ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a moment in the UK in the 1930s when the vast expansion of the manufacture and the marketing of building products transformed the role of architects and their relationship to industry, and argues that these developments also provided conditions which facilitated the entry, in any number, of women into the architectural profession. To make this case I look in particular at The Building Centre, which opened in Bond Street in 1932 to showcase new products, and draw parallels with the work of the Electrical Association for Women, who saw in the expansion of electrification real potentials for women’s emancipation, and mobilised an army of female electrical demonstrators, ‘housecraft’ educators, technicians and product specialists who were recruited into the industry for their ability to communicate with the newly-targeted female market. By giving space to the wide range of roles women played in the building industry, I aim to show there was no single monolithic category of women whose lives the 'proprietary turn' transformed. Even in the 1930s, as today, there are more ways in which women contributed to the built environment than can be understood only by recovering the histories of their work as architects or as patrons.
