Minerva Parker Nichols, First Female Solo Practitioner

Minerva Parker was born in 1862 in Glasford, Illinois. Her father died during the Civil War when she was 14 months old. Her mother, older sister, and Minerva moved to Chicago in 1871, and to Philadelphia in 1876 after her mother remarried. Minerva’s stepfather died the following year, and her mother opened a boarding house.

Rachel Avery House. Photo by Jerrye & Roy Klotz, M.D., 2017 (CCA-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia.

In 1880, Minerva was working as a housekeeper and governess but she aspired to enter her grandfather’s profession of architecture. During the early 1880s she took several drafting courses. In 1885, Minerva Parker found a position as an apprentice in an architect’s office, and in the late 1880s, she opened her own practice. She is recognized as the first female solo practitioner in the US. Parker designed many houses for clients in the nearby suburbs of Philadelphia, including one for suffragist Rachel Foster Avery in 1890.

New Century Club, Philadelphia, 1872. (Library of Congress photocopy)

Parker designed one of the first buildings in the US to be used exclusively as a women’s club. The New Century Club in Philadelphia included a 700-seat theater and was completed in 1892. After Parker’s marriage to Unitarian minister William Ichabod Nichols in 1891, the architect delayed her honeymoon so she could finish supervising the building’s construction. Parker Nichols also received the commission for Wilmington, Delaware’s New Century Club, which was completed in 1893. That building survives today and is listed on the National Register for Historic Places. It now operates as a children’s theater. The Philadelphia club house was demolished in 1973.

New Century Club interior, Philadelphia. (Library of Congress, HABS PA-1522)

In addition to her architectural practice, from 1891 to 1895 Parker Nichols taught architectural ornament classes at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She often wrote articles about home design and women in architecture for different periodicals. In her 1893 article for Woman’s Progress, Parker Nichols wrote, “…I beg of you, in the name of a suffering class of laborers do not say, because you furnished the architect with some rude sketches to work out your design, that ‘I was my own architect.’ You do not say because you tell the cook that you will dine on beef and potatoes, that you prepare the dinner. It would seem that the architect is employed as a delicate charity or as a scapegoat between the owner and the contractor, the latter getting the profit, the former the credit and the architect all blame on both sides….”

When Parker Nichols spoke at the General Federation of Women’s Clubs biennial meeting in 1896, she lamented the difficulty women had getting an apprenticeship in an office. She also said, “Financial success will depend on a question of skill and not of sex; but any who dream of long bank balances or luxurious returns for a limited expenditure of labor, I would advise to shun the architectural path.” This is another sentiment that still rings true today.

Parker Nichols closed her office and began working from home in 1893, and she stopped advertising her practice after the birth of her child in 1894. She would have three children by 1905. In a 1901 discussion preceding a speech by Josephine Wright Chapman about architecture as a profession for women, Parker Nichols was recognized as a “pioneer among women architects.” While Parker Nichols criticized the dearth of architecture schools that admitted women, she believed women could still succeed in the profession. She thought women could particularly excel designing homes owing to their experience as housekeepers. In her case, Parker Nichols said, she had been “called to a higher sphere of action, that of motherhood,” and her architectural work is now “secondary to the nursery.”

Although the most productive years of her career were behind her, Parker Nichols continued to do occasional projects for friends, social causes, and family members. Her immediate family moved to Brooklyn in 1896 when William Nichols took a job there. In 1907, the family bought a summer house in Wilton, Connecticut. Parker Nichols altered it, and in 1912 the family moved there until William took a job in Massachusetts the following year. He died in 1917.

In the 1920s, Parker Nichols moved to Westport, Connecticut with her daughter and son-in-law. She designed two homes near each other, one for each household. She died in her home in 1949 at age 87.

For more information on Parker Nichol’s career and life, visit https://www.minervaparkernichols.com/. You can see photos and drawings of many of Parker Nichols’ more than eighty projects here. There is an exhibit “Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect” at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia through June 17, 2023.

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Sources:

Minerva Parker Nichols: Preserving Minerva, architect 1862 – 1949. Accessed April 16, 2023.

Minerva Parker Nichols, “Architecture, Architect and Client.” Woman’s Progress, May 1893, 60 – 62.

“Women in Architecture,” The Women’s Journal, January 5, 1901, 2.

Minerva Parker Nichols, “Women as Architects,” Third Biennial, General Federation of Women’s Clubs (Louisville, KY: Flexner Brothers, 1896): 266 – 270.

Patricia A. Maley and Robert Briggs, “National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination Form: New Century Club [Wilmington],” May 18, 1983.