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Women at Work
Above: Women working at a drafting table, possibly in the office of Howe and Manning.
By Sally Zimmerman, Manager of Historic Preservation Services
Long recognized as keepers of cultural heritage, and especially of the history and traditions of families and home, women in the mid-nineteenth century began playing a more active and public role as saviors of historic properties. Until the late twentieth century, however, women preservationists were volunteers in support of the cause. Female professionals working in preservationrelated fields were rare, but not unknown.
The role of female professionals in historic preservation during the first half of the twentieth century has not generally received much attention. The birth of the preservation movement in America began as a volunteer effort led by Ann Pamela Cunningham, whose Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association secured the preservation of George Washington’s home in 1858. For much of the next century, preservation campaigns continued as voluntary efforts and were often mounted by patriotic organizations like the Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, men like Historic New England founder William Sumner Appleton began to professionalize the field, and until after World War II, men held most of the jobs in preservation. Women generally participated as volunteers and did not play major roles as preservation professionals until the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966. And yet in the early years of the last century, some of the nation’s first women professionals in architecture, decorative arts, and interior design—fields closely related to preservation—were nurtured in New England and helped shape the field as it developed.
Among those women involved in preservation during the first half of the twentieth century, pioneering architects held the strongest professional credentials. MIT-trained architect Lois Lilley Howe (1864–1964), was the second female member of the American Institute of Architects and the first woman architect recognized as an AIA Fellow. A native of Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an abiding interest in its history, Howe is credited with more than thirty-three commissions in the city. She and partners Mary Almy (1883–1953) and Eleanor Manning (1884–1973) excelled at Colonial Revival residential design, a focus well documented in a 1913 book of measured drawings titled Details from Old New England Houses that Howe co-authored. With fifty plates of exterior, interior, and decorative architectural furnishings and details, the book exemplified the documentary approach to accurately recording the physical fabric of an old house that male preservation advocates like Appleton endorsed. Female architects’ work often focused on residential design, and frequently, on modifications to existing houses rather than on new commissions. This typically meant working on historic houses and in the process of refitting them, preserving them. Even Modernist Eleanor Raymond (1887–1989), architect of a 1931 design credited with being the first Modern house in New England and of one of the earliest solar houses in the country, was more widely known in her own day for her careful remodeling of early houses. In her archives “additions, alterations, remodeling, and renovations” far outnumber “single-family dwellings.” The solarium and dining room wing she added in 1951 to an 1836 high-style Greek Revival home, with long, multi-paned casements and classic corner cupboards that relate the addition stylistically to traditional elements in the main house, was typical of this work.
Design-related work for women without architectural training was scarce. Nonetheless, growing interest in historic restoration did offer chances to a lucky few. Charleston, South Carolina, native Nonie Davis Tupper (1875–1954), for example, developed a career as an interior designer in private homes in combination with her antiques store, Tupper and Goodridge, in Boston’s Back Bay. Tupper spent most of her career as a single woman. Her preservation work included efforts to save the Tupper family homestead in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and her 1917 renovation of the Lyman Estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the Colonial Revival style.
The career of Susan Higginson Nash (1893–1971) yields vivid evidence of both the challenges faced by early female preservationists and the breadth of their impact on the field. Nash’s life and career as the first decorator and furnishing director for the Colonial Williamsburg restoration have been extensively studied, but her contributions to the art and science of paint analysis are obscure to all but specialists in architectural conservation.
Nash enjoyed a relatively conventional upbringing among the elite of turn-of-the-century Boston. Her father was a stockbroker, while her mother, an early graduate of MIT, established a household where art and artists like John LaFarge and William Morris Hunt were welcomed. Married in 1913 to a broker in her father’s firm, she trained as a fine artist at the Child-Walker School and with artists Charles Hopkinson and Dodge McKnight. When her marriage failed in the 1920s, she had great difficulty both in finding suitable work and in fitting it into the social expectations of Boston society. “I felt sometimes quite a difference in some of my friends and acquaintances, partly because I was never able to do anything when they asked me and partly because they had never worked,” she said. “If one had to make a living, … they considered it advisable to go back and live with your mother and father, or with some other well-to-do relative.” Having been rejected for any work in a museum in Boston for her lack of college training, Nash thought to “try to work in an architect’s office.” Through informal interior decoration work for friends, her art training, and a knowledge and love of antique furniture, she finally found work at Perry, Shaw and Hepburn just as the small Boston architectural firm took on the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg.
Responsible for the paints, furniture, and furnishings at Williamsburg, Nash wrote in a 1935 summary of the restoration about seeking “an effect of continued life, and of settled repose” in the interpretation of the museum’s interior color and texture. She stated, “It is impossible to place too great emphasis on the importance of the proper handling of this color and texture in the effort to produce effects that are essential to authenticity.” She “tried to adapt [her] experience with colors to the usages of Colonial times and to learn from documents and actual examples as much as may be gleaned from them.”
In her observations, all based on the earliest color layers exposed by scraping down to bare wood, Nash recognized that the study of paint layers in situ was critical to understanding historic color usage. Her color formulas, as well as her methodology for cataloguing and maintaining color accuracy in the museum interiors, established the standard used at Williamsburg through the 1950s, until new methods of scientific analysis achieved a more accurate understanding of historic colors. Perhaps the most enduring legacy of her work was the Williamsburg paint color palette, first marketed to the public in 1936–37, which paint historian Frank Welsh states “is still in the minds of many the official source of ‘authentic’ colonial colors.”
Nash’s later career, which included consulting for numerous institutions and historical organizations (Historic New England among them), extended into the era when working women in preservation outnumbered “lady volunteers.” But as historian Barbara Howe has noted, “Few people who have studied the role of women in preservation would disagree . . . that ‘this country would be in big trouble if not for the women.’ They are…‘the backbone of the movement.’”
Ms. Zimmerman thanks architectural historian Pauline Metcalf, who graciously shared her research on Susan Higginson Nash.
