Gender Space Architecture

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2000 by Kate Macintosh

Edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, Iain Borden. London: Routledge. 2000. [pound]50 ([pound]18.50 paperback)

This collection of 38 essays spans a wide variety of subjects, from painting in fin de siecle France to the impact of the post-industrial economics on the lives of British women. It is set out in three sections: Gender, Gender Space and Gender Space Architecture.

Who is the target audience and what is the provenance of this unfocused work? Is the purpose to encourage young aspiring women and provide them with a time-map of the continuum within which they live? The opening three texts from the writings of formulators of feminist thinking, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan give hope. But this is dashed by the predominantly paranoid tone of the remaining contributions. The authors, with a few notable exceptions, show no awareness of the territory conquered. Women pioneers staked out the objectives as rights to: enfranchisement, property and earning power, birth control and education. All of these have been won (for middle-class women of the West in the Northern hemisphere, to which this group belong) and much more besides. Yet there is no celebration, only a chewing over of old grievances, and ascribing gender particularity to every activity which is the reverse of liberating, unless a way out is described.

Notable exceptions are Lynn Walker's excellent concise history of 'Women in Architecture', highlighting some of the difficulties for young women training, such as 97 per cent of tutors are male, and Doreen Massey's analysis of the impact of deregulated part-time, high-tech industries on gender relations. Denise Scott Brown gives valuable hands-on advice to young women graduates.