Judith Edelman about 1974. Credit Robert Ipcar for the New York Times.

By Kate Reggev

In 1950, Elizabeth Jablonsky wrote a letter to the editor of American Builder. “What future do you see for women as architects?” she asked the editor. “There was a time when architects, builders and others in the building trades and professions looked in the opposite direction when a woman architect applied for a job in the field," responded the editor. "However, we believe that day has passed; that there is a growing acceptance of women in the architectural field."

But Elizabeth did not feel “that day has passed.” Her own experience was riddled with frustration rather than a “growing acceptance”: it took WWII’s shortage of male architects for the field to open up for her, working first as an illustrator and later as an architectural designer of prefabricated homes. And even in these roles, she felt discriminated against and stuck in her career, unable to grow or aspire for something more because of challenges she found in the workplace.

04_Georgia Louise Harris Brown (third from right) at work in the office of Frank Kornacker, structural engineer. Photograph by Edwards, circa late 1940s. Courtesy of the Brown family, via Pioneering Women .

Jablonsky’s experience trying to work in architecture in postwar America reflected two simultaneous but seemingly opposite trends: the opening up of the workforce to women, and yet also the continued expectations of women in the home. While midcentury design and architecture is known for its break with the past, that didn’t quite make its way into the physical offices (and minds!) of firms and their leaders — despite what that editor said.

What did happen after the US’s entrance into WWII in 1941 and in the ensuing decade was the slow (but meaningful!) increase of women in architecture schools. Natalie Griffin de Blois (1921-2013, for example, graduated Columbia in 1944 was one of five women in her class of 18; Norma Merrick Sklarek (1926-2012) was one of two women in her class in 1950; one article in Architectural Record in 1948 noted that “even Harvard has seen the error of its strictly masculine ways” and had opened up to female students.

From schools, women then trickled into architecture firms and subsequently into licensure (and yes, those exams were frustrating even back then!). Many then joined the AIA. In Sarah Allaback’s book The First American Women Architects, her appendix notes that nearly 70 (if not more!) women joined the AIA between 1942 and 1950 — more than quadruple the previous decade, and more women than had been members since the AIA’s establishment in 1857. Impressively, six even were made Fellows of the AIA.

But it wasn’t just enrollment and AIA numbers that improved. Women’s organizations expanded, accommodating the need for the growing numbers of women to connect with and support each other. The student and professional group Alpha Alpha Gamma (renamed The Association of Women in Architecture and Allied Arts (AWA) in 1948), had 20 chapters across the country by 1950 (remember when we talked about Alberta and Martha Cassell, sisters and Black female architecture students at Cornell who were members in 1948?).

*A Thousand Women In Architecture*, March 1948 Architectural Record.

The media interpreted the late 1940s as a milestone era for women in architecture. Architectural Record, probably considered the most significant professional architectural publication at the time, did a two-part series on “A Thousand Women In Architecture,” profiling women and their work. Of the 1,119 women who they tried to track down, more than 200 responded to their survey, and over 100 stated they were actively practicing architecture. Many were no longer practicing because they had young children, but hoped to get back into the field once the kids were older — more on that later!

Of the eighteen women profiled in the two articles, many projects were single-family residential work (remember, there was a housing boom at the time! Plus, of course, the lingering sentiment that a woman’s place and her area of expertise was in the home). But also included were some commercial and cultural projects like churches, office buildings, and restaurants, all completed in a range of architectural styles from Colonial Revival to Moderne and Modernist; one architect, Elizabeth Coit (1892-1987), also wrote extensively for architectural publications.

The article included solo practitioners, like Carina Eaglesfield Milligan (1890-1978), who opened up her own firm shortly after her graduation from Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (refresher here on some of those design schools devoted to educating women), as well as female architects who worked for others, like Irene McFaul, AIA (d. 1980), who was the chief draftsman (ahem, draftswoman!) at the firm of Walter R. Hagedohm in Los Angeles. It also featured women like Victorine du Pont Homsey, AIA (1900-1998), who practiced with her husband Samuel; together, the article noted, they were “one of the best-known husband-and-wife architectural teams in the country.”

This arrangement of starting a firm with their husbands wasn’t unusual; “some husband-and-wife partnerships have been particularly successful, and have done outstanding work,” the article remarked. And in fact, practicing with your husband was often the only way for women to have a successful career in architecture, especially one that continued after marriage. Women could balance (or, at least, try!) having a family while still working and having a career in their chosen field.

03_Victorine and Samuel Homsey featured in Architectural Record, March 1938.

For example, Barbara Goldberg Neski (1928-2025), who graduated from Bennington College in 1949 and later Harvard’s GSD, married her coworker Julian Neski in 1953. The two met working in the office of Josep Lluis Sert and then, after marriage, together went to work for Marcel Breuer (can you imagine how unusual — or maybe just “modern” — they must have seemed: a husband-and-wife duo working in the same office!).

Like many other female architects of the time, Neski stopped working in 1957 when she was pregnant with her first child; however, architecture was never totally out of the picture. "I changed his diaper on our drafting table," she recalled in a 2007 piece about her work in Dwell. By the early 1960s, the couple had three young ones: two children and a new architectural practice they established together. Neski explained that it was the "way that we could have a career and children too." Throughout their 40+ year career together, the couple designed more than 35 Modernist homes on the eastern end of Long Island that were described by The New York Times as “ landmarks in weekend living.”

While the Architectural Record piece did showcase women’s a broad range of work and ways of practicing, it didn’t stretch so far as to feature many racial or ethnic minorities. Yes, two had been educated abroad, and including Elsa Gidoni was originally from Latvia and was Jewish. But we know that by midcentury, architecture was slowly but surely becoming slightly more diverse. By the 1940s, there were a number of Black women studying architecture (the Cassell sisters, Alma Carlisle, and more), and several actively practicing, like Norma Merrick Sklarek, Beverly Lorraine Greene, Ethel Bailey Furman, and Georgia Louise Harris Brown. Where are they in Architectural Record? And what about the exuberant, commercially-driven work of Helen Liu Fong (1927-2005), the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants?

It’s hard to say exactly why these women weren’t mentioned or included in the article. It’s true that women of color were a very small percentage of all architects in the 1940s and 1950s; women today are only about 25% of all architects in the US (I see you ladies!!) and only 17% in 2013, so you can imagine that it must have been meaningfully less 75 years ago — and even more so for non-white women. But I have to wonder if there wasn’t something more furtive and even illicit happening: the desire to show that even if women were beginning to be accepted in the field, they had to look a certain way or come from a specific racial or ethnic background, i.e. like the majority of the (male) architectural population.

Association of Women in Architecture, LA Chapter, 1950. Courtesy of The Association of Women in Architecture.

Regardless of their race or ethnicity, it’s likely that all of these women encountered sexism. Georgia Louise Harris Brown recalled a professor suggesting her place was in home economics instead of architecture. At her first job out of architecture school, Natalie de Blois was let go after rebuffing the advances of a male colleague (“their loss” is truly an understatement here). Norma Sklarek, too, felt that being a woman worked against her in the field, especially in her job search; when reflecting on her long career, she told a local newspaper in 2004 that she hadn’t been sure what was more of an issue: that she was a woman or that she was African American. Judith Hochberg Edelman (1923-2014), who graduated with a B.Arch from Columbia in 1946, was turned down by employers before ultimately starting a firm with her husband and a third partner.

It’s hard not to see the irony of the period. The advent and embracing of Modernism left behind the aesthetics of the past, replacing them with the new, the sleek, the idea of purpose over ornament — but not when it came to gender roles. Instead, preconceptions about women remained. Still, though, dozens of women persisted, enduring the sexism, racism, tough job hunts, diapers on drafting boards, and more.

In a pleasant surprise, it appears that Elizabeth Jablonski, the writer of that letter to the editor in 1950, ended up having a very long career in the field. By the late 1980s and early 1990s — a whopping 40 years after her letter to American Builder! — she was still working in architecture and construction, now in Princeton Township as the local Construction Official. Perhaps she, and the female architects that were featured in Architectural Record in 1948 felt as the article stated: “These 10 are architects; it so happens they also are women.”

Diapers on Drafting Tables: 1,000 Midcentury Female Architects