Jessie Cassidy Saunders Quit Architecture in 1887

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.

Holding these men accountable for performing their work properly, Cassidy Saunders wrote, required “considerable pluck and a kind of ability which many women lack and cannot be acquired.” Other concerns Cassidy Saunders noted include the threat of hearing workers’ coarse language and the need to climb ladders which necessitated wearing bloomers, a garment which Cassidy Saunders called “inartistic, not to say ugly.”

Cassidy Saunders said she had never superintended construction, “circumstances making it more expedient that I should relinquish architecture than follow it actively,” but suggested women architects should partner with or hire a man to handle the superintendency portion of practice. Cassidy Saunders wrote, “To sum up,--there is no reason why women cannot study architecture and become valued office assistants, or even able office architects, but there is reason why they cannot count on becoming full-fledge architects without sacrificing some portion of their womanliness.”

There were contemporaneous practicing female architects who disagreed with Cassidy Saunders on the subjects of supervising construction, bloomers, and womanliness (see, for example, Elise Mercur), but her concern with “womanliness” was not uncommon in this era. What might seem discordant today is that Cassidy Saunders, whose article endorsed gender stereotypes and conformance with social norms that limited women’s opportunities, was also a strong proponent of women’s right to vote.

The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) published a book by Cassidy Saunders titled The Legal Status of Women two years after her article on architecture for women was published. In it, Cassidy Saunders considered the property rights of married women on a state-by-state basis. Cassidy Saunders was appointed to NAWSA’s “Course of Study” Committee in 1899, and in 1900 she traveled with other women in the organization to advocate for suffrage at the White House and with Congress. She stayed involved in the cause until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

While Cassidy Saunders never returned to practicing architecture, she maintained an interest in the built environment. In 1910, she gave an address to the Teacher’s College School of Household Arts that received notice in several newspapers nationally and in Canada. She criticized the long hall described as typical of New York’s apartments as causing a “waste of a vast amount of feminine energy.” More storage space for food was another need Saunders identified. Her interest in New York apartments was probably related to her study of social economics and education for her Master degree, which she earned from Columbia in 1912.

“My interests are in education, social betterment in all its phases, house planning, especially housing for workers and the middle classes, who usually live in very poorly planned houses or apartments, and, lastly, in the enfranchisement of women,” Cassidy Saunders told her sorority’s alumnae newsletter in 1913. She maintained her advocacy of voting rights throughout her life, becoming president of her local League of Women Voters chapter in 1928.

While Cassidy Saunders’ architectural contributions are slight, her story may resonate with many women practicing architecture today. Women still bear a disproportionate share of unpaid labor at home and, since they are paid 78.5 percent of what male architects earn  (and 83 percent of what men earn across professions), it is more likely that they (like Cassidy Saunders) will leave their careers behind to take care of a family member when circumstances require it.

As still happens more than a century later, Cassidy Saunders internalized harmful gender stereotypes. She advised women to prioritize societal expectations of “womanliness” over the full practice of architecture while devoting her life to advocating for greater opportunities for women. Women today are walking a similar tightrope between being too feminine to be seen as competent and too assertive to meet societal expectations for likability.

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Sources:

Suffrage Procession, New York City, 1911 (Library of Congress)

John William Leonard, ed., Woman’s Who’s Who of America, 1914 – 1915 (New York: The American Commonwealth Company): 716 – 717.

Lalah Ruth Randle, “Kappas Known to Fame: Jessie Cassidy Saunders, Psi,” The Key, May 1913: 243-245.

“Some Defects in Apartment Houses,” Santa Cruz Evening News, May 23, 1910: 1.

Jessie J. Cassidy, “Women in Architecture,” The Key, October 1895: 197-201.

Columbia University in the City of New York, Catalog of Officers and Graduates of Columbia University, 1916: 981.

“Will Head Local League of Women Voters for 1928,” The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 17, 1927: 12.

Jessie Cassidy Saunders suffrage address, in “Women are No Longer Mere Slaves or Dolls,” The Springfield Union ( Massachusetts), August 15, 1915: 16.