ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part illustrates situations where women have played central roles in the creation of new environments designed for use by women. It reviews four years of the development of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, a public space created to house woman’s culture. The part examines historical precedents in the feminist wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and compares them to the spaces of the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement. It addresses the symbolic requirements of die building as well as the strictly spatial needs identified by the groups. The part describes the planning process and the outcome, which included finally economic constraints that prevented the actual building of the complex! It discusses Women in Transition, a female-conceptualized and administered environment for women in marital transition.
