brown

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These general historical studies are supplemented by articles and exhibitions about the work of individual women architects, planners, and landscape architects: Catharine Beecher, Louise Bethune, Sophia Hayden, Lois Lilley Howe, Eileen Gray, Catherine Bauer, Julia Morgan, Elizabeth Coit, Eleanor Raymond, and others.6 As with women artists, the work of many women architects has been credited to their male colleagues-husbands, fathers, brothers, partners, employers-so there are serious problems of attribution to be resolved. Important work of reclamation needs to be done on European as well as American designers. Why don't we know more about the woman who was Brunelleschi's chief rival in the competition for the design of the Duomo in Florence?7 Was Christopher Wren's daughter also a distinguished designer?8 How much did Margaret McDonald contribute to the work of her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh? Some of their drawings are signed with both sets of initials.9 What part of Marion Mahony's work has been credited to her employer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and to her husband, Walter Burley Griffin?10 What was Aino Aalto's involvement in the work of Alvar Aalto?" The American Institute of Architects organized one show in 1974 of the work of women members. A more comprehensive exhibition, or-

Decades'" (paper presented at conference on sexual politics and design, M.I.T. Depart- ment of Architecture, January 1975); Judith Paine, "Living Pioneers: Recording the Life and Work of Women Architects" (project description and paper presented at conference on sexual politics and design, M.I.T. Department of Architecture, January 1975). 6. Dolores Hayden, "Catharine Beecher and the Politics of Housework," in Women in Architecture and Design: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre (New York: George Braziller, in press); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). Madeleine Stern, "Three American Women Firsts in Architecture" (Harriet Irwin, Louise Bethune, Sophia Hayden), in Stern, We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Shulte Publishing Co., 1963); Elizabeth Reinhardt, "The Partnership of Three Women Architects: Lois Lilley Howe, Eleanora Manning, and Mary Almy" (paper presented at conference on sexual politics and design, M.I.T. Department of Architecture, January 1975); exhibition of the work of Eileen Gray, the Women's Building, Los Angeles, Calif., spring 1975; Mary Sue Cole, "Catherine Bauer and Public Housing in Government, 1926-1936" (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1975); for material on Morgan, Coit, and Raymond, see Torre. 7. A woman of the Gaddi family, according to Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London, 1907; reprint ed., New York: Modern Library, 1959), 1:446. 8. "Female Architects," Builder 19 (April 13, 1861): 254. 9. Charles Michal first brought this to our attention. Robert Macleod, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Felthan, England: Country Life Books, 1968), p. 119, quotes the architect on his wife's abilities: "Margaret has genius; I have only talent." Macleod attributes this state- ment to "the myopia of love"! 10. See Berkon (n. 5 above). Susana Torre has designed an architectural monument to Mahony and Griffin together for a site in Canberra, Australia. 11. Doris Cole raised this question for us.

This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 926 Hayden and Wright Review: Architecture and Planning ganized by the Archive of Women in Architecture to take place at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 1976, will include the work of historic and contemporary American women designers. The catalog, edited by Susana Torre, corrects many problems of attribution for American women designers and raises questions about European women not included in the exhibition.l2 In the last few years women in the design professions have become far more visible than they have been at any time in history. Women's work has been the subject of special issues of such journals as Arts in Society, Design and Environment, and Architectural Design.l3 Ellen Perry Berkeley, as an editor of Architectural Forum and Architecture Plus, has taken a special interest in documenting the problems women have faced in attempting to enter the architectural profession, from high school through training, apprenticeship, and registration.14 Carolyn Johnson has published a bibliography for the Council of Planning Librarians covering all of these areas and listing the various women's organizations active in campaigns to end discrimination in employment.'5 Women's groups such as WALAP (Women in Architecture, Landscape Architec- ture, and Planning), as well as women's caucuses within the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Planning Officials, and the American Society of Landscape Architects, have produced a number of statistical documents concerning discrimination in salaries and pro- motion for women as well as policy statements and manifestos.16 Going

12. Torre (n. 6 above). This exhibition catalog includes essays by Torre as well as Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, Judith Paine, Lucy Lippard, Ellen Perry Berkeley, and others. It was designed by Sheila de Bretteville. 13. Arts in Society, vol. 11 (Spring-Summer 1974); Design and Environment, vol. 5 (Spring 1974); Architectural Design, vol. 45 (August 1975). 14. See, in particular, Ellen Perry Berkeley, "Women in Architecture," Architectural Forum 137 (September 1972): 46-53. Also of interest on the backgrounds of women architects, Kay Standley and Bradley Soule, Women in Professions: Historic Antecedents and Current Lifestyles (Baltimore: National Institute of Mental Health, 1974). 15. Carolyn R. Johnson, Women in Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Sources of Information, Council of Planning Librarians, Exchange Bibliography, no. 549, 1974. 16. WALAP (Women in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning), "The Case for Flexible Work Schedules," Architectural Forum 137 (September 1972): 53ff; AIA (American Institute of Architects) Task Force on Women in Architecture, Judith Edelman, chairwoman, Status of Women in the Architectural Profession (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, 1975); Karen E. Hapgood, "Women in Planning: A Report on their Status in Public Agencies," American Society of Planning Officials (ASPO), Planning Advisory Service Report no. 263, 1971; Karen E. Hapgood and Judith Getzels, Women, Planning, and Change: The Relationship between Changing Roles of Women and Selected Planning Variables (Chicago: ASPO, 1974); Lisa B. Yondrof, "Women and Blacks in Plan- ning," ASPO, Planning Advisory Service memo M-10, 1972; Darwina L. Neal, chairperson, "Report on the Task Force on Women in Landscape Architecture," American Society of Landscape Architects Bulletin (July 1973); "Women in Landscape Architectural Education" American Society of Landscape Architects Bulletin (December 1975); see also proceedings of

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beyond the figures which document women's working lives in these fields, Lian Hurst has produced an extremely revealing, personal account of the interactions between male and female members of the work force in a large architectural office.17 In contrast to Hurst's description of hierarchical office structures is the account of the Open Design Office, a collective of women architects and planners in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and of its efforts to develop a collaborative work process focusing on client participation.18 Many women builders are not formally identified with the professions. They are self-trained designers and contractors who build for themselves or others. Helen Garvy's book, I Built Myself a House, is an autobiographical account which conveys the excitement of the building process as well as instructions on how to go about it. Older books in this genre like Bricks and Flowers and Building with Adobe deserve to be republished.19 Grandma Prisbee's bottle house and Maude Meager and Caroline Smiley's adobe house and studio are triumphs of imagination and skill.20

The Effects of Design on Women

If few women have designed environments, all women are users of them and have to adapt to the way environments have been designed. Physical settings help to organize the work we do and may thereby perpetuate the sexual division of labor, both functionally and ideologi- cally. Women have been most closely associated with domestic environments, but almost always as passive clients. They have had to accept conferences on women in architecture at Washington University, St. Louis, March 1974, and on women in design at the University of Oregon, Eugene, April 1974. 17. Lian Hurst, "Building Shelters in a Corporate Society: Toward a Political Economy of Architectural Practice in the United States," (M.Arch. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1974). A related work in progress is Eileen Hsu Balzer's sociological study of interactions between men and women in a large architectural office in Cambridge, Mass. (Ph.D. diss., Yale University). 18. Kathryn Allott, Magda Brosio, Olga Kahn, Mary Murtagh, Lucille Roseman, Joan Forrester Sprague, Lois Stern, and Emilie Buck Turano, "Who We Are," mimeo- graphed (Open Design Office, 1134 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Mass., 1972); also by the members of the office, including Marie Kennedy, "Open Design Office," a.s. [Architectural Student] 24 (February 1975): 20-21. 19. Helen Garvy, I Built Myself a House, with illustrations by Susan Freeman (San Francisco: Shire Press, 1975); Katherine Everett, Bricks and Flowers (London, 1951); Maude Meager and Caroline Smiley, We Built Our Own Adobe Home (Los Altos, Calif.: World Youth Publishing Co., 1945). 20. Esther McCoy, "Grandma Prisbee's Bottle House," Naives and Visionaries, ed. by Martin Friedman (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1975), Jan Wampler, "Imprint," exhibition including the work of Meager and Smiley, Hayden Gallery, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass., 1974.

This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 928 Hayden and Wright Review: Architecture and Planning spatial and social traditions that confined them to certain kinds of structures, and they have had to transform their homes and lives according to the changing standards of advertising, zoning legislation, welfare policy, or neighborhood pressure for conformity. Yet women have used their identification with the home in positive ways. Individual women have demanded that dwellings be adapted to their own or their family's needs. Groups seeking social change have often used the domestic environment to mobilize women's involvement. Several historians have considered the influence of the home and the ways that adaptations in environments and differences in class have affected roles for women. Mary Ryan's Womanhood in America: From Co- lonial Times to the Present provides an overview. She traces roles and settings for different classes, from the colonial village and the frontier homestead, through the evolution of the privatized suburban middle- class home, and the urban tenement.21 Barbara Laslett, a sociologist, focuses on the evolution of the home as a "private" sphere. She documents how house form adapted to the changing composition of middle- class families as apprentices and servants left and the family became smaller. She asks what differences these developments meant in the social life and work of the woman who kept the home.22 Sheila de Brette- ville and Gwendolyn Wright discuss rationales that have supported relegating women to the home and connect these with developments in American domestic architecture.23 The early twentieth century has been the subject of several mono- graphs describing radical changes in housing form, in industry's ap- proach to the domestic market, and in women's attitudes towards their place in the home. A number of studies by women on earlier home life and family life have recently been reprinted.24 The teachers of public health and home economics, whose standards were based upon higher

21. Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in Americafrom Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975). 22. Barbara Laslett, "Institution: An Historical Perspective,"Journal of Marriage and the Family 25 (August 1973): 480-91. Louise Lamphere discusses the political implications of this separation in "Strategies, Cooperation, and Conflict among Women in Domestic Groups," in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lam- phere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 97-112. 23. Wright, "'A Woman's Place Is in the Home': Women and American Domestic Architecture, 1870-1975" (M.Arch. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1974); Sheila de Bretteville, "Habitability, '73," Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Northern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Monterey, 1973. 24. Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (1898; reprint ed., Stockbridge, Mass.: Berkshire Traveller Press, 1974); Emily James Putnam, The Lady: Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (1910; reprinted ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economwis (1898; reprint ed., New York: Harper & Row, 1966) and The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903; reprint ed., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972).

This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Signs Summer 1976 929 expectations for efficiency and cleanliness in the home, became the ar- bitrators for the middle-class woman. "Social housekeepers" (women in these reform movements) sought to teach higher standards of home maintenance and to encourage aspirations of home ownership among working class and immigrant women. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English account for the spread of the public health movement into the home by documenting women's fears of social chaos and revolt outside the home and the actual dangers of disease and contamination facing women who raised families.25 "Sweet and Clean: The Domestic Land- scape in the Progressive Era" by Gwendolyn Wright describes the "therapeutic environment" women were taught to buy and create in order to counter these exterior dangers.26 The fear of germs became, in effect, a way of rationalizing the woman's place in the home where she could exercise some control and ensure its purity. It explains the over- whelming acceptance of the minimal environment, the array of new appliances, and the additional work for the housewife, since women believed that they could preserve their family's health, given the right domestic environment. The application of "scientific management" principles to privatized housekeeping did not liberate women from their domestic respon- sibilities. David Handlin, an architectural historian, describes the evolution of the middle-class, "professional" housekeeper and her specialized work place.27 Ruth Schwartz Cowan analyzes how changes in technology-exemplified by the washing machine, the supermarket de- livery system, the textile mill, and the typewriter-gave women time to take on new jobs, but also raised standards of performance.28 Women were still bound to the home and to low-status jobs. As Joann Vanek has shown, housewives without outside paid employment worked fifty-five hours per week in the 1960s, compared with fifty-two hours in 1924.29 As housing forms changed, becoming more standardized, the capi- tal investment that had once been frozen into the structure was shifted

25. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1974); Ehrenreich and English, "The Manufacture of Housework," Socialist Revolution 26 (October-December 1975): 5-40. 26. Wright, "Sweet and Clean: The Domestic Landscape in the Progressive Era," Landscape 10 (October 1975): 38-43. 27. David Handlin, "Efficiency and the American Home," Architectural Association Quarterly 5 (Winter 1973): 50-54. 28. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "A Case Study of Technological and Social Change: The Washing Machine and the Working Wife," in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York: Harper & Row, Torchbooks, 1974), and Cowan, "The Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the United States," Technology and Culture 17 (January 1976): 1-26. 29. Joann Vanek, "Time Spent in Housework," Scientific American 231 (November 1974): 116-20.

This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 930 Hayden and Wright Review: Architecture and Planning into the mechanical system. The percentage of construction costs in mechanical equipment grew, and domestic appliances appeared on the market in greater numbers. At the same time, single-purpose appliances required the woman to be in the home much of the day. Heidi Hartmann provides a thorough analysis of the economic theory of managed consumption, as well as a documentation of the domestic appliances which appeared from 1900 to 1930.30 A series of excellent articles by Stuart Ewen details the advertising campaigns of the time that supported this domestic consumption.31 Most architects and planners writing about environments for the American family have considered the issue of child care only tangen- tially. However, several recent pamphlets on day care have discussed the political implications of day-care policy and spatial design. They include material on the history of public child care in America and analyses of the contemporary alternatives-corporate day care, community control, and public school affiliations32-as well as consideration of the problems of sex-role reinforcement in the design of environments for children.33 The few contemporary housing studies which focus on the needs of women have tended to idealize the mother-child relationship. Clare Cooper provides an excellent analysis of several housing projects and the ways their designs have influenced social use, as well as a useful set of guidelines for site planning.34 However, she limits her discussion to the needs of the mother with her children, as does Reena Racki in her study of housing for married students.35 Neither considers domestic environments designed so that men and women might easily share these duties, either collectively or within individual families.

30. Heidi Irmgard Hartmann, "Capitalism and Women's Work in the Home, 1900-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1974). 31. Stuart Ewen, "Advertising: Selling the System," in The Poverty of Progress: The Political Economy of American Social Problems, ed. Milton Mankoff (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972): 430-448, and Ewen, "Advertising as a Way of Life," Liberation 19 (January 1975): 16-34. 32. Mary Jo Bane, "Who Cares about Child Care?" Working Papers for a New Society 2 (Spring 1974): 33-40; Vicki Breitbart, The Day Care Book: The Why, What, and How of Community Day Care (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Resources for Community Change, Demand for Day Care (Washington, D.C.: Resources for Community Change, 1974); Cookie Avrin, Georgia Sassen, and the Women's Research Action Project, The Corporations and Child Care: Profit-making Day Care, Work-Place Day Care, and a Look at the Alternatives (Cambridge, Mass.: Women's Research Action Project, 1974); Pamela Roby, ed., Child Care-Who Cares? Foreign and Domestic Infant and Early Childhood Development Policies (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 33. E. Belle Evans, George E. Saia, and Elmer A. Evans, Designing a Day Care Center (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), contains functional design suggestions and plans, as well as an interesting discussion of sex role reinforcement. 34. Clare Cooper, Easter Hill Village: Some Social Implications of Design (New York: Free Press, 1975). 35. Reena Racki, "Mothers' Perceptions of Housing Space" (M.Arch. Advanced Studies thesis, M.I.T., 1975).

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Dorothy Smith analyzes the differences between the ways in which working-class and middle-class women relate to their homes-either providing a refuge for their family or creating a status-based "display order." She shows how differences in domestic environments reflect both internal family organization and the place of families in the corporate order.36 The effects of these domestic associations on a woman's self-image can be dramatic. The film Womanhouse, based upon an exhibit by a group of Los Angeles artists, depicts the impact of domestic forms through a series of environments and theater pieces.37 There have been notable alternatives to environments designed for the nuclear family. The participation of women, as both builders and users, in the design of utopian communities is discussed by Dolores Hayden in Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975. Individuals such as Lucy Wright, a Shaker leader, and Alice Austin, a feminist architect who worked with the Llano del Rio Colony, are identified as important women planners and architects. Hayden's account of these communities' involvement with the design process ranges over such issues as the influence of bedroom arrange- ments on the practice of complex marriage at the Oneida Community, or the effect of kitchenless houses on child care and housekeeping at Amana.38 Another community, the Woman's Commonwealth of Belton, Texas, functioned as a self-sufficient, feminist, communist organization for almost forty years, where the members specifically addressed themselves to creating workplaces for communal housekeeping tasks.39 Hayden's "Collectivizing the Domestic Workplace" deals with the design of collective facilities for domestic work in utopias and in the American and English cooperative housekeeping movements, 1870-1940. She argues that the design of private domestic spaces perpetuates unwillingness to count "women's work" as real work.40 The women's movement has begun to affect women's expectations for the home as a workplace and a shared family environment. The Movimento di Lotta Femminile of Padua has produced a manifesto for contemporary community organization. The authors argue that child care and housework should be shared among the men and women of a neighborhood, who should be given time off from their other work for

36. Dorothy Smith, "Household Space and Family Organization," Pacific Journal of Sociology 14 (January 1971): 53-78; "Women, the Family and Corporate Capitalism," Berkeley Journal of Sociology 20 (1975-76): 55-89. 37. Womanhouse, film by Johanna Demetrekas, Los Angeles, Calif., 1972. 38. Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, in press). 39. Wright, "The Woman's Commonwealth: Separatism, Self and Sharing," Architectural Association Quarterly 6 (Fall-Winter 1974): 36-43. 40. Hayden, "Collectivizing the Domestic Workplace," Lotus: Rivista internazionale di architettura contemporanea, vol. 10 (Winter 1976), in Italian and English.

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these duties.41 The recent example of the Cuban Family Code of 1974,42 making men legally responsible for sharing equally in household duties, suggests the possible architectural repercussions of feminism combined with political change. The home is of course a workplace for almost all women, but the design of environments where women work outside the home is an important area of research as well. A number of writers address this issue obliquely: Elinor Langer, in "Inside the New York Telephone Company," describes the design of hierarchical desk configurations and observation spaces used by telephone company supervisors to intimidate their customer service employees.43 May Hobbs, organizer of London office cleaners and author of Born to Struggle, describes the design and use of office building layouts as they are perceived by women cleaners.44 Dolores Hayden touches on secretaries' and cleaners' views of office towers in "Skyscraper Rape," a discussion of the oppressive phallic forms and hierarchical spaces of corporate office buildings.45 Elizabeth Lind- quist Cock and Estelle Jussim, in "Machismo in American Architecture," also discuss urban towers and how these environments are oppressive to women and men.46 Other writers, such as the authors of Women at Work: Ontario, 1850-1930, describe the factory, the hospital, the sweatshop, and the schoolroom, covering both contemporary and historical workplaces.47 A Place for Pleasure, an illustrated history of prostitution, also describes environments where women earned their living, although the author wishes to titillate rather than analyze.48 In general, work environments need the attention of feminist historians and architects. The authors we have cited offer some insights but no one has developed arguments about workplace design and women workers that are as far reaching as

41. Movimento di Lotta Femminile, Padova, "Programmatic Manifesto of Housewives in the Neighborhood," Socialist Revolution 9 (May-June 1972): 85-90. 42. "Cuban Family Code," Centerfor Cuban Studies, vol. 2 (1975) (available from the Center, 220 East 23d St., New York, N.Y.); Margaret Randall, Cuban Women Now: Afterword 1974 (Toronto: Canadian Women's Educational Press, 1974). 43. Elinor Langer, "Inside the New York Telephone Company," in Women at Work, ed. William L. O'Neill (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972). 44. May Hobbs, Born to Struggle (Plainfield, Vt.: Daughters, Inc., 1975). 45. Hayden, "Skyscraper Rape" (paper given at conference on Women in Design, Women's Building, Los Angeles, Calif., March 1975). 46. Elizabeth Lindquist Cock and Estelle Jussim, "Machismo in American Architec- ture," Feminist ArtJournal 3 (Spring 1974): 8-10. 47. Janice Acton, Penny Goldsmith, and Bonnie Shepard, eds., Women at Work: On- tario, 1850-1930 (Toronto: Women's Press, 1974). Also see reprints of Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, introduction by Tillie Olsen (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1972), originally published in 1861; and Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, Women and the Trades (New York: Arno Press, 1969) (originally published in 1909 as part of The Pittsburgh Survey). 48. G. L. Simon,A Placefor Pleasure (London: Harwood-Smart Publishing Co., 1974).

This content downloaded from 150.199.117.76 on Wed, 19 Oct 2016 15:20:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Signs Summer 1976 933 the current theories about the home. Perhaps the domestic workplace ultimately is the most important in terms of women's history and iden- tity, but women, especially working-class women, have had to cope with a great variety of other work environments as well. Analyses of the structure and function of these environments should illuminate important aspects of labor history and the life experiences of working-class women.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Hayden) University of California, Berkeley (Wright)

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