Brooklyn-born Jessie Cassidy Saunders (1861 - ?) was among the first women in the United States to earn an architecture degree; she received a B.S. in Architecture from Cornell in 1886. Within the year, she became one of the first university-educated female architects to leave the profession owing to family obligations. As her sorority’s alumnae newsletter put it, “A few months in an architect’s office were followed by several years of housekeeping for her father.” In 1898, she married florist Sidney A. Saunders. The couple lived in a house Cassidy Saunders designed in Summit, New Jersey and had a son in 1900.

In 1895, Cassidy Saunders wrote an article for her sorority’s alumnae newsletter titled “Architecture for Women.” Her take on the suitability of the career was ambivalent. She asserted, “it is an entirely tenable position to hold that, proper training and adequate ability being a given, many problems in architectural practice may be as satisfactorily solved by a woman as a man.” She offered an exception, however. “The only point that assumes disagreeable proportions is that of superintendence….which means actual contact with contractors…and direct, vigorous control exercised over all the workmen,” she wrote.

When co-workers act without civility, women are more likely than men to keep their ideas to themselves. This is owing to the backlash women anticipate. Researchers Kristin Bain, et al, write inHarvard Business Review (HBR): “Due to gender-role expectations, challenging others may be seen as a more unexpected and norm-violating behavior when women do it. Women who speak up risk facing gender backlash: repercussions for violating gender-based expectations.”

When women are silenced by incivility, their companies lose their full participation. Additionally, those experiencing incivility might chose to find a better work environment elsewhere. Incivility, then, has a negative impact on both the employees experiencing it and the company tolerating it.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) is best known for her work designing, decorating, and renovating buildings for the Fred Harvey company. But before she started her career with the hospitality company, she was as an artist and teacher in St. Paul, Minnesota. It is in her capacity of art teacher that Colter’s first connection with St. Louis was documented.

Colter taught freehand drawing and literature at St. Paul’s Mechanic Arts High School from 1892 to 1907. The work of Colter’s pupils was honored at several world’s fairs, including St. Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904.

Ethel Madison Bailey Carter Furman (1893-1976) designed over 200 churches, homes, hotels, department stores, and other buildings during her lifetime. Furman was born in Richmond, Virginia, where she spent most of her career. The daughter of Black contractor Madison J. Bailey, Ethel Furman gained early experience at a drafting table in her father’s company that operated out of their home. Furman and her father worked together as design-builders for much of their lives.

Furman married in 1912, had two children, divorced, married again in 1918 and had a third child, and moved with her family to New York City. There she received private tutoring from Edward R. Williams, a prominent African-American architect. After receiving a diploma declaring her a certified architect in 1923, Furman returned to Richmond with her family. That same year, she designed a house that would later become the birthplace of Virginia’s first Black governor, L. Douglas Wilder.

It can be hard to say ‘no’ at work, especially if you are new or think your loyalty is being tested, Joseph Grenny writes in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). You might risk coming across as lazy or as not a team player.  But if done properly, saying ‘no’ can help safeguard your time, introduce or maintain work-life balance, and improve your productivity, reliability, and promotability.

Women might have a particularly hard time saying ‘no’ because women are socialized to want to please people. Yet saying ‘yes’ too often can lead to being given more and more tasks, resulting in less productivity, sloppy work, or missed deadlines, Gail Allyn Short writes.

Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was known for her architectural and interior design work for Fred Harvey, the hospitality company that operated the hotels and restaurants along the Santa Fe, Atchison, and Topeka Railway. Her thoroughness and attention to detail were often remarked upon. After remodeling the Alvarado’s cocktail lounge in 1940, Colter didn’t stop at the furnishings in her pursuit of the look she sought.

 “Mary Jane Colter saw me and pulled me aside and said she wanted to make a special costume for me to wear in the Cantina,” Violet Bosetti, who worked in the Alvarado’s Cocina Cantina cocktail lounge when it first opened, told author Leslie Poling-Kempes. “A seamstress came in and made me this beautiful dress later worn by all the Harvey Girls in the Cantina.”

Katharine Cotheal Budd (1860 – 1951) began studying architecture when opportunities for women to do so were very limited in both universities and offices. She was born in Clinton, Iowa, and went to New York where she studied privately with Columbia University’s architecture school founder William R. Ware. She studied architecture in Paris in the studio of a teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in Rome, and at the New York Art Students League. Her office training included running the architecture office of another Columbia professor for a year. She studied art as well.

Budd’s architectural work included houses for prominent New Yorkers and others, the Ann Brown School in Yonkers, the Brooklyn Women’s Club, and numerous community houses. During World War I, the YWCA hired Budd and other female architects (Marcia Mead, Fay Kellogg, and Julia Morgan) to design hostels for female family members to stay and dine in while visiting men living on military bases. Budd designed seventy-two of the ninety-six “Hostess Houses” in operation in 1919 at a construction cost of two million dollars (about $42 million today). She designed three main types of Hostess Houses and was credited with making each feel “homey” rather than institutional. Her work on the Hostess Houses took her to Indiana, New Jersey, Illinois, South Dakota, and Michigan.

Some express concern that the humorous term “mansplaining” is polarizing and risks trivializing a harmful competence-questioning behavior. But it succinctly describes a phenomenon centuries older than the word itself: unsolicited and condescending explaining or advising. While women might engage in this behavior, the harm to the woman experiencing the “mansplaining” is greater when it comes from a man.

This is because when a man condescends to a woman, gendered stereotypes reflecting status and biases regarding competence come into play. Mansplaining behaviors from men “might remind women receivers of societally normative gender roles…and, in doing so, may induce in women the…perception that one is being seen through the lens of a pervasive group stereotype (e.g., those associated with gender, race, and age),” researchers Erik Santoro and Hazel Rose Markus found.

Hospitality companies redecorate, renovate, and refurbish their properties on a regular cycle. As an architect and decorator for the Fred Harvey hospitality company, Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) spent much of her time in this work. She traveled “the line”—the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway line along which Fred Harvey managed and operated the hotels, restaurants and shops—generating design ideas, overseeing construction, and purchasing new fittings and furnishing. This last task often took her to Mexico or farther afield.

In 1902, Colter’s first job with Fred Harvey was at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque, where she helped decorate a museum and shop exhibiting wares made by Native Americans. Nearly four decades later, Colter oversaw the renovation of the same hotel’s restaurants and lounge. Much had changed for the hotel over the decades, starting with a significant decline in the railway traffic that once dropped trainloads of guests at the Alvarado’s doorstep.

Theodosia Reynolds Beacham (c. 1853 - ?) of Kalamazoo, Michigan, traveled the United States constructing railways. Her achievements were documented in the first decade of the twentieth century in numerous articles that followed headlines such as “Women who Make Money in Odd Ways” and “Builds Railroad in the Wilderness: Feminine Contractor Bosses Gangs of Rough Laborers and Wins Respect.”

The public found Beacham’s profitability as remarkable as her gender. One journalist wrote, “It was learned from other railroad sources that she makes $40,000 [more than $1.4 million in 2024] and upward annually….Mrs. Beacham says her biggest contract was with the Tennessee Central Railroad in 1900. She made about $75,000 or $80,000 on that, and it took nearly a year to do it.” Beacham also worked on the Tidewater Railway in Virginia (where she built from Kilby Station westward for five miles, “a relatively small job to Mrs. Beacham”), Old Dominion Railway, and Southern Railway, among others.

Women make up 34 percent of licensed architects but are just 24 percent of firm principals and partners, according to The Business of Architecture: AIA Firm Survey Report 2024. The percentage of licensed architects identifying as female has declined two percent since 2022, while their representation in firm leadership increased just one percent since the AIA’s 2022 Firm Survey Report.

The 2024 report found that only about a third of architecture firms surveyed have policies regarding equitable pay or reducing bias in performance reviews, hiring and recruitment. The lack of attention to equality likely contributes to why women, especially women of color, are far less satisfied with their architectural careers at their current employers than white men are, as a 2021 AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation into bias in the architecture profession found.

In its announcement of the May 1930 opening of La Posada, the Fred Harvey hotel and restaurant located between the railroad tracks and Route 66 in Winslow, Arizona, National Hotel Reporter called the building “unique in every detail.” The article continued, “The idea, as carried out by Miss [Mary] E. J. Colter in designing and decorating, is that in inaccessible localities…it was impossible to follow exact styles and materials used in Spain.” The result, the reporter wrote, was “a style peculiar to itself and the attempt has been made to create such a building so found in ‘La Posada.’”

While Colter was engaged in preliminary design and decorating, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway’s architects and engineers produced the working drawings for construction for the building. When complete, the railway owned and Colter’s employer Fred Harvey operated La Posada. The contract for construction, including the adjacent depot, was awarded to an El Paso company in April 1929, with a bid of approximately $600,000. Later reporting said that, with furnishings, the project cost about a million dollars.

The Architectress turns three this month, marking this anniversary with its thirty-seventh issue! The Architectress is also free—free to subscribe to, free to read, ad-free, and produced with free labor. But it’s not free to host and distribute. If you’d like to help offset the more than $600 annual costs with a donation of any size, please visit the The Architectress’s Go Fund Me page. Thank you for reading The Architectress!

Alice Durkin (c. 1875 – 1934) built schools, hospitals, and other large-scale projects in the New York City area. “It is always the big work that attracts me,” Durkin told the New York Times. “I like the municipal contracts best, perhaps, but then I like anything big.” She also liked competing with and beating men on the big projects. “I know lots of them must be jealous, just because I am a woman. And I do enjoy showing them that doesn’t make any difference—that a woman’s work must be considered just as work, the same as theirs!”

Durkin’s interest in building began after high school when she joined a contractor’s office as a clerk. Because of her aptitude in math and her fascination with specifications and blueprints, she quickly progressed to preparing estimates for bidding. She spent eight years with her employer and became his “right-hand man.” Durkin described her mentor as “astonished” when she announced she was leaving his company to compete against him, although she said they remained “good friends.”

Gender bias is often unconscious, yet it permeates our society including our workplaces. While firm leaders must implement structural changes to make performance reviews, tasks assigned, recruiting, hiring, promotion, and pay more equitable, all people must take actions to mitigate bias.

 “Gender allyship” is when men promote gender equality and equity through “supportive and collaborative relationships, acts of sponsorship, and public advocacy in order to drive systemic change,” Carmen Acton writes in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). A male ally confronting bias is more effective than a woman confronting it, researchers Laura K. Hildebrand et al found. This is because of “perceptions of target group confronters as complainers and overly sensitive, whereas dominant group ally confrontations are perceived as more legitimate and appropriate,” they write in the European Journal of Social Psychology.

In October 1911, women in California obtained full suffrage. Federal suffrage was not achieved nationally until 1920 when the 19th amendment was enacted.  In addition to California, in 1911 women’s state voting rights were equal to men’s only in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Washington.  Women in 28 states could vote in municipal and school elections that year.

The women’s suffrage movement in the US began before decorator and future architect Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) was born. The same year that California granted full suffrage to women, Colter, then 42, moved to California. She moved from Seattle, where Colter had developed the decorations department of a department store. Since Washington had full suffrage a year earlier, voting rights were not the motivation for the move.

Laura Hayes (1867 – 1956) came in third in the competition for designing the Woman’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1891. A newspaper article described the difficult decision for the Exposition’s Board of Lady Managers between winner Sophia Hayden and second-place finisher Lois L. Howe and made note of their architectural training. The article did not mention any of Hayes’s qualifications, although she had completed two years of college. It did report that, at the time of the competition, Hayes was the private secretary of the President of the Board of Lady Managers, Mrs. Potter Palmer. Hayes’s entry was a surprise to Mrs. Palmer. The third place prize award was $250, or roughly $8,650 today.

Hayes was also listed as the designer of the Columbian seal later exhibited in the Woman’s Building. She received the most acclaim for writing the book Three Girls in a Flat which was published in 1892. Hayes co-authored the book with friends Enid Yandell (a sculptor) and Jean Loughborough. It was the semi-autobiographical story of three young women making preparations for the Exposition, with a focus on the work of the Board of Lady Managers. A reviewer described it as “a charming booklet, and it remains extremely doubtful whether the Columbian Exposition gets any more potent or persuasive advertising than is contained between its covers.”

While workplace relationships with high-status colleagues can help in advancing careers, decades of research has found that building these relationships is more challenging for women than for men.

One challenge is that confidence and assertiveness are typically required for lower-status workers to make these connections. Owing to gender bias, women exhibiting these traits are often perceived as pushy or arrogant. Self-promoting or refraining from doing so to avoid backlash are both obstacles to women creating strong collaborative connections with high-status individuals.

 Since its opening in 1905 near the El Tovar hotel, Hopi House at the Grand Canyon has sold hand-crafted objects made by American Indians. In its early days, Hopi House also housed some of the indigenous people who worked as artist-demonstrators in the building.

The hospitality company Fred Harvey, which worked closely with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway on their Grand Canyon developments, managed the Hopi House. Like the train depot and El Tovar, Hopi House was built on part of the 20 acres that was the railway’s right-of-way next to the Grand Canyon’s rim.

Emily Elizabeth Smith Holman (1854 – 1925) practiced architecture in Philadelphia from about 1892 until she retired in 1914. During that time she designed numerous projects including opera houses, theaters, stores, hotels, and many homes. She published at least six plan books of cottages, houses, and camps, and designed projects in every U.S. state and in Canada, Jamaica, England, and France.

Holman got her training in an architect’s office where she was hired as a clerk. “It wasn’t two weeks, however, before she felt that if she tried very hard and kept her eyes and ears open very wide she too could become an architect,” a 1915 newspaper article recounted. In time, Holman’s role in the office grew, until “Finally she realized that in everything but name she was really and truly an architect.” At that point she left the firm and opened her own office.