Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers

Women of Steel and Stone: 22 Inspirational Architects, Engineers, and Landscape Designers — page 9
4 INTRODUCTION The government was indirectly instrumental in changing the role of women in architecture and related fields thanks to the Morrill Act created in 1862 and signed by Abraham Lincoln The Morrill Act granted government land to colleges for free Although the Morrill Act did not require that institutions open their doors to women by 1890 every state included the admis sion of women in its land grant charter This enabled women to get college degrees to start working professionally in the areas of architecture engineering and landscape architecture among other fields Soon thereafter women began making headway in those industries In 1873 Mary L Page became the first woman to earn an architecture degree from the University of Illinois In 1890 Sophia Hayden became the first woman graduate from MIT’s four-year architecture program In 1904 Marian Coffin graduated from MIT as a special student from the landscape architecture program In 1905 Nora Stanton Blatch Barney became the first woman to receive a degree in civil engineering from Cornell University An article in the 1901 New-York Daily Tribune titled Occupa tions of Women What the Field of Architecture Offers to the Well Trained Practical Woman reads It must be obvious that women have a more intimate knowledge of the requirements of a home than men usu ally have They know of necessity why bedrooms should be properly partitioned not merely divided by portieres which leave the occupant of each room at the mercy of every trifling noise in the other Their personal experi ence teaches them that fully one-half of the comfort of a house or apartment depends upon the closet room They would never think of building a small apartment house in such a way that butcher and baker and candlestick