Collective Agency: The First Women to Enroll at Harvard University Graduate School of Design [1942—1948]
This is the continuation of this work I started when I made the film: Women were first admitted to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) in 1942. On a September morning, they took the six steps up to Robinson Hall to start their work at Harvard, possibly lamenting the loss of their women’s school, the Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, which had closed just months earlier. United States’s entrance into World War II brought wide-ranging changes to these women's lives. The domestic war efforts encouraged women to participate fully in society and pursue employment or education within the gendered spaces of factories or, in this narrative, elite universities like Harvard. Multitudes of women enrolled and bolstered each other’s educational efforts in what had otherwise been an all-male institution. At this time, architectural education was also changing, moving towards a Modernist pedagogy that proposed architecture as a social service. Women’s acceptance into the GSD program was reinforced by social stereotypes that women’s design skills were defined by their biology; they approached design instinctually and emotionally to support the use-value of the domestic spaces and the collaborative coursework being implemented. This history takes place between 1940 and 1948, but women shifted the paradigm in Architecture much earlier by pursuing education and professional practice, acting as examples for the first GSD women.