MINERVA
PARKER NICHOLS: A FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN ARCHITECT 1860-1943
Front
elevation and second floor plan, New Century Club
for Women, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1893. (Courtesy
the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University)
An article about her in
Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary
concludes
Minerva Parker Nichols ranks with Louise Blanchard Bethune
as one of the first American women to conduct a succesful
architectural practice.
The
American National Biography article specifies:
Minerva
Parker Nichols was the second American woman architect
to receive recognition. Unlike Louise Blanchard
Bethune, who took her husband as her partner shortly
after opening he buffalo office in 1881, Nichols
established the first succesful American Architectual
practice run by a woman working alone, without the
assistance or partnership of a man. She was brought
into national prominece by her design for the Queen
Isabella Society. Her most significant public buildings
were the New Century Clubs and the Browne and Nichols
School.
Women
in American Architecture edited by Susana Torre
in the Whitney Library of Design, 1977, Summarizes
her contribution as follows
Minerva
Parker Nichols devoted most of her career to domestic
architecture because she felt that "specialists
in architecture, as in medicine, are most assured
of success." After she trained with Frederick
Thorn, Jr., in Philadelphia as a draftsperson, she
took over his practice at 14 South Broad Street
in 188. In Philadelphia and its suburbs of Radnor,
Cynwood, Berwyn, Germantown, and Overbrooke, she
designed homes in a variety of styles. In the early
1890s, she built two New Century for Women clubs-one
in Philadelphia in the Renaissance style, recently
demolished; another in Wilmington, Delaware, still
extant.
Not all her work, however ,was residential. She
planned two factory buildings for the Philadelphia
spaghetti manufacturer Geano and Raggio, and a year
after her marriage, in 1894, she designed the Browne
and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her chief obstacle, she believed, was not how to
practice architecture, but how to obtain the technical
and architectural training necessary to do her work
well.
MINERVA PARKER NICHOLS
by
Elizabeth G. Grossman and Lisa B. Reitzes
Minerva
Parker Nichols assumed that, given a real chance,
women architects would proves as capable as men:
It
is time to put aside prejudice and sentimentalism, and
judge women's work by their ability. Let the conditions
and restrictions be exactly the same as those under
which men work, . . . so that the restriction shall
be one of ability, and not sex. We do not need women
as architects, we do not need men, but we do need brains
enough to lift the architecture of this country beyond
the grasp of unskilled and unqualified practictioners.
Nichols
had come to architecture through an apprenticeship. After
graduating from the Philadelphia Normal ArtSchool, she
entered the office of Philadelphia architect Frederick
Thorn, Jr., and while training with him took courses in
architectural drawing and design at the Franklin Institute.
When Thorn retired four years later, Nichols took over
the business, continuing her education at the Philadelphia
Museum and School of Industrial Arts.
Thus she did not go from the academy to the office, but
rather, as was usual for men, supplemented her practical
training with course work. The favorable aspects of her
own academic experiences undoubtedly made Nichols idealistic
about the options presented to women by the architecture
schools. But the concern that she expressed, about the
lack of practical expertise of school-trained women, realistically
echoed the views of male architects who would be the colleagues
and employers of women entering the field.
Font
elevation and second floor plan, New Century Club
for Women, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1893. (Courtesy
the Schlesinger Library, Harvard University)
To
obtain the kind of practical experience that Nichols endorsed,
however, women coming out of the schools (like men) had
to enter what amounted to an "internship" in
an architect's office—a period the AIA would later
formally define as the "candidacy." The difficulty
was that, in seeking to fulfill this requirement, women
aspirants were back in the position of having to be accepted
by an individual mentor, the very impediment that admission
to an architecture school was sup. posed to eliminate.
Nichols
was peculiarly optimistic about the chances for school
trained women to continue their training in an office—"there
are very few architects who would not be willing to offer
a helping hand to any woman whom they saw earnestly attempting
to join their ranks'' —but her own circumstances
had been fortuitous. After inheriting her mentor's active
Philadelphia practice, Nichols went on to have a prosperous,
if relatively short, career as an architect best known
for her suburban houses and for her work with women's
organizations. For our purposes, what is most significant
about Nichols is the extravagant support she received
from the builders' community in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia
Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, which identified
itself as "devoted to real estate, building, architectural
and insurance interests," gave an entire front page
to Nichols's career in 1890. Earlier this journal had
proudly announced her entry into the profession as "the
only [woman] in this city who has chosen this useful occupation,
and it followed her work until she left the city in 1896.
The PRERBG used Nichols's established success to
substantiate its claim that "a position [in architecture]
is waiting for every woman [who] makes herself capable
of filling it." This article emphatically stated
that gender had not been a factor in the fortunes of "the
only woman architect in Philadelphia":
Strange
to say the fact of being a woman has never, at any time,
been a serious drawback, nor in any way handicapped her
while pursuing her line of work. On the contrary, words
of encouragement and good fellowship have at all times
been freely extended, both by the public in general and
her fellow architects.... As to builders, mechanics, and
all with whom she has come in contact, the only advantage
any of them has taken in dealing with a woman has been
added care on their part in executing the work called
for by her plans and specifications.
The
enthusiasm of the PRERBG shows the local builders'
community to be far more receptive to women at this time
than the part of the profession that espoused the AIA model
of architecture. Indeed, the builders actively recruited
women into architectural practice.
However, as with the AIA model of the "qualified"
architect, the definition of "capable" that the
PRERBG offered in support of Nichols was specific
and value-laden. Nichols was praised because she "[did]
not come before the public with the plea that she is a woman,
and therefore to be helped and supported, but as fully prepared
as the generality of her colaborers." In other words,
this journal's remarkable endorsement of Nichols lay not
only in the fact that she was adequately trained, but also
in the fact that she was trained in such a way as not to
set her apart from the community in which she worked. For
the PRERBG, this meant training through apprenticeship,
not through an elite academic program.
The PRERBG clearly believed that apprenticeship trained
a per son to be an architect and not merely a builder. In
its commentary on the results of the 1891 competition for
the Woman's Building, the journal predictably endorsed Minerva
Parker Nichols's design, but it also asserted that the other
top competitors (Sophie Hayden, Lois Howe, Laura Hayes)
were not "professional architects and therefore the
competition cannot be classed as one based on true architectural
merit." Hayden and Howe had both recently graduated
from MIT, and therefore, by PRERBG standards, lacked
practical experience, and Laura Hayes had received no formal
training in architecture at all. Among these women, only
Nichols had come to the competition with full credentials.
In sum, Bethune's and Nichols's advocacy of academic education
and practical experience for women derived from their belief
that a woman's success in the profession depended on her
becoming a "complete architect." But the professional
struggles between architects and builders were in effect
rendering that model of the architect meaningless. Instead
of seeking a larger conception of the profession, each of
these factions actually sought authority for its own more
limited definition of the field. Women, not surprisingly,
got caught in this male battle for professional turf.
Once these women graduated, they faced the difficulty of
finding an office in which to intern, to acquire that "practical
experience" they were assumed as a sex to be lacking,
regardless of their previous education. It seems likely
that if a woman applied for internship to an architect who
valued school training, the "gentlemanly" model
would work against her. On the other hand, if she sought
employment from the ranks of architects who were not themselves
academically trained, these practitioners would be suspicious,
not only of her training but also of her inappropriate architectural
ambitions. It was commonplace in this period, for instance,
to assume that women who did the profession should "specialize"
in domestic architecture. Yet schools, in their curricula
and underlying philosophy, encouraged students to aspire
to design buildings for the great cultural institutions
of the country.
If a woman who wished to become an architect in this period
understood from the start that the professional status promised
by the academic degree was not intended for her, she could
choose to try to enter an apprenticeship with an established,
sympathetic architect. If she joined a small firm of local
reputation and became a house designer, she could hope for
professional acceptance and an active, profitable career.
However, for some ambitious, middle class women—for
whom professional identity was increasingly linked to higher
education—this "traditional" route must have
seemed an unattractive option. For, insofar as they embraced
the AIA definition of the architect, these women might have
seen apprenticeship as a process jeopardizing both their
professional and class status.
Given the prospects that professionalization and academic
education actually opened for women in this period, is it
any wonder that, as Louise Bethune observed, most of the
women who graduated from the schools "renounced ambition
with the attainment of the degree" or that, according
to the PRERBG, "In Philadelphia, while most
of the trades and professions are ably represented by a
number of bright and intelligent women, that of architecture
has but one follower."
From
Architecture: A Place for Women edited by Ellen Perry
Berkeley, 1989.
Biography by Agnes Addison Gilchrist in Notable
American Women. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
UNITARIAN
NOTE
The
article about her in American National Biography
states: "A longtime Unitarian, Minerva Parker married
Reverend William Ichabod Nichols, Pastor of the Spring
Garden Unitarian Church, Philadelphia . . . and restored
the Unitarian Church in Deefield, Massachusetts (1913)
when her husband became its rector.
