For the Record. Joan Grierson

across the country – became a major business centre. Settlements appeared along the rail lines. To keep pace with this growth, the Bank of Commerce shipped prefabricated banks to new towns atop flatbed rail cars, two rail cars per bank. In 1906, a new branch was being erected somewhere in the Prairies every other week.

      Most of the population still lived on farms, but towns were growing and the shift had begun to urban life. Larger towns boasted modern conveniences such as gas-powered and horse-drawn trams; theatres were well attended and the level of culture, over all, was on the rise. Women worked with church groups and benevolent societies for the welfare of women working in factories and the homeless and in the realm of medical care. To promote better practical education for wives and mothers, Adelaide Hunter Hood-less established the first Women’s Institute in Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. Other socially minded groups were forming, too: the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Suffrage Society of Canada and the Young Women’s Christian Association.

      Women were becoming a force. They wanted more say in matters that concerned them, and it was easy to see that political power and education were both essential to that purpose. Victoria College, in Cobourg, Ontario, opened its doors to women in 1877, and University College in Toronto followed in 1884. Frustrated in attempts to enter established medical schools in Toronto and Kingston, women managed to start their own schools in both cities. The earliest professional degrees accessible to women were in the fields of science, pharmacy, law and eventually medicine. Architecture was still in the future.

      WOMEN’S BUILDING, WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, Chicago, designed by Sophie Hayden, 1893; HOTEL LAFAYETTE, Buffalo, New York, 1904, Louise Blanchard Bethune, AIA.

      In Europe and in the United States, it was a different story. In 1881, in Buffalo, New York, Louise Blanchard Bethune opened an architectural office at the age of twenty-five. She had learned her trade in the office of Richard Waite, the man whose commissions included the Ontario Legislature. With R.A. Bethune, her husband and her partner in the firm, Louise Blanchard Bethune shared a practice that was responsible for the design of many of Buffalo’s early educational, industrial and commercial buildings – including Hotel Lafayette (1898–1904), a city landmark.

      In 1880, the first woman graduated in architecture from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. By 1891, when women were invited to compete for the design of the Women’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), there were thirteen entrants from around the United States. First prize went to Sophie Hayden, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is interesting to note that Louise Blanchard Bethune refused to enter this competition because the honorarium for the winner of the women’s competition was one-tenth that being offered for an equivalent competition open to male architects.

      In the 1894 MIT graduating class.map in architecture were three women; one was Marion Mahony. From 1895 to 1909, she worked with Frank Lloyd Wright in his Oak Park Studio outside Chicago. When she started, she was twenty-four and Wright was twenty-eight. Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin in 1911; their architectural firm built an international reputation. On the west coast, in 1904, architect Julia Morgan opened an office in San Francisco. Before retiring in 1951, she had designed over 700 buildings. By 1910, Julia Morgan was one of fifty women architects practicing in the United States.

      In Europe, too, women were active in the profession. Emilie Winkelmann opened her own office in 1908 in Berlin, with a staff of fifteen prior to the First World War. In Austria, the first woman architect began a practice in 1917. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky worked on Frankfurt Social Housing with Ernst May: her work produced the Frankfurt Kitchen, a prefabricated unit that could be inserted into high-rise apartments by a crane. (Ten thousand such units were installed between 1925 and 1930.)

      In Finland, Signe Hornborg graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of Helsinki in 1890. In England, Ethel Charles was the first woman to graduate from an architectural program in 1898. The following year, the Royal Institute of British Architects elected by a single vote to admit women, and Ethel Charles joined the RIBA. In 1900, they admitted a second woman: Bessie Ada Charles, Ethel’s sister. In Australia, Florence Taylor was the first woman to graduate in architecture in 1907. Before coming to Canada, Alexandra Biriukova completed degrees in Petrograd in 1914 and in Rome in 1925.

      BERKELEY WOMEN’S CITY CLUB, Berkeley, California, 1929–1930, Julia Morgan, Architect; MUELLER HOUSE, Chicago, Illinois, 1910, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, Architects.

      Women’s interest in architecture was growing. In the United States, it led to an unusual school of architecture and landscape design exclusively for women. The Cambridge School was close to Harvard, which did not admit women. A Radcliffe College graduate requested tutorials in architectural design in the office of Henry Frost and his partner. Several more women applied, and the office turned into a school. That was in 1917. When the school closed twenty-six years later, 500 women had been trained and the Cambridge School had a well-established reputation for excellence.

      In Canada, it was a different story, with only limited signs of interest. In Montreal, in the 1890s, Jean Eleanor Howden studied at McGill University for two years, but when she was told a woman could not be granted a degree in architecture, she left the university and joined the office of Edward and W.S. Maxwell, Architects. In 1908, one woman’s application to study architecture was referred to the McGill University Faculty of Applied Science, which decided it “would not be advisable to admit women at the present.” McGill relented in 1937. Women architects were slow to appear in Canada and few in number. Mary Anna Kentner enrolled in 1916 at the University of Toronto, and Marjorie Hill, who had first enrolled in Alberta, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1920.

      That was the beginning. It was in 1917 that women in Canada won the right to vote. Five years after Hill graduated, for the first time in history, a young woman took her seat in the House of Commons in Ottawa. Agnes Macphail was to be the only woman there for fifteen of her nineteen years in office, but as she said, “A woman’s place is where she wants to be.”

      The first women who trained to be architects in Canada would certainly agree. Between 1920 and 1960 twenty-eight women went through the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto. The following pages describe their professional lives, with glimpses of the times they faced upon graduation.

WOMEN GRADUATES IN ARCHITECTURE

      1920 TO 1960, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

      1920s

Marjorie Hill

Jean Hall

Elizabeth Lalor Harding

      1930s

Beatrice Centner Davidson

Katharine Jefferys Helm

Dama Lumley Bell

       Phyllis Cook Carlisle

       Ann Gauthier Malott

      1940s

       Martha Stewart Leitch

       Margaret Synge Dryer

       Mary Imrie