In 1988 ASID reported that 72% of women were interior designers. By 1998, the number increased to 81%. Yet at that same time, 70% of the 120 designers admitted to Interior Design's Hall of Fame were men. The number of women attending design school has gradually increased over the decade (I’m trying to find statistics for 2008/2009), however, estimating the number of women currently practicing in the field is difficult to find. Estimating the number of who are industrial designers is even more difficult.
One explanation for this is that many women are in and out of the workforce turning their attention to their families. Another reason, I was told, was that women lacked self-promotional, business and management skills to raise their profiles.
Oh really?
Or has the media let them down.
Why is this?
Women have been crucial to the development of interior design as a discipline and profession. The active participation of women in the history of interior design has yet to be seriously treated by scholars and historians (with the exception of Penny Sparke, Pat Kirkham, Beatriz Colomina and others who have made extraordinary contributions.)
After all, what is a well-decorated room compared to an acknowledged work of art? Or the architectural design of a building? The interior design of a room is fleeting, composed of everyday objects -- paint, fabric, ornaments, furniture and knickknacks. They can change as quickly in color and detail as the leaves on a tree. While the initial visual impact may be memorable, its longevity is limited and subject to the whims of popular taste. The study of the history of interior design is only recently being taken seriously.
A second reason women have been largely ignored is that, unfortunately, the attitude towards women having an innate knack for "decorating" has not seemed to change much over the centuries. Women were recognized as having a natural instinct for the placement of color and objects; the activity was also deemed suitable for them. And so it began, slowly at first, but steadily thereafter -- women as the arbiters of taste in their fine new houses that sprang up everywhere in America.
I propose to post a series of posts with your help -- dear readers -- about women interior and furniture designers, some names we have heard of, but others who have been forgotten by time. I would like to uncover these women, dust off their names and give them the attention they deserve. Some of this information is difficult to find, but I think as a collaborative effort we can... and, therefore, begin to rewrite history.
One explanation for this is that many women are in and out of the workforce turning their attention to their families. Another reason, I was told, was that women lacked self-promotional, business and management skills to raise their profiles.
Oh really?
Or has the media let them down.
Why is this?
Women have been crucial to the development of interior design as a discipline and profession. The active participation of women in the history of interior design has yet to be seriously treated by scholars and historians (with the exception of Penny Sparke, Pat Kirkham, Beatriz Colomina and others who have made extraordinary contributions.)
After all, what is a well-decorated room compared to an acknowledged work of art? Or the architectural design of a building? The interior design of a room is fleeting, composed of everyday objects -- paint, fabric, ornaments, furniture and knickknacks. They can change as quickly in color and detail as the leaves on a tree. While the initial visual impact may be memorable, its longevity is limited and subject to the whims of popular taste. The study of the history of interior design is only recently being taken seriously.
A second reason women have been largely ignored is that, unfortunately, the attitude towards women having an innate knack for "decorating" has not seemed to change much over the centuries. Women were recognized as having a natural instinct for the placement of color and objects; the activity was also deemed suitable for them. And so it began, slowly at first, but steadily thereafter -- women as the arbiters of taste in their fine new houses that sprang up everywhere in America.
I propose to post a series of posts with your help -- dear readers -- about women interior and furniture designers, some names we have heard of, but others who have been forgotten by time. I would like to uncover these women, dust off their names and give them the attention they deserve. Some of this information is difficult to find, but I think as a collaborative effort we can... and, therefore, begin to rewrite history.
18 comments:
There are so many to mention, I will have to decide on a couple of great women designers for you to start with!
Soodie-a very exciting and I will bet challenging endeavor.Here are some thoughts to add to the mix. I started my career with an art major and a home ec major and grad from all girls school in 1982 (the dark ages) before the design program (now in place at this venerable institution) was developed. The way for Women (& men) is easier I think now-though competition abounds-start a lifestyle blog-set yourself up as a designer. The profession has suffered and still does from non professionals. I consider myself to be of the prof. ilk-I worked my way through. I have belonged to defunct organizations and also ASID. I dropped all these appellations because they are only letters arranged in a particular fashion. The challenge is doing good work and getting someone to pay you good money. I have been fortunate in having found clients that appreciate it and pay for it.
The last thing I will drop is the one black mark against women in design-perhaps it speaks to the times 80's 90's-It is the simple matter of their Sex.Having worked for a male designer and a very good one and being exposed to several of the best in the area closely- THE MEN can get away with things they tell clients that the WO's can not.Cynical yes- maybe not Sister or crazy Dorothy Draper but(now there is a promoter) but those practicing and professional-not fussing with a sample and a tete a tete with her new best friend (the client)-many women are intimidated-they are many times seeking the BFF and not the designer.
karena, thank you, i have a few lined up. i would love to hear your suggestions. these posts, unfortunately, will be a bit sporadic as i will do them as i can and will reflect what information i can find. btw, the greatest resource we have here in KC is the nelson-atkins library... (then linda hall library.)
oh my GT do we have similar educational backgrounds and experiences!
i, too, worked for two 'decorators' -- i drafted their floor plans in CAD, created 3-D models of their furniture designs and did all the presentation boards. after i finished a 4 yr post grad program, was member of ASID and started to study for the NCIDQ. each one i worked for did not have any training in design. and i experienced the same situation: i was extremely surprised what the male accomplished using his stern (supposedly) authoritative voice. you have a very, very good point about client perceiving women designers as the BFF and not as a professional.
i will never forget when i went out on my own. first project was to redo a gutted MCM house. i created floor plans, elevations and boards. their response: 'we can rearrange our own furniture, we just wanted you to tell us where you buy pillows and fabric and stuff -- isn't that what you do?'
Bravo, Soodie! To paraphrase Virginia Wolfe about writing, if its credited to Anon, you can be sure it was done by a woman. I hope people all over the globe will send you names of women they knew of, or simply heard of, who have gone missing in the history of design. I'm kinda' seeing you as Jessica Fletcher in an "Art She Wrote" series.
I also look forward to the intelligent, passionate and cogent remarks this dialogue (as LA's comments about attest) generate.
Count me in as a charter member of the Decoding the Mystery of women in design. I hope my decoder ring is in the mail.
Yes, or worse they perceive a threat. I have established a wonderful relationship with the clients(mostly couples 40+) and 90% is "full bodied" from conception to a pillow. I love it and have worked closely with both husband & or wife making decisions. It is all about trust, nothing happens without it. I have never used a cad, old school and stop doing drawings of rooms years (& years) ago. I had to do one for an ASID showhouse and thought I would hemorrhage.I think of myself in the old mold(not moldy) school of decorating.pgt
Home, although this is a serious subject... you always make me laugh!
GT, another excellent point.
(and btw, they trained us heavily in school not only to draft, but use CAD, ArchiCAD, Sketch-up ... but i was no where near able to use 3-D Max like some other students.. why? because we were only taught by architects who said they didn't want designers to come in and 'mess everything up' when working on the interiors with the architects.... i'm rambling at this point now)
yes! you're completely right! it is about trust -- earning the public's trust -- but also educating them on what needs to be done and how the process needs to be approached.
As someone who has training but very limited real-world experience with clients, I will be very interested to read what goes on here. I can use all the help and insight I can get... even if it does start out with the dream-killing reality that women in this industry aren't taken seriously. How can that be? Haven't we always thought of interior decor and design as a women's field? Not just because of our sex's "innate" proclivities toward making things pretty, but because most of the depictions in the media are of women doing this work. (They called it "Designing Women", not "Designing People")I don't mean to make fun of a business I take very seriously, but, like I said, I have yet to be immersed in the field like you have been, so I won't be surprised to find out that I'm way wrong about many aspects of the industry. In any case, count me in as the naive voice of inexperience who may or may not have anything of value to contribute. And definitely send me one of those rings.
tracy, agreed 'how can that be?' i had same reaction when i read those statics. plus, in the 2000s, about 90% of my fellow students were women, and i have taught about 99% girls/women. (btw, i didn't work in the field long, just a couple years (simultaneously with what i do now) and my involvement currently is only small projects.) so i am looking for help, advice, opinions from others out there. let's begin to unravel all of this. i thought i would start off by digging up names from the past -- to figure out why their names weren't covered by the press. or maybe they were and we just aren't aware of them. perhaps look in smaller cities to unearth old talent. to see which has had more recognition: decorators vs. designers. to look for patterns... to see where this goes.
Bravo Soodie! I'm looking forward to this new endeavor. I've often asked myself about women of the field in France - though, granted, the set up is very different...
P.S. I hope you will still grace your blog with a drawing from time to time and --- your appraisal site is fantastic!!
Last spring, prompted by Emily Evans Eerdman's wonderful book Regency Redux I arranged a tour for the two of us of the virtually unknown Chicago decorator Rue Winterbotham Carpenter's greatest surving work, the little-known but spectacular 1928 interiors of a very private club in Chicago, and later in the summer, I did a couple of posts on Carpenter for EEE's blog.
Carpenter's work was the best of its kind, and hereabouts, nobody else approached her kind of glamour, but there were other highly talented women in the field, and for all the recognition they've received in the years since then, it's almost as though they never existed.
Mrs. Howard Linn--nee Lucy McCormick Blair--worked the same social set Rue Carpenter did, but a lot of her work suffered the same lack of visibility: many of her projects were executed for clients who didn't want their names & their houses splashed across the pages of magazines read by people they didn't know.
Marianne Willisch was another local name in the 1920s, one with an exclusive shop in one of the toniest Art Deco buildings on Michigan Avenue, and throuhgh that and her clients, she was instrumental in introducing German Modernism to Chicago. And millions of people became familiar with the work of Mabel Schamberg, who furnished the sleek Modernist interiors for the octagonal, steel-&-glass House of Tomorrow, designed by George Fred Keck & Kecks for the Century of Progress in 1933. She remained a leader in the field here in the Chicago until the 196Os, but she's faded away into obsurity, too. One time, I ran into someone who's been in the inner circle of the local chapter of ASID for a number of years, and I asked if there was anyone still active in the field who might possibly have known Mabel Schamberg. I was thinking of someone who started out in the profession in the late Fifties or early Sixties, at the time when Mabel Schamberg would have been one of the esteemed members of the old guard. The Face of ASID didn't even recognize Mabel's name.
continued...
Anyway, like I said, I did a few posts on Carpenter for EEE & I've been dragging her name into whatever relevant discussion I've come across online for a year or so now, but as far as the others go--Blair, Willsich & Schamberg--as big as they were at the time, and as talented, if you do a Google search on them, you'll get fewer hits for the three names combined than you will if you do a search for the name Magnaverde. Pretty sad, if you ask me.
The only reason that Blair comes up so much under her married name is that the Linns had lots of money and they supported a lot of charitable works. But as far as her decorating career goes, it's consigned to a few fading halftone photos in dusty bound volumes of old magazines that are slowly being sold off a page-at-a-time on Ebay, as more & more libraries divest themselves of our shared cultural history in order to make more room for computers, video games & coffee shops. What's wrong with this picture?
Anyway, the names above were only a few of the women working in the upper strata of Chicago society during the second & third decades quarter of the last century, and as such, they reperesent only a thin layer of the tip of the iceberg. Somebody, somewhere, may have pieces of their stories, pieces that never made it into books, but if it's firsthand knowledge that people have, they'd better put it down on paper, and do it fast. Time's a-wastin'. Here's what the novelist Arthur Meeker said--speaking specifically of Carpenter, in his book "Chicago, with Love"--but it could apply just as well to all of them:
Many others enjoyed a longer and more intimate acquantance and have better right to speak of her than I: but alas! none of them's a writer. She has been dead now for nearly a quarter of a century, during which time nobody has come forward to give her her due, to explain what she meant to Chicago and the Chicagoans of her time: Let me say what I can."
le style... yes, i suppose the set up is very different... however, there may be some similarities.
as for drawings... thank you! can;t tell you how much i appreciate that. but i thought they might be better suited elsewhere.
magnaverde, now that's what i'm talking about!
my you are a wealth of information and a boon to this community! you must be recognized.
I'm am metaphorically standing on my chair and shouting, "YES!YES! YES!) I was hoping the esteemed Magnaverde would open the floodgates of his encyclopedic brain of his. What a treat and a treasure. Hope he returns often.
p.s. Why don't you design a Women in Design Decoder ring? Magnaverde should be the first wearer of the honor. Great work you two.
Home, his knowledge runs deep. hope he does too. and very thrilled he visited in the first place.
Soodie I did not even comment on your new look, photo is beautiful! I would love to have a new header done for my site.
Post a Comment