Margaret Hicks, First Published Female Architect

Margaret Hicks (1858 – 1883) was the first woman to publish her work in a professional journal and the second to earn an architecture degree from an accredited university. Her design for a workman’s cottage was published in the April 13, 1878 edition of The American Architect and Builder News. Hicks received a state scholarship to attend Cornell University where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1879 and a bachelor of architecture degree in 1880.

Hicks’s design was published in The American Architect and Builder News in 1878.

While attending Cornell, Hicks became friends with future activist and social reformer Florence Kelley. Hicks shared Kelley’s interest in social justice as demonstrated in her designing a worker’s cottage while many of her classmates’ student projects were for a wealthier clientele. An 1883 history of women in America lauded Hicks’s design skills and concern for the poor. It read in part, “The theme selected by Miss Hicks, as her Commencement Essay, was the ‘Tenement House,’ and she seemed—unlike many of the architects who have sent plans to New York for which premiums are offered—to have remembered that houses must have light and air, closets and bed-rooms.”

Upon completing her architecture degree, Hicks began working in an architect’s office. In 1882, her translation from German of the book Text-Book to the Illustrations of the History of Art was published. That same year, she married fellow Cornell architecture graduate Arthur L. K. Volkmann.

Sadly, we will never know what more Margaret Hicks Volkmann might have accomplished. She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts of Bright’s Disease at just 25 years old. Her obituary in her hometown newspaper remembered her as “one of the cleverest young women ever graduated from the Syracuse high school.”

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Sources

Sarah Allaback, The First American Women Architects (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 97-98.

“Design for a Workman’s Cottage,” The American Architect and Builder News, April 13, 1878: 129.

Phebe A. Hanaford, Daughters of America; or, Women of the Century (Augusta, Maine: True and Company, 1883): 286.                                       

“Margaret Hicks Volkmann,” FindAGrave.com.

Text-Book to the Illustrations of the History of Art, Translated from the German by Margaret Hicks (Boston: L. Prager, 1882).