Review: Louise Blanchard Bethune: Every Woman Her Own Architect

In 1963, Madeleine B. Stern published the first posthumous profile of Louise Blanchard Bethune, widely considered to be America’s first professional woman architect.¹ The profile articulated a conundrum that has shaped Bethune’s legacy ever since: a self-described conservative who adapted to the status quo and seemed to disdain “professional agitators” such as suffragists, Bethune was steadfast in her belief that women were as capable as men at potentially anything and should settle for nothing less than equal pay for equal work. Was she a feminist?

Sixty years later, Kelly Hayes McAlonie has published the second-ever book-length biography of Bethune. Equipped with decades of scholarship on women, gender, and the architectural profession, as well as digitized primary sources, two small collections of Bethune family and professional pictures and documents, a keen analytical mind, and clear, persuasive prose, McAlonie argues across nine chapters that Bethune was in fact a feminist. She was also a good architect who designed some important buildings.

Jennie Louise Blanchard was born in 1856. Her parents were educators who raised their daughter in western New York, where the women’s suffrage movement was born alongside fights for gender pay equity and women’s property rights. The Blanchard family eventually settled in Buffalo. After graduating from high school, Louise intended to study architecture at Cornell University, but when one of Buffalo’s rising stars, Richard A. Waite, offered Louise an apprenticeship in his studio, she accepted it. After all, apprenticeship was still the primary mode of architectural training, and Louise jumped at the opportunity to experience the same training as most of her male contemporaries.

In 1881, Louise Blanchard became the first woman in the United States to establish an independent architectural practice. She soon invited her new husband and fellow architect, Richard A. Bethune, to join her firm, and a year later Bethune & Bethune hired Walter Fuchs as an apprentice. He became a partner in 1890. Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs defied many gender norms. Louise remained sole financial proprietor for more than a decade; she owned the property where the firm practiced, and she likely oversaw financial management of the business. She also played a leading role in all types and aspects of projects, from drafting plans to managing building sites. She did all this while acting as the primary caregiver to her son, Charles. Publicly, however, the firm presented more traditional gender roles, with Louise claiming the lead role on houses and schools—acceptable feminine spaces for families and children—and Robert claiming the lead on commercial and noneducational public buildings. He also received more public credit for the firm’s work. As the suffrage movement gained momentum in the 1890s, Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs experienced a backlash, particularly from public institutions, which resisted contracting with woman-owned businesses. From that point forward, the firm relied mostly on private commissions from clients who supported its progressive gender model.

Residential commissions accounted for about a third of Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs’s output. At first, Louise Bethune espoused the contemporary belief that women had a natural advantage in residential design, but she came to dispute that argument, countering that women should avoid residential commissions altogether. She noted that architects made little money from dwellings, so consigning this building type to women stunted their professional development and ensured they would never earn the same income as their comparably trained male peers. Moreover, home design required the architect to resolve more competing ideas than in any other building type. Regardless, Bethune designed about eighty houses, mostly in the popular Queen Anne style and mostly for middle-class and affluent households. McAlonie focuses on exceptional mansions for prominent businessmen, provides exterior descriptions of a few other houses, and offers brief background sketches of another handful of clients, but the reader never quite understands who the typical client was, what the demands of competing voices might have been, or Bethune’s spatial solutions for them.

Just four years after opening her office, Bethune was the first woman to be admitted to the Western Association of Architects. She was granted membership on the basis of her work, just like her male peers, but Bethune’s trailblazing effort to set women on an equal footing from the earliest days of architecture’s professionalization was no match for prevailing gender norms. The WAA leadership, including Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, and John Root, supported Bethune’s application and used it as an opportunity to express optimism that more women would follow her. Two years later, Bethune became the first woman to be admitted to the American Institute of Architects, and in 1888 she was elevated to the status of AIA fellow—only, however, to placate the WAA, as the two professional organizations prepared to merge. Neither the AIA leadership nor the institute’s members supported the idea of women architects, and, indeed, the AIA actively limited the profession to men. As the institute’s influence grew, Bethune’s voice and engagement within it diminished. She refused to be treated unequally. Though principled, Bethune’s retreat from the AIA may have contributed to the slowing of women architects’ momentum toward achieving equal status among their male peers.

By the time she applied for admission to the WAA and AIA, Bethune’s portfolio included public and commercial buildings in addition to houses. The firm designed or remodeled fifteen public schools, projects that showcased their ability to design in many styles, address complex programmatic needs for modern education, incorporate the latest innovations in sanitation and ventilation, and collaborate with city officials. These successes led to several commissions for police stations, one for a women’s penitentiary, and one for the monumental Flemish Renaissance Seventy-Fourth Regiment Armory Building. Commissions like these grew the Bethunes’ network of wealthy and influential residents in the region, who hired the firm to design retail spaces, market halls, a major resort hotel and amusement facilities, the Buffalo Livestock Exchange (the second largest in the country), several factories, and light industrial buildings. The breadth and quality of architecture that Bethune, Bethune & Fuchs produced solidified the firm as one of Buffalo’s best.

All of this building activity required on-site management, and Bethune was known to arrive at construction sites on her bicycle. In the 1890s, the bicycle symbolized the suffragist, the New Woman, and, for Bethune, the true woman architect. “Riding a bicycle and practicing architecture,” McAlonie writes, “required perseverance and strength, physically and in character” (161). Bethune also joined the Buffalo Women’s Wheel and Athletic Club. Like so many other women’s clubs at the time, Women’s Wheel was not a political organization per se, but it empowered members to challenge conventional gender norms, amplified their voices around issues they cared about, and provided leadership opportunities.

In 1891, Louise Bethune was the most experienced and most highly regarded woman architect in the United States. She might have catapulted to international acclaim had she entered the competition to create the most widely publicized woman-designed building of the time, the Woman’s Building for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Bethune refused to participate, however, feeling that competing would be an insult to her unparalleled experience. Further, the competition placed women in an unequal position, as no men had to compete to design the fair’s other buildings, and the prize money for winning the Woman’s Building commission was a pittance compared to the men’s earnings. Bethune’s vision of equality was of an integrated world of men’s and women’s work, whatever that work entailed. One has to wonder if, like her retreat from the AIA, Bethune’s refusal to participate in the Woman’s Building competition, however principled, was a missed opportunity to propel the progress of women in the profession.

If women’s progress in architecture suffered from her principled stance, Bethune’s career did not. Work on her magnum opus, the Hotel Lafayette in Buffalo, commenced in 1901. The French Renaissance luxury hotel showcased Bethune’s design skills and garnered significant attention. Recently renovated, the Hotel Lafayette is the only building in Bethune’s portfolio to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands as an excellent period example of a palace hotel, but it is not as architecturally innovative as two commissions that came after it. For the Daniels Building, a warehouse and retail space for music and instruments, and the Bricka & Enos Department Store, Bethune introduced industrial design into commercial buildings, which is particularly notable for her extensive use of glazing. This mixture of styles foreshadowed modernism. How far Louise Bethune might have ventured away from historicism toward modernism will never be known, however, as declining health forced her into retirement. She died in 1913 at the age of fifty-seven.

McAlonie has made the most of a relatively small base of primary sources to present this compelling portrait of Louise Blanchard Bethune. Readers will learn more about Bethune’s oeuvre than ever before, and they will understand the context of women’s place in the architectural profession from the late Gilded Age through the early Progressive Era. They may still pine for insights into how and why Bethune made architectural decisions, but only theory can fill that void.