Josephine Wright Chapman and Woman’s Work
Josephine Wright Chapman was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1867. She later credited time spent in her father’s manufacturing shops with helping her develop mechanical and drafting skills. When Chapman’s family didn’t support her aspirations to become an architect, she pawned her jewelry and found a job as an apprentice in an architect’s office. Before long, she opened her own office in Boston.
Worcester Women’s Club (now Tuckerman Hall), constructed in 1902.
Chapman won a competition to design Harvard University’s Craigie Arms dormitory, a brick and limestone building that was completed in 1897. This is the first of three buildings she designed that were later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Worcester (Massachusetts) Women’s Club building constructed in 1902 and Hillandale, a 1923 house in Washington, DC, are two others.
Hillandale, a Washington, DC residence designed and constructed for Anne Archbold, 1922 - 1925.
Chapman became well-known for her design of the New England Building for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York and received commissions for clubs, churches, dormitories, apartments, and other large projects. At around this time, Chapman also began to write about architecture and interior design for popular national magazines like Success, The Woman’s Home Companion, and The Saturday Evening Post.
In spite of her early successes designing commercial projects, Chapman began turning down commercial work. “A woman’s work is to design houses. Hereafter I am going to design houses,” she said. Seeking a better economic climate during the Panic of 1907, Chapman let her staff go, closed her Boston office, and moved her practice to New York City.
Chapman shared many of the biases against female architects that were common in her day. In a 1901 article for The Saturday Evening Post, she lamented a lack of seriousness among women applying for positions in her firm, opining that many saw architecture merely as a pastime before marriage. She saw boys as having better mechanical abilities as well as the physical strength to lean over a drafting board, an activity made more challenging by corsets.
Still, in two articles published in 1903, Chapman offered advice to women wishing to enter the profession. She stressed the importance of training with professionals while observing that it was “extremely difficult to gain admittance to an architect’s office” for women. She recommended women learn to use a typewriter to help get an apprenticeship and said that typing specifications could be a learning experience.
For those women who succeeded and opened their own practices, Chapman stressed the importance of being businesslike, starting with renting an office rather than working from home. “People, men in particular, have no confidence in the ability of a woman who conducts her business in a womanish way,” she wrote.
By 1912 Chapman had stopped hiring women, saying that men did better work. “I am discouraged by the outlook for women as architects. I’ve given up hiring them after fifteen years of experience in employing both sexes,” she told a newspaper reporter.
Chapman was a proponent of English homes. “Of course I will build a man any sort of house that he wants,” she told the Ladies Home Journal in 1914, “but I will always make a plea for the English type of home dwelling.” Chapman spent many summers in England studying residential architecture and moved there after her retirement. She died in Bath in 1943 at age 75.
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Sources
“A Woman who Builds Homes,” Ladies Home Journal, October 31, 1914, 3.
Mary B. Mullet, “Women and the Pan-American,” Harpers Weekly, August 3, 1901, 782.
Josephine Wright Chapman, “Women as Architects,” The Saturday Evening Post, March 30, 1901, 22-23.
Josephine Wright Chapman, “Architecture as a Profession for Women,” Success, September 1903, 507, and October 1903, 596.
Ada Patterson, “Business Woman Lack System and Decision,” The Bee (Omaha), October 5, 1912, 19.
Sarah Allaback, “Chapman, Josephine Wright (1867 – 1943)” in The First American Women Architects (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 60-62.