Louise Blanchard Bethune - LINKS

The AIA Accepts Its First Woman Member
by Adriana Barbasch
Reprinted from Architecture: A Place for Women (1989)

In 1881, young Jennie Louise Blanchard announced the opening of her architectural office at the Ninth Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women held in Buffalo. That congress also heard an address by Belva Ann Lockwood, soon to be the first woman candidate for president of the United States.

Running on the National Equal Rights Party ticket, Lockwood lost her second of two bids for the presidency in 1888; she never ran for president again but remained a successful lawyer and activist for fifty years. She appears on the seventeen-cent stamp issued in 1986. Another election of 1888 was more favorable to women. Jennie Louise, now Louise Blanchard Bethune, became the first woman to be voted a member of the American Institute of Architects.

Born in 1856 in Waterloo, New York, Jennie Louise Blanchard was the daughter of Dalson Wallace Blanchard, a mathematician and school principal of French Huguenot descent, and Emma Melona Blanchard, (nee Williams), a school teacher whose Welsh ancestors had come to Massachusetts in 1640. Her only brother died at an early age.

As was common for girls in those times, Jennie Louise was educated at home. With her parents' undivided attention, she probably received a more complete education than was possible at any girls' school. During these formative years, too, she acquired a self-reliance that led her to disregard many conventional limitations throughout her life.

Buffalo

The Blanchards moved to Buffalo in 1866, to better jobs, and Jennie Louise spent her next eight years at the Buffalo High School, graduating in 1874. It was here that she expressed interest in architecture and showed ability in drawing houses and other buildings.

For two years she studied in preparation to enter the newly opened architecture course at Cornell University, but in 1876 she decided to enter the profession in the more traditional way, by apprenticing as a draftsman in a professional office. She was hired by Richard A. Waite, a established office in Buffalo and learned her trade through hard work: six days a week at the drafting board, on construction sites, and studying the vast amount of material in the office library.

She soon advanced to become R. A. Waite's assistant. She had mastered technical drafting, construction detailing, and the art of architectural design. She had received a man's education and had proven her ability in a man's profession. At the young age of twenty-five, she decided to open her own office.

The city of Buffalo in 1881 was enjoying its most prosperous era. For the fifteen years after the construction of the Erie Canal in 1825, Buffalo had been the largest port of emigration to the West. As the tide of pioneers began to slow, the ships turned around to bring in their harvests and make Buffalo the largest grain-handling port in the world. With the invention of the steam powered grain elevator in 1842, Joseph Dart revolutionized the grain trade and Buffalo became -- after Chicago -- the nation's second busiest railway center.

By 1881, the population of Buffalo was 155,000; it would reach 352,000 at the turn of the century. Banks, real-estate businesses, and manufacturing enterprises were flourishing. An early public transportation system of horse-drawn carriages became, in 1896, a trolley system totaling 169 miles within the city limits. Buffalo claimed to be the best paved city in the world in 1897, with more than 200 miles of streets surfaced with asphalt and stone. The city boasted one of the most comprehensive park systems (nearly 1,000 acres designed by Frederick Law Olmsted), a New York State University and several colleges, over thirty newspapers and periodicals in six languages, and a well-developed cultural life. To house this phenomenal development, architects from other cities flocked to Buffalo. New and existing offices needed every person qualified to do the work.

Jennie Louise Blanchard's apprenticeship had evolved under the most auspicious conditions. This was a time, furthermore, women were actively pursuing emancipation. In October 1881, the Ninth Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women convened in Buffalo, with 975 women and 25 men voicing their beliefs and examining the scientific, artistic, and professional fields for their acceptance of women. The opening of Bethune's office, announced during this Congress, marked what is considered the entry into the field of the first professional woman architect in the United States.

Marriage

Robert Armour Bethune (photo), a Canadian-born draftsman and former colleague from R. A. Waite, became Louise's partner and husband in December 1881. The hiring of draftsman William L. Fuchs (photo), in 1882, seems to have coincided with the birth of Louise's only child, Charles William, in 1883. (Fuchs apprenticed in the office until 1883 when he became the third partner.)

Although it is difficult to know precise authorship of work in any partnership, we are told in an article of 1893 that Louise Bethune "had been in business for sixteen years" and that "for some years she had taken entire charge of the office work and complete superintendence of one-third of the outside work". Yet one hundred years later, despite her numerous and significant contributions to Buffalo's architecture, Louise Bethune is remembered just vaguely and then only in connection with the Hotel Lafayette, keystone of her career.

Her office produced a continuous stream of industrial, commercial, and educational buildings of all sizes and types. Many notable industrial buildings are in good condition today and are still in use for their initial purposes (e.g., the Iroquois Door Plant Company warehouse and the large Chandler Street complex for the Buffalo Weaving Company.

Between 1881 and 1904, when the City of Buffalo commissioned fifty four new school buildings and twelve major additions to existing schools, Louise Bethune's office can be credited with the design of eighteen of these ñ plus the Lockport Union High School and a large addition to the old Griffith Institute in Springville.

Her firm also built a number of structures for other uses: the woman's prison for the Erie County Penitentiary; grandstands for the Queen City Baseball and Amusement Company (later the Offerman Baseball Stadium); the first building for the Seventy fourth Regiment Armory (later converted into the Elmwood Music Hall); the transformer building for the first power line in the nation, bringing electricity from Niagara Falls to Buffalo's trolley system, the Kensington Church in Buffalo; the Denton & Cottier music store, one of the first structures in the United States with a steel frame and poured concrete slabs; the police precinct station on Louisiana Street; a four story multiple dwelling with stores; and a railroad station in Black Rock, now part of Buffalo.

Most of the firm's designs are utilitarian and indicate tight budget controls, at the same time showing good sense of proportion, discreet handling of decorative elements, and thorough knowledge of construction technology. It is only in a few projects that Louise Bethune shows her talent for classical detailing in elegant materials.

Above all, Louise Bethune has been praised for the design of the Lafayette Hotel, her authorship clearly acknowledged in writings of her time. Originally planned for the Pan-American Exposition, the 225-room hotel was delayed by financial woes and change of ownership, and opened finally in 1904. With hot and cold water in all bathrooms, and telephones in all rooms, the seven-story hotel offered "the best that science, art and experience can offer for the comfort of the traveling public." Four years later, an addition doubled the size of the hotel, and fifty years later it was still operating as a luxury 400 room hotel, run by three successive generations of the same family. Today it is a rooming house, in dire need of restoration.

In contrast to the amazing range and variety of these projects, the office produced very few single-family residences, mostly for clients whose names are connected with other commissions. Louise Bethune had a strong dislike for single-residence architecture; she rejected the pigeonholing of women to house design and, from her own experience, knew it to be the worst paying and most frustrating job for any architect.

American Institute of Architects

Her professional reputation brought her enthusiastic admission to the Western Association of Architects in 1885. The board of directors, which included some of her eminent colleagues from Buffalo -- Louis H. Sullivan, Daniel Burnham and John M. Root who all had offices then in Buffalo and knew her work well ó-- first decided on the general principle of accepting women as members. "If the lady is practicing architecture and is in good standing, there is no reason why she should not be one of us." Louise Bethune's application was then voted on. "She has done work by herself and been very successful. She is unanimously elected a member."

She was a major organizer in 1886 of the Architects Association in Buffalo, called the Buffalo Society of Architects until 1891 when it became the Buffalo Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. In 1888, she was elected to membership in the American Institute of Architects; in 1889, she became its first woman Fellow when the Western Association of Architects was merged with the Institute. She was an active AIA member throughout her career and held chapter office as Vice President and Treasurer.

A woman of strong professional principles, she consistently supported the Architects' Licensing Bill, which, after twenty five years of debate, became the law to enforce rigid preliminary examinations for the practice of architecture. And in 1891 she refused to compete for the design of the Woman's Building for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, because it was against her principle of "Equal Remuneration for Equal Service." (Male architects were "appointed" to design major buildings and were paid $10,000 for artistic services only, with all construction drawings made at the expense of the Fair. Women architects were asked to compete for the artistic design and to provide all construction documents for a "prize" of $1,000.

Although there are conflicting dates for Louise Bethune's retirement, some as early as the 1905, the Buffalo City Directories carried her name in the business section until 1910. She had moved close to her son's home in 1907; her husband's residence was shown as the place of business until 1911, when he moved out to join her. (It is possible that her early change of address was due to a kidney disease that required special care by her son, a urologist.) Louise Bethune died in 1913 at the age of fifty seven.

Her will, containing a codicil dated 4 January 1908 and settling her share of the firm with the two remaining partners, confirms 1908 as the date of retirement. According to this codicil, written in her own handwriting, Jennie Louise Bethune had been sole owner of the office until the other two partners became financially involved, "since 1886 in the case of Robert A. Bethune and since 1893 in the case of Wm. L. Fuchs."

She had been a pioneer and a highly principled professional. Her beliefs are stated in her speech of 6 March 1891 before the Women's Educational and Industrial Union: "[Women] meet no serious opposition from the profession nor the public. Neither are they warmly welcomed. They minister to no special needs of women, and receive no special favors from them."

She continued with these thoughts, as reported in one of the local newspapers. While there had always been a need for women in the medical fraternity and while she believed there was a strong necessity for women in the legal profession, she said

... there is no need whatever of a woman architect. No one wants her, no one yearns for her and there is no special line in architecture to which she is better adapted than a man . . . [The woman architect] has exactly the same work to do as a man. When a woman enters the profession she will be met kindly and will be welcome but not as a woman, only as an architect.

The professional journal would quote her at some length about the few women in the profession, and about her hopes for their future.

|There are among [the women graduates] a few brilliant and energetic women
for whom the future holds great possibilities.

There are also a few women drafting in various offices through the country . . . They shirk the brick and-mortar-rubber-boot-and ladder climbing period of investigative education, and as a consequence remain at the tracing stage of draftsmanship. There are hardly more successful women draftsmen than women graduates, but the next decade will doubtless give us a few thoroughly efficient architects from their number.


She was far from being a rabble-rouser. To the women who heard her luncheon comments, she made clear the principles of her own career.

The objects of the business woman are quite distinct from those of the professional agitator. Her aims are conservative rather than aggressive, her strength lies in adaptability, not in reform, and her desire is to conciliate rather than to antagonize.


She left those ladies, and she leaves us, with words that showed her belief in herself and her belief in women as architects. "The future of woman in the architectural profession is what she herself sees fit to make it."


Footnotes not reproduced because of plagiarism problem
Page by Chuck LaChiusa
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