Women’s Studies W3916/Architecture A6673
Historical Approaches to Feminist Questions – Gender and the Built Environment
Tuesday 2:10-4 PM
754 Schermerhorn Ext
Mary McLeod
[email protected]
212.854.8262
Victoria Rosner
[email protected]
212.854.2720
212.854.2171(appointments)
The built environment – the human-made surroundings in which we live, work, and play - is shaped in important ways by ideas about gender, race, and sexuality. Yet the built
environment has been a relatively neglected area within women’s and gender studies, a
neglect this course seeks to redress. This course will move among literature, architecture,
design, and urban planning with a focus on the 19th century in England and the United
States. It seeks to lead students to adapt a critical perspective on the built environment, to
analyze the rhetoric of architectural space and perhaps to consider why architecture
remains among the most male-dominated of all the professions. We will think carefully
about the meaning of women’s history and the various approaches to the historian’s work;
assignments for the course, described below, will give students the opportunity to
undertake archival research and compose and publish their own histories. After a brief
introduction to feminist architectural theory, we will begin by exploring the complex
environs of the English country house, circa 1860, as well as its transatlantic cousin, the
U.S. plantation household. Our end point will be the year 1928, which saw the
publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as well as Adolf Loos’s design of a
house for Josephine Baker (unbuilt). Along the way, we will consider topics such as
women’s confinement to the domestic sphere and identification with the home; public
and private realms; the organization of sexuality in the city; the feminist utopian spatial
imagination; and the evolution of women’s spaces for reading and writing.
CLASS SCHEDULE
January 22
Introductions
January 29
Feminism and Architecture
Diana Agrest, “Architecture From Without: Body, Logic, and Sex,” in Architecture From
Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Sherry Ahrentzen, “The ‘F Word in Architecture: Feminist Analyses in/of/for Architecture,”
Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourse and Social Practices, ed. Thomas A. Dutton
and Lian Hurst Mann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, 71-118.
Leslie Kanes Weisman, “Women’s Environmental Rights: A Manifesto,” Heresies: A
Feminist Publication on Art and Politics 3 (1981): 6-8.
February 5
Feminism and History
The second half of class will be held in Avery Library where a librarian will provide an
introduction to research techniques in architecture
Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", Art News, January
1971, 22-39, 67-71, rpt. in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1989. 147-58.
Joan Scott, “Women’s History,” Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999. 15-27.
Lisa Tichner, "Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference." Genders, no. 3 (November
1988): 92-128.
Recommended:
Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" in Vision and
Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Methuen, 1988. 5090.
Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?" Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988.
Scott, Joan W. Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999.
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February 12
Separate Spheres
Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House (1864) (parts one and two)
In CLIO at http://clio.cul.columbia.edu:7018/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=9338238
Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, “On the Parapets of Privacy: Walls of Wealth and
Dispossession,” The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 143-155.
Recommended:
Judith Flanders. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian
England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
February 19
The Architecture of Secrecy
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42
Henry Urbach, "Closets, Clothes, Disclosure," Assemblage 30 (1996): 62-73.
Recommended:
George Chauncey, “Privacy Could Only Be Had in Public: Gay Uses of the Streets,” in
Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, ed. Joel Sanders. New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996. 224-61.
Judith Walkowitz, “Urban Spectatorship,” City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual
Danger in Late Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
February 26
Women’s Work in the Victorian Age
Hannah Cullwick, The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, ed. Liz Stanley.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984. This book is out of print and on reserve
at Butler Library. Please read any 150 pages and come to class with passages you find
interesting to share with everyone.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford. 1851. Oxford University Press editon.
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/394
Recommended:
Anne McClintock, “Imperial Leather: Race, Cross-Dressing, and the Cult of Domesticity,”
in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York and
London: Routledge, 1995. 132-180.
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March 5
The Plantation Household
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Ed. Valerie Smith. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988.
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030
Carl Anthony, "The Big House and the Slave Quarters: African Contributions to the New
World," Landscape 20-21 (1976), rpt. in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and
Landscape of North American Slavery, ed. Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
Recommended:
Ann Gelder, “Reforming the Body: 'Experience' and the Architecture of Imagination in
Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics,
Science, and Literature 1650-1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash. Lexington,
KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Valerie Smith, "'Loopholes of Retreat': Architecture and Ideology in Harriet Jacobs's
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl." Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical
Anthology. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of
the South. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Analytic paper due
March 12
Domestic Reform
Guest lecture by Gwendolyn Wright
Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869)
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6598
Dolores Hayden, “Catharine Beecher and the Politics of Housework” in Women in
American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, ed. Susana Torre. New
York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977. 40-49.
Gwendolyn Wright (1981) “The Women’s Commonwealth: A Nineteenth-Century
Experiment,” Heresies 11 (1981): 24-28.
March 19
Spring break
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March 26
The New Woman
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1889)
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/160/160-h/160-h.htm
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892)
At Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, excerpt from Woman and Economics, in Alice S. Rossi,
ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1973. 572-98.
Dolores Hayden, “Domestic Evolution or Revolution?” in The Grand Domestic
Revolution. Boston: MIT Press, 1982. 182-205.
Recommended:
Polly Wynn Allen, “Gilman’s Attention to Domestic Architecture: Her Fourfold Case
Against Prevailing Household Design,” in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural
Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 55-119.
Annmarie Adams, “Domestic Architecture and Victorian Feminism,” from Architecture in
the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1996. 129April 2
House Beautiful
Alice T. Friedman, "Frank Lloyd Wright and Feminism: Mamah Borthwick's Letters to
Ellen Key," JSAH 61, no. 2 (June 2002).
Ellen Kay, "Beauty in the House," in Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts, ed.
Lucy Creagh et al. New York: MoMA, 2008.
Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1980. Chapter on Wright, House Beautiful.
Screening of film: “A Girl is a Fellow Here.”
First draft of profile due
April 9
Scientific Management of the Home
Christine Frederick, The New Housekeeping (1912). Free eBook at Google Books or from
the National Humanities Center website.
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Alice T. Friedman, “Introduction,” Women and the Making of the Modern House. New
York: H. N. Abrams, 1990.
Susan Henderson, “A Revolution in the Woman’s Sphere: Grete Lihotzky and the Frankfurt
Kitchen,” in Architecture and Feminism, ed. Debra Coleman et al. Princeton: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996. 221-248.
Recommended:
Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command. New York: Oxford University Press,
1948. 512-526 and 659-710.
April 16
Modern Women
Adolf Loos, Baker House Project (1927). At
http://cargocollective.com/adolfloos/Josephine-Baker-House-Unbuilt
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928). Any edition.
Recommended:
Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011.
April 23
Guest speaker: Beverly Willis
Research presentations
Architect profile due
April 30
Research presentations
The following texts will be available at Book Culture:
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
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ASSIGNMENTS
Assignments by weight:
40% Architect profile
30% Analytic paper
20% Seminar presentation
10% Class participation
Architect profile
The primary written work for this course will give students the opportunity to participate
directly in the documentation of women’s contributions to the built environment. You
will research and write a 2000-word essay that will potentially become part of a edited
and locked web-based archive of early 20th century women architects. The Dynamic
National Archive is a project of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and is
supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The names of the
individuals to be profiled will be selected by a national panel of scholars in February. You
will use primary historical materials to research your subject and, in composing your
profile, follow an outline that will be provided to you. You will also gather images
relevant to the work of your subject. Relevant links:
http://bwaf.org/bwaf-press-release-nea-grant-funds-making-a-place-for-women-in-20thcentury-american-architecture/
http://bwaf.org/collection/dna-about/
Analytic paper
In a 7-8 page paper, develop an analysis of a work from the syllabus that is articulated
through conversation with other critical commentary on the work. Your goal is both to
delineate the shape of relevant critical debate on the work you select and to present an
original interpretation that builds on prior criticism. You should draw on at least 4-5
different sources, though you will likely give some sources more weight than others in
your paper.
Instructions for both of the above papers:
Please submit your papers by the date indicated on the syllabus. Submit your papers as
hard copies; they should be double-spaced, stapled, titled and formatted in Times or
Times New Roman. Cover pages are not required. Be sure to proofread your work
carefully and document any works referenced in MLA style with in-text citations and a
bibliography. Late papers will be graded down one increment for each day late, i.e., from
A to A-. Papers more than a week late will not be accepted and will receive an F. Please
retain copies of all work submitted.
Seminar presentation
Working in groups of two or three (depending on final course enrollment), you will be
responsible for researching a topic related to the day’s readings, and assembling a
presentation that is lively, informative, and performance-oriented. Please do not read from
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a script. Use of visual materials is highly recommended. Your report may either be on a
topic related to the day’s assigned reading or may focus on a portion of the reading itself
and investigate it through research. On the day of your presentation, you will hand in a
write-up of your work together with an annotated bibliography of your sources. It is your
responsibility to meet with me AT LEAST A WEEK prior to your presentation to discuss this
assignment; at the time of our meeting you should have a preliminary plan in mind.
COURSE POLICIES
Policy on attendance, preparation and classroom conduct
You are expected to attend class and to arrive promptly. This course is organized around
discussion, so be prepared to participate actively: come to class prepared to contribute. If
you miss a class, you are still responsible for turning in any assignment due that day, and
for notifying me about the reason for the absence. Please complete all readings by class
time on the day they are assigned and bring a copy of the text to class. Please plan to
dedicate your attention to our class colloquy and refrain from accessing the Internet or
employing any form of interpersonal communication besides speech during class.
Policy on academic integrity
The intellectual venture in which we are all engaged requires of faculty and students alike
the highest level of personal and academic integrity. As members of an academic
community, each one of us bears the responsibility to participate in scholarly discourse
and research in a manner characterized by intellectual honesty and scholarly integrity.
Collaborative scholarship requires the study of other scholars’ work, the free discussion of
such work, and the explicit acknowledgement of those ideas in any work that inform our
own. This exchange of ideas relies upon a mutual trust that sources, opinions, facts, and
insights will be properly noted and carefully credited. Any breach of this intellectual
responsibility is a breach of faith with the rest of our academic community and will be
investigated by the Office of Judicial Affairs.
Policy on accommodations for students with disabilities
In order to receive disability-related academic accommodations, students must first be
registered with Disability Services . More information on the Disability Services registration
process is available online at www.health.columbia.edu/ods. Registered students must
present an accommodation letter to the professor before exam or other accommodations
can be provided. Students who have, or think they may have, a disability are invited to
contact Disability Services for a confidential discussion at (212) 854-2388 (Voice/TTY) or
by email at [email protected].
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