Storming the Old Boys' Citadel : Two Pioneer Women Architects of Nineteenth Century North America

Tania Martin, Carla Blank

Description

“Women” and “architecture” were once mutually exclusive terms. In an 1891 address, Louise Blanchard Bethune declared, “it is hardly safe to assert” that a connection even exists between the two words. Some women didn’t agree.
Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart (1823-1902) is credited with works built in the present states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and British Columbia. Born Esther Pariseau in Saint-Elzéar, Québec, the “Mother with a hammer” was honored by the State of Washington as one of two people to represent it in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C.
Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856-1913) designed and built works in the Buffalo, New York area, including the Lafayette Hotel, which was one of the eleven most luxurious hotels in the United States when it opened in 1904.
Mother Joseph’s and Louise Bethune’s signature buildings, Providence Academy, Vancouver, Washington, and the Lafayette Hotel, Buffalo, New York, are both listed on the United States’ National Register of Historic Places. Both buildings are cases of historic preservation and adaptive reuse.
Bridging disciplines from women’s studies, architecture and architectural history to the fascinating past of the Pacific Northwest and Upstate New York, Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel sheds new light on North America’s common built environment and those who made it.
In this book, based on years of research and keen story-telling skills, Carla Blank and Tania Martin also breathe new life into the lives and works of two remarkable nineteenth-century women.

Sujets

• architectural history
• Vancouver Washington
• Louise Blanchard Bethune
• Renovation
• Women's studies
• French Canadian
• Pacific Northwest
• HIStory
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Baraka Books
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771860314
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

© Baraka Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN 978-1-77186-013-0 (pbk); 978-1-77186-031-4 (epub); 978-1-77186-032-1 (pdf); 978-1-77186-033-8 (mobi/pocket) Book design and cover by Folio infographie Cover photo: iStock Back cover photos: Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart and Providence Academy, ca 1901 (Courtesy of Providence Archives, Vancouver, Washington.) Louise Blanchard Bethune and Hotel Lafayette, ca. 1930 (Buffalo History Museum, used by permission.) Legal Deposit, 4th quarter 2014 Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec Library and Archives Canada Published by Baraka Books of Montreal. 6977, rue Lacroix Montréal, Québec H4E 2V4 Telephone: [phone] [e-mail] www.barakabooks.com Printed and bound in Quebec Baraka Books acknowledges the generous support of its publishing program from the Société de développement des entreprises culturelles du Québec (SODEC), the Government of Quebec, tax credit for book publishing administered by SODEC, and the Canada Council for the Arts. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing for our translation activities and through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities. Trade Distribution & Returns Canada and the United States Independent Publishers Group 1-800-888-4741 (IPG1); [e-mail]
Foreword

Some early women architects achieved a measure of fame, and some are now obscure, and it is certainly possible there are women who have yet to surface in the existing literature. This book focuses on two women who began to practice architecture in North America before the turn of the twentieth century.
Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart (born Esther Pariseau, 1823-1902) is representative of nameless pioneer women who helped to build nineteenth-century North America.
Louise Bethune (born Jennie Louise Blanchard, 1856-1913) is representative of the “exceptional women” admitted into the architecture profession, following another pattern that continued well into the twentieth century.
Our selection of these two women happened somewhat accidentally.
Carla Blank on Louise Bethune and Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel
In 2005, as guest speaker at Buffalo’s Harlem Book Fair, my partner, Ishmael Reed, was put up at a downtown hotel in the vicinity of Buffalo’s Lafayette Square. As he walked into the lobby of another hotel located at the square’s intersection of Washington and Clinton Streets, which he noticed had a dilapidated look, he saw a plaque indicating that it had opened in 1904 as a luxury hotel, the Hotel Lafayette (also known as the Lafayette Hotel), designed by the first American woman to be called a professional architect. When Ishmael returned home, he told me about this building and asked if I had heard of its architect, whose work he had never noticed or heard talk of in all his years growing up in Buffalo. Amazed that such a feat had managed to escape even Ishmael’s relentless curiosity, I began to investigate this architect’s story. As my research continued, I came to understand that Ishmael’s experience is typical, as Louise Blanchard Bethune, who without question established many “firsts” for women in architecture, has remained practically non-existent in the nation’s historical record. I wondered whether this deteriorating architectural legacy of Mrs. Bethune’s, hidden in plain sight for so long, reflected the fact that women have found architecture one of the most difficult fields to enter because, from ancient times, when we think of master builders, we think of men.
Further research turned up evidence of over thirty women who had begun architectural studies, training, or practices before the turn of the twentieth century in the U.S. or Canada, or in territories now within those countries’ borders. This fact was the makings of a book.
Shopping the book proposal around to various publishers, all expressed interest in the subject but politely declined because they assessed it as too expensive a project to achieve an acceptable return on their investment. Then, accompanying Ishmael on a book launch and tour of Montreal, Toronto, and New York, I related this experience to Robin Philpot, his publisher, and the head of Baraka Books. He was intrigued with the idea and asked me if any Canadians were among these women. As I reeled off the list of names, including Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart, Robin immediately said that he bet she was a Quebecer as her order, the Sisters of Providence, was founded by Émile Gamelin in 1840 in Montreal. He took me to visit the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where the young women in charge of their bookstore assured me that there were no books on women practicing architecture in Canada in the nineteenth century. They stated that the earliest Canadian woman architect was Marjorie Hill, who became the first Canadian woman registered as an architect when the Alberta Association of Architects accepted her as a member in 1925. However, a day in the McGill University library proved them wrong, as I found Constructing Careers: Profiles of Five Early Women Architects in British Columbia , an exhibition catalogue published in 1966 by the Women in Architecture Exhibits Committee that included Mother Joseph and confirmed her Canadian roots. So Robin said he would publish the book if it was about North American women architects, not just those based in the United States, and if a Canadian co-author could be found who understood French.
How to manage finding the right person to fit this bill? Thinking the best possible co-author would be a Canadian architectural historian bilingual in French and English, as Mother Joseph’s correspondence was written in French, I remembered that Kelly Hayes McAloney, one of the Buffalo architects who first introduced me to the Hotel Lafayette, was born in Canada. When I asked her if she could suggest a potential candidate, she put me in touch with Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian born in Montreal, who sent me to McGill University-based architectural historian Annmarie Adams, who in turn suggested Tania Martin, who not only fit all of my qualifications but goes one better as she has been a long-time specialist in the built environments of Catholic religious communities. We finally managed to meet at Université Laval in Quebec City during Ishmael’s second Canadian book tour. Robin, Ishmael, and I climbed the Saint-Joseph staircase, whose wooden steps were worn down into polished curves by students over some two hundred years, to the top floor of the School of Architecture, where we found Tania on a teaching break from her design studio course. After some discussion, we agreed to write this book together.
Neither Tania nor I were prepared for the many discoveries in store for us as we explored the lives of these women. For me, Bethune’s career not only told the story of a woman who succeeded despite long odds, but her story is also the story of her times.
Tania Martin on Mother Joseph and Storming the Old Boys’ Citadel
I first heard rumors that Mother Joseph had been an architect while writing my master’s thesis. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, figuring that if it were the case, she would show up again; and she did. Deborah Rink, a historic preservation consultant who had been studying the landscapes of the Sisters of St. Ann in Vancouver, British Columbia, contacted me. She was putting together an exhibition on the careers of early women architects in that province and had heard about my Ph.D. work on the Grey Nuns and the Sisters of Providence, both based in Montreal. Although I had not yet collected information on Mother Joseph, my article “Housing the Grey Nuns: Power, Women, and Religion in fin-de-siècle Montréal” featured another sister, Marie-Anne Falardeau, or Sœur Saint-Jean-de-la-Croix in religion. She had produced a series of as-built plans of a number of the Grey Nuns’ buildings in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century using the same architectural conventions employed by contemporary architects on her ink-on-linen drawings.
In June 1998, I embarked on a thirty-day cross-continent trip with my mother, who insisted on accompanying me to visit as many sites as possible where the two French-Canadian Catholic sisterhoods had lived and worked, and that were accessible from the major North American highways. As a graduate student, my meager resources did not allow me to fly into the remote northern locations or to drive five-hundred-mile detours to see first-hand the buildings the sisters had erected, although we did make a number of smaller forays to distant locations. The majority of the Sisters of Providence buildings attributed to Mother Joseph had long disappeared, except Providence Academy, formerly the House of Providence, built in 1873 in Vancouver, Washington, as an orphan asylum, school, and administrative seat of the Sisters in the Northwest. Unfortunately, we were not able to visit the whole of the complex. At that time, the chapel was being readied for a wedding and the auditorium decorated for the reception to follow. So it was a delight in August 2013 when Yvette Payne took Carla and me on a complete tour, from attic to basement, of each of the wings of Providence Academy as well as to the extant secondary structures. From the outside, and the little I had seen of the inside, not much had changed since my last visit fifteen years earlier, although the building was slightly worse for wear.
In the autumn of 1999, I learned that my proposal for a paper on Mother Joseph was accepted for the 2000 meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians’ session on Women Architects. Rink kindly sent me