Two female settlement pioneers, Florence Kelley and Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, founded the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York. The organization’s first project was the New York Congestiom Exhibit of 1908. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

By Kate Reggev

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we’ve mentioned a few times now how historically, many felt that if women were to become architects, their participation in the field should be relegated to residential architecture because of their “innate” and “intimate” knowledge of the domestic sphere. But what about the bigger scale of housing, beyond the individual building? What about large-scale strategic planning, mapping, policy-making, and promoting better housing for all? In Part I of our deep-dive into women and affordable housing, we focused on the meaningful impact that female architects had on a range of housing types and scales, from individual homes to model tenements, entire city blocks, and larger neighborhoods. Here in Part II, we’ll get to the planning side of things, where women designed not with maylines and ink, but rather with words, advocacy, and unwavering grit.

New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia swears in new members of the New York City Housing Authority including Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, 1937.

Women had, by the early 1900s, decades of experience in social reform. The whole settlement house movement (ironically not a residential “house” in the way we’ve been discussing them!) was predominantly led by women and deeply impacted housing reform in the United States. Women like British tenement manager Octavia Hill (1838-1912) and Jane Addams (1860-1935), founder of Chicago’s Hull House, pioneered social reform for immigrants and the urban poor; they also became thought leaders in urban and affordable housing around the same time early female architects like Mary Gannon, Alice Hands, and others were practicing. There is some evidence that the two groups — early female architects and female social reformers — moved in the same circles; some early female architects like Fay Kellogg (1871-1918) were also directly involved in the suffrage and reform movements. Others relied on insights from social reformers for their designs: architect Alice J. Hands, for example, noted the assistance of “the University Settlement men” in an 1899 article describing her design process for developing a New York City model tenement.

But by the turn of the 20th century, another group of reformers hit the scene: planners. As the American Planning Association explains, “‘planning’ emerged as a standardized profession and practice in the early 1900s,” seeking to design and manage the physical, economic, and social development of communities. Larger in scale and broader in its multi-disciplinary scope than architecture, early planners often had a background in a range of areas, from economics to voting rights to urban reform to architecture.

Like architecture in the early twentieth century, the profession of city planning was distinctly male and overwhelmingly white (surprise!) — think landscape architects like Richard Law Olmsted, who served as one of the earliest city planners. And as planning professionalized, it also tried to sideline the topic of affordable housing. However, as researcher Bri Gauger, Ph.D. notes in her fantastic dissertation “Urban Planning and Its Feminist Histories,” a small group of pioneering female social reformers in the early twentieth century “created “A distinctly female support network… [which] enable[d] politically and professionally active women to function independently and intensively” to shape a national city planning agenda.” These women refused to let housing reform fall to the wayside, and pushed affordable housing on to the main stage, directly leading to the first public housing program in the U.S. in the 1930s (basically, we owe the existence of public housing to these women!).

So, who was a part of this “distinctly female support network”? It was primarily composed of educated white women of some socio-economic means who typically were involved in social reform in urban areas on the East Coast. The group included settlement house founders and activists like Vida Scudder (1861-1954), Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (1867-1951), Florence Kelley (1859-1932), and Lillian Wald (1867-1940). While these women weren’t, as historian Eugenie Ladner Birch noted in an interview with Gauger, “professional planners,” they knew and understood the on-the-ground issues of the urban poor. As a result, they were uniquely positioned to develop ideas, strategies, and priorities for affordable housing. Many of them also had significant roles in shaping the national housing conversation: Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, for example, started the New York City settlement house Greenwich House; she later served as the first president of the National Public Housing Conference and ultimately one of the first members (1934-1948) of the New York City Housing Authority.

Portrait of Edith Elmer Wood_Courtesy of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

By the 1920s and 1930s, ideas about urban reform shifted from individual efforts often funded by private donors (like individual settlement houses) or small co-ops, to the idea that the federal government should be more involved in ensuring adequate and affordable housing for all (nothing like the Great Depression to make you realize the importance of a safety net!). As planning matured, men continued to be the primary figures of the profession, with a handful of exceptional exceptions like Edith Elmer Wood (1871-1945) and Catherine Bauer Wurster (1905-1964).

Wood, an 1890 graduate of Smith College and mother of four, was drawn to affordable and public housing through her interest in public health. Early involvement in housing included writing a building code for new construction in San Juan, Puerto Rico (her husband was stationed there as a Naval officer) and later a survey of Washington, D.C.’s alleyway homes that often lacked plumbing, heat, insulation and sewage systems (exactly the alley conditions that Schenck & Mead’s award-winning design for the Wilson Memorial Homes was seeking to avoid!).

In 1915 at the ripe young age of 43 and determined to become an authority on housing, Wood moved to the center of housing reform, New York City, to attend Columbia University. Her impressive dissertation, The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner, became her fifth (!) book and was published in 1919. It included an exhaustive survey of all American housing efforts, outlined the housing problem, and provided multi-pronged solutions. She was dreaming big here, calling for a National Housing Act, a National Housing Commission, and a state Commission of Housing and Town Planning. By the 1920s, her book became “the basic handbook on housing,” according to Eugenie Ladner Birch, who wrote her own dissertation on Wood.

Recent Trends in American Housing by Edith Elmer Wood, 1931.

Even when public interest in housing for the poor waned during the 1920s (why think about affordable housing when you could be sipping illicit cocktails in a speakeasy?), Wood pressed on, publishing research, teaching at Columbia, and becoming a member of the influential (and almost exclusively male) Regional Planning Association of America. She wrote her seminal book, Recent Trends in American Housing, in 1931, and from there her pioneering career only continued to gain momentum. As she entered her sixties (!), she served on the executive committee of the International Housing Association (1931) and became the vice president and later director of the National Public Housing Conference (1932, 1936-1945). She co-founded the National Association of Housing Officials (1933), worked as a consultant to the housing division of the Public Works Administration and to the US Housing Authority, and served as a member of the New Jersey State Housing Authority. (Phew! I’m exhausted just writing all of that out!)

Wood was notable not just for the span (four decades) and depth of her career, but also for some of her fundamental ideas about housing — especially the view that government intervention and sponsorship were necessary to make high-quality affordable housing. Here, she was particularly influenced by the models seen in Europe, especially the social housing in cities like Vienna.

Unfortunately, a central part of her vision, especially in the later years, was often “slum clearance,” i.e. the removal of what was often seen by some (read: government officials, usually male, white, and at least middle-class) as “blighted”. Despite her socially-minded approach, Wood and her colleagues failed to fully understand the nuances of existing communities and social values. I also sense that her top-down, government-reliant approach, while thoughtful and even idealist, often directly associated “old” with “bad” and “needing to be torn down.” It’s hard not to look at the past with the perspective of today, so I know we can’t totally fault her for these ideas — but I do wonder what forward-thinking ideas and ideals she might have, if she were alive today.

Equally impressive and interested in public housing was Catherine Bauer Wurster, who was a generation behind Wood and built on some of her ideas about housing. After graduating from Vassar in 1926, Wurster’s astounding career started in publishing, where she worked under the renowned (if oft snarky) historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford. Inspired by visits to the socially-driven Modernist architects in post-World War I Europe, she became convinced and then advocated that good social housing funded by the government had the potential to improve virtually all aspects of life.

In 1934, she wrote the catalyzing Modern Housing, which looked to the publicly-developed Modernist apartment complexes in England, France, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands as the ideal model for the United States. Unlike Wood, Wurster argued not for slum clearance and low-income housing, but rather high-quality construction that would be targeted more for the middle class and lower middle class, while stimulating the construction economy.

That same year that Modern Housing came out, Wurster was chosen as the Executive Director of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and a few short years later co-wrote the Housing Act of 1937 that established public housing in the U.S. (that saga alone is well-worth an entire docu-drama, if anyone is looking for a project!). As if her career weren’t already in full-throttle mode, she was soon named Director of Information and Research for the newly-formed United States Housing Authority. From there, she participated in the 1939 New York World’s Fair, taught at Harvard and Berkeley (where she ultimately became associate dean), gave birth to a daughter in 1940, advised five presidents on housing and urban planning, and consulted for many national, state, and local housing and planning agencies (feels like there was nothing she couldn’t do!) before her untimely death at age 59 in 1964.

Such an impressive, impactful career merited the many obituaries and tributes that were published in mainstream and design-oriented media. Her tribute by architecture critic Douglas Haskell in the April 1965 issue of Architectural Forum called her "synonymous with housing," (wow!) and described her as "a forerunner, a prototype."

Catherine Bauer, on the jury for MoMA’s Organic Design Exhibition, ca. 1940. Courtesy of Southern California Architectural History.

But her gender, at least for that author, had to be mentioned: "She embodied, with her womanly way, but with directness and toughness, the characteristics of the coming leader in the art of making this earth a tolerable abode..." While I get a hint of warm condescension (if that can be a thing?) in his tone, I do think that in most ways, Haskell genuinely meant to praise her; he later noted that Lewis Mumford compared the style and flair of her personal letters to "Virginia Woolf, whom Catherine visited in 1938." (can there be any higher praise?! I think not!).

It seems that whether women were designing individual residences, model tenements, low-income housing developments, or groundbreaking national housing policy, it was impossible for them to escape their gender. In the foreword to one of her own books, Edith Elmer Wood noted that she approaches the problem of public housing as "the housewife, the alert citizen, and the social economist." Is it that Wood saw herself in this multi-faceted way that inevitably connected to her gender, or is it the male-centric perspective that relegated her to it? Did any male housing experts ever self-describe as “husbands” or “fathers” in the forewords of their own books?

On the other hand, perhaps gender here is both relevant and positive; differences from the status quo are not de facto negative (surprise! Gender dynamics are complex 🙂). Perhaps being a woman in these environments truly did give these planners and advocates a different perspective — one that was fresher, more holistic, considerate, and understanding.

And finally, while we are ending here with early female planners and their housing efforts in the 1930s, there is so much more here — the broader planning and design impacts of women like Elisabeth May Herlihy and Eleanor Manning O’Connor, for example, on cities like Boston; women’s contributions to the planning and design of government-sponsored large-scale housing into the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond (Elizabeth Coit!); the contributions of female planners in academia, where we find names we’d recognize today (Denise Scott Brown! Jane Jacobs!). Guess there will just have to be more In Ink pieces on the topic down the road!

RESOURCES

Modern Housing by Catherine Bauer

Urban Planning and Its Feminist Histories by Bri Gauger

New Angle, New Voice: Catherine Bauer Wurster: A Thoroughly Modern Woman

The (Still) Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing by Barbara Penner in Places

11 Women Whose Work Can Inspire Post-Pandemic Planning

Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers at UC Berkeley

Introduction to Housing; Facts and Principles by Edith Elmer Wood, United States Housing Authority, 1940.

The Housing of the Unskilled Wage Earner by Edith Elmer Wood, 1919.

Women on Housing: Edith Elmer Wood and Catherine Bauer, in DESIGNING MODERN AMERICA: THE REGIONAL PLANNING ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA AND ITS MEMBERS, 1996.

Edith Elmer Wood and the Genesis of Liberal Housing Thought, 1910-1942, by Eugenie Ladner Birch, 1976.

US contributions to the construction of the modern city: Five women by María Cristina García González y Salvador Guerrero López

Women In Affordable Housing, Part II: The Planners & Advocates

RESOURCES