C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 29 DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION ELIZABETH DARLING (Some of) The women who shaped British modernism Women architects did much to shape the nature of the profession itself and played a major role in the modernism that defined the architecture of the 20th century. Women’s presence in British architectural culture has a long and rich history. Through to the 19th century they can be found active and influential as clients, writers, reformers of the built environment, conservationists, and architects in the amateur tradition; think of Bess of Hardwick, Henrietta Howard, Sara Losh or Octavia Hill. As professionally trained architects, however, their presence has been more complicated. This had much to do with the emergence of pupillage as the standard form of architectural training in the 19th century. It was rooted in a guild tradition of master and apprentice, a system which institutionalised the masculinity (and hence sexism) of an emerging profession. Moreover, despite the shift to academic training, and architecture’s relatively late legal professionalisation (registration acts were not passed until the 1930s), this has had a long legacy in shaping the fundamental structures of the discipline and expectations of who and who should not be an architect. It was only a century ago that women began to enter training and then practice in any number. Paradoxically, this process also had its roots in the 19th century for, from the 1850s, feminist campaigners began to argue for (at this point middle-class) women’s right to a full education. By the 1910s, it was the combination of it being more common in middle-class circles for girls to go to university, and the increasing shift to training in architecture schools, that saw women begin to train as architects. They began the slow process of redressing the gender imbalance in the profession and, in so doing, made space for the generations of women who followed them. Equally important, they did much to shape the nature of the profession itself and played a major role in the modernism that defined the architecture of the 20th century. London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), which opened its doors to women in 1917, was an important centre for the first women to enter the profession en masse. Gillian Cooke (1898–1974), for example, was one of the first four women to join the school, and went on to enjoy a long career in partnership with her husband, H St John Harrison. The practice specialised in domestic work with Cooke the design lead. Schemes included Red Willows, Kent (1930) but their design for a project for Cooke’s sister and husband, a certain Rosemary (Molly) and Jack Pritchard, on Lawn Kensal House, London, 1934, designed by Elizabeth Denby and Maxwell Fry (Photo: John East)
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