ABSTRACT
Reflecting upon the impact of feminist thought on the academic discipline of Design History over the past twenty years, Judith Attfield makes the point that whilst there has been considerable development in a much wider field of gender, as opposed to women’s, studies, some of the most recently published work ‘suggests that many of the problems identified in the first wave of “women and design” literature still apply’.1 In one of those early and seminal ‘first wave’ texts which have informed much of the work of later art and design historians, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker proposed methods of tackling the ‘problems’ which still hold such currency. They argued that it was not sufficient merely to unearth forgotten female artists or designers and somehow make room for them in the canon; rather, what was required was the deconstruction of a patriarchal society and its institutions, and an understanding of the ways in which women have been, and are still, marginalised and excluded.2 How, then, do the achievements of a professionally qualified, talented, well connected and popular woman get written out of architectural history? According to architectural historian Lynne Walker, it happens in a variety of ways:
Women’s architectural production in the late 1920s and 1930s was very well received and well-illustrated in the building press, but modernist architectural history has either ignored it, as in the case of the ‘pioneering’ Factory Offices, Derby 1929-31, designed by Norah Aiton and Betty Scott; misattributed their work (Mary Crowley); absorbed their names and reputations into their partners’ (Sadie Speight) or depicted it as a representation of the designer’s femininity.3
