E. Elizabeth Holman Hid her Gender to Succeed

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.

“Few of those who do business with ‘E. E. Holman, Architect,’ suspect that these initials stand for a woman,” Leslie’s, a popular magazine, revealed in 1900. In fact, when Scientific American featured photographs and floor plans of eleven if her residential projects in its magazine earlier that year, it credited each one to ‘Mr. E. E. Holman, Architect.’

The misunderstanding Holman caused was deliberate. A 1915 profile of Holman reads, “Practicing architecture 20 years ago was very much like writing novels in the 18th and 19th centuries. If a woman wanted to indulge, it was safest to mask her identity under a masculine sounding name.” Although Holman did lose a few clients when they discovered she was a woman, “[I]n the majority of cases all that was asked was that the architect ‘deliver the goods,’ and this being done satisfactorily, Mrs. Holman was forgiven for being a woman.”

To at least a degree, Holman believed the biases of the day. She was quoted in 1901 as saying, “Practical architecture includes much climbing of ladders, walking of beams in unfinished houses and constant supervision of workmen. For this reason the woman who enters the profession is undertaking a business which is better suited to men than to women.”

Regarding female architects, Holman continued, “If she has in her the elements of success, however, she will succeed. The necessary qualifications are a talent for designing, capacity for hard work, a willingness to master the details of small things, patience to work and to wait and business ability to know an opportunity when it presents itself. She must, too, be ready to fight if necessary with stupid and incompetent people for what she knows to be right.”

In later years, Holman added to this list of qualifications “an ability to listen to men swear long and hard in her presence without getting riled. I believe such a one, despite her sex, will be well qualified for the profession of architecture.”

Buena Vista, from Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, June 1900.

Holman counted among her clients many prominent businessmen. In 1900, she considered her best house design to be “Buena Vista,” the summer home designed in Old Greenwich, Connecticut for a New York attorney. The site was on a hill with a drop of 20 to 50 feet along the 230 feet length of the home. Designed in a Spanish style with Moorish decoration, the house had 17 staircases, 160 windows, and all the modern conveniences including electricity, a gas plant, and a steam plant for heat.

From Scientific American, March 1900.

In 1925 at age 71, Holman died of pneumonia. She was buried in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. Buena Vista was demolished in 2015 to make way for a new development.

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Sources:

Joseph Dana Miller, “Women as Architects.” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, June 1900: 199 – 204.

“Woman Architect Tells How She Won Success,” Evening Ledger—Philadelphia, July 7, 1915: 10.

“Building Edition,” Scientific American, March 1900: 43 – 60.

“Woman’s World,” Montour American (Danville, PA), March 07, 1901: 3.

“Certificate of Death” and “1880 United States Federal Census,” Ancestry.com.

From Scientific American, March 1900.