Emancipated but still accompanied

The first department of architecture in Slovakia opened in the 1946. The first female Slovak architects began their careers with the graduation of the first class of students in 1950, four of whom were women (6 percent). At the same time, the number of female graduates did not increase in proportion to the total number who completed the course. Even though there was no official gender-based numerus clausus, the number of women studying architecture in the first decade of the faculty’s existence did not exceed 13 in one year. In subsequent decades, the number of women who studied architecture rose steadily, yet the gender imbalance among graduates remained, and varied widely from year to year. In 1968, for instance, women represented a mere 15 percent of graduates in the field of architecture, while in 1971 the figure was 46 percent; in 1976 the proportion fell again to 21 percent, yet by 1990 had soared to 45.8 percent. Thus, as in most European countries, the first wave of women to enter the architectural profession in Slovakia did not occur in the first half of the twentieth century, but only in the 1950s and 1960s. This situation also reflects the fact that the first comprehensive review of women in the architectural profession occurred only in the late 1980s. However, when the editors of the Slovak architectural journal Projekt began preparing a special issue in 1989 dedicated to the first women in architecture, most of the respondents stated that they had no desire to investigate architecture from a female perspective. Nevertheless, the editors eventually collected information on the life and work of 13 women architects. Their presentation of this research, however, revealed the pervasive ambivalence that surrounds women who work in a professional context. The biographical data of the architects did not include dates of birth, and many of the women in the interviews spoke of themselves in the masculine form – “architect” (vs. architektka), “creator” (tvorca), or at most the neutral “person” (človek). In fact, the respondents justified the need to distance themselves from questions of gender through their “right to an evaluation of their work that is equal to that of men”. ¹ Indeed, focusing an entire issue of the journal on the work of women in architecture was seen “not as any elevation but more as a degradation”. ² Without exception, the subjects under consideration were those very women who first made their appearance in the architectural scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and managed to create their own autonomous architectural works.