Women in Design

by Anne Massey

A comprehensive history of women designers working internationally from 1900 to the present day.  Women designers have created some of the most important objects in history. By revealing the untold stories of female design pioneers, this wide-ranging introduction celebrates their crucial role in the history of modern processes of making. Arranged chronologically, this guide considers the structural barriers to professional success and how women overcame these hurdles, charting the works of designers including Anni Albers at the Bauhaus, the architects Eileen Gray and Zaha Hadid, interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe, and fashion icon Mary Quant. Focusing on the key subjects of architecture, craft, fashion, furniture, graphics, interior, product, and textile design, author Anne Massey explores the link between early twentieth– century revolutionary design and lifestyle, as well as the idea of shopping and consumerism as liberatory. Massey also discusses the important contribution of designers during and after World War II, along with design activism, design collectives, and the current success of women working transnationally in architecture and design. Illustrated throughout, Women in Design is the definitive history of women designers working around the world over the past 120 years.  152 color illustrations

Genres: Design

200 pages, Paperback

First published November 3, 2022

About the author

Anne Massey is professor of design and culture at Huddersfield University and professorial fellow at the University of the Creative Arts, England. She is the author of The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture, 1945–1959; Interior Design Since 1900; and six other books. She has edited five volumes, including A Companion to Contemporary Design Since 1945, and was founding coeditor of the journal Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture. She lives in London.

Reviews

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great overview over the all too often overlooked women in areas of decoration, textile and fashion design, product design, industrial design interior design, architecture and more. The author does not only describe the designers, but also the conditions that, through the ages, have made it difficult for women to establish themselves in this field, and how women pioneers have contributed to changing these conditions.
It is quite shocking, though sadly not surprising, that behind some of the world famous male designers stood a female partner or collaborator, often uncredited and omitted from records. I can only imagine how much work the author had to put into digging up this kind of information.
The book is mostly focused on designers in the English-speaking world - it would be interesting to have a more international view on the subject.

[ezgi]

gözüme zor bi sektör kestirmişim lol

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction
p.8 – The history of design has been so predicated on the male designer as “hero,” celebrating one model of what is perceived as “good design,” that work which is more discursive and decorative is often not included in standard accounts. Modernism, which purported to be eternal and everlasting, was anti-fashion and largely patriarchal, traits reinforced by subsequent histories. The key architect of this modern Darwinism was Le Corbusier, who ridiculed the cheap taste of “shop girls” for ornament in his book The Decorative Arts Today (1925), as a reaction to the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels. In a highly racialized and sexist statement he described “Decoration: baubles, charming entertainment for a savage.... But in the twentieth century our powers of judgment have developed greatly and we have raised our level of consciousness. Our spiritual needs are different, and higher worlds than those of decoration offer us commensurate experience. It seems justified to affirm: the more cultivated a people becomes, the more decoration disappears.” Women were identified with decoration, with “savages” and a lower order of design in the view of Le Corbusier and subsequent modern architects and writers.
Chapter 1 – Shifting Barriers
p.12 – As Caroline Criado Perez demonstrates in Invisible Women (2019), the professional world of design was founded for and by men. The professional identity of the designer was, in the nineteenth century, male by default. Professional structures and educational opportunities were constructed for the male participant; women were not factored into the design system. Design education, starting with the first UK School of Design, founded by the British government in 1837, was for the male student, as were schools of architecture and the apprenticeship system. Trade bodies were a men-only preserve from the very beginning. Women had to make their case to be included and accepted as exceptions to the rule, one by one. These same design structures also formed an important part of the colonization of other nations, and, as shown in the design and building of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, aimed to place Britain at the centre of a global empire through design.
During the nineteenth century, middle-class women were associated with delicate hand-work that could be achieved strictly at home, as amateurs. This included needlework, painting ceramics, lacemaking, jewelry, illustration and bookbinding (only of a kind that did not require a specialist studio). By pursuing these areas of skill, women could ensure their respectability by working alone from home. Work undertaken beyond the domestic sphere by those who had less access to these genteel pastimes, generally working-class women and women of colour, was regarded as less feminine. This ideology around the appropriateness of feminine pursuits runs through the history of women in design.
In Japan, the gendered concept of Shugei, handicrafts, meant that handwork was often undertaken by genteel women in the home for little or no monetary reward. This was encouraged through popular magazines, advice manuals and education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the opening-up of trade between Japan and the West. Subjects such as embroidery were taught to girls in elementary schools, and specialist colleges were founded, including the Toyo Women's Crafts School in the late nineteenth century. The curriculum was aimed at self-improvement rather than workplace skills, and included sewing and flower arranging as well as logic, English, science and calligraphy.
p.13 – The division of amateur and professional was cleaved along the lines of gender, making it difficult to enter the processional world of design.
p.25 – In Scotland, an important point of contact for the development and support of women in design was the Glasgow School of Art. Founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, it began as a training college to promote good design for industry along the usual default male lines. But in 1885 a new Headmaster, Francis ‘Fra’ Newbery (1855-1946), was appointed and began to support and further the interests of women. When he took up his post there were no female members of staff, but by 1910, one-third of the staff were women, a high proportion for that time. Female students studied the same courses as their male counterparts, with the exception of life drawing, which was undertaken from plaster casts. When the School of Architecture opened in 1904, places were open to women. The Applied Design course was a popular choice for women, who saw a professional future in repoussé metalwork, art needlework, bookbinding, illustration, stained glass, china painting and silversmithing. Margaret Gilmour (1860-1942) and her sister Mary Gilmour (1872-1938) succeeded in establishing a studio, and produced Art Nouveau objects with a Celtic twist to a high standard. At a later date, the skills of mosaics, enamelling and gesso were added to the course.
p.27 – Many of the women who studied at the Glasgow School of Art were subsequently offered teaching posts, building up the balance of female staff. Jessie King (1875-1949) graduated in 1899 and then taught bookbinding and ceramics for almost ten years. She also found professional success as a book illustrator, textile and jewelry designer, producing designs for Liberty's of London in an Art Nouveau style, with exquisite necklaces, brooches, buckles and rings made from silver, enamel and pearl, as well as wallpaper, textiles and a panel for a walnut screen. Jessie Newbery (1864-1948) was a tour de force at Glasgow School of Art and a staunch supporter of the suffragette cause. After completing her studies at the school, she taught and established the Embroidery department, where she exercised an open admissions policy, allowing access to classes for those from all walks of life. She used affordable materials and simple techniques such as appliqué to ensure that her students could reach a level of creative expression through handiwork, which was the aim of the Arts and Crafts movement. As the history of the Arts and Crafts remains a male-dominated narrative, with William Morris overshadowing the entire movement, it is vital that the contribution of designers such as Newbery are acknowledged. Her work was bold in outline, characterized by the geometric Glasgow rose in pastel colours.
p.28 – As with the Arts and Crafts Movement, where William Morris has become the de facto sole representative, work undertaken in Glasgow at the turn of the last century is commonly understood under the heading of another male hero, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). Work by the women at the Glasgow School of Art and further afield has been overshadowed., if not obliterated or even ridiculed. As one piece of art criticism from 2018, titled “Charles Rennie Mackintosh review, Walker Art Gallery – a timely tribute to the guru of Glasgow style” and reproduced on the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society website states: “There's a lot of good support material, though: card stencils used in decorating walls and furniture, beautiful architectural drawings by Mackintosh and a lot of twee embroidery.” As has been demonstrated, women at the Glasgow School of Art contributed and achieved a great deal that deserves greater acknowledgement.
Two of the leading female practitioners at the school were the sisters Margaret (1864-1933) and Frances Macdonald (1873-1921), who both studied there from 1890. At the Glasgow School of Art Club's annual autumn exhibition of 1894, they attracted public attention for their ghostly imagery, elongated figures with death-mask faces, that became their trademark. The pair went on to establish a successful studio in 1896, where they produced jewelry, posters, metal and gesso decorative panels, embroideries, book-cover designs and clocks, candlesticks and mirror frames as vital ingredients of the Glasgow Style interior.
p.33 – The Glasgow School of Art was an exception in its encouragement of women in design at the turn of the early twentieth century. In Vienna, women were not allowed to study at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts or be members of the Secession. In 1897, the Kunstschule für Frauen und Mädchen (KFM, Art School for Women and Girls, later renamed the Wiener Frauenakademie (Viennese Women's Academy) was founded. The school was imbued with the radical outlook of the Vienna Secession, and aimed to challenge differences between art and design.
p.34 – Teachers at the school included Adolf Böhm (1861-1927), a founding member of the Secession who facilitated opportunities for his women students at the new Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), which were founded in 1903 by the architect Josef Hoffmann, the designer and painter Koloman Moser and the entrepreneur and painter Fritz Waerndorfer following a visit by Hoffmann to Macdonald and Mackintosh in Glasgow in 1902. The idea was to create a studio for the production of design. Women created and sold work through the workshops from the beginning; for example, a wooden chess set created by KFM graduates Fanny Harlfinger-Zakucka (1873-1954) and Minka Podhajská (1881-1963) in 1906. Carved from woo, its tiny figures stand at 23h inches (5-8.7 cm) and are drawn from a fairy-tale kingdom of medieval castles and figures adorned in brightly coloured robes.
One of the first commissions for the Wiener Werkstätte was the corporate identity and fashion showroom for entrepreneur Emilie Flöge (1873--1952). She is most often remembered as Gustav Klimt's muse, but she ran a successful, high-end fashion salon for almost thirty-five years. Few records remain of the establishment and she destroyed her part of her correspondence with Klimt. However, it is clear that she was the creative head of the enterprise. She supplied reform dress to women of the Austrian elite, which essentially meant flowing dresses that could be worn without a corset, in rich materials with high, tight necklines and fitted bodices. She was aided by the expert weaver Jutta Sika (1877-1964)
Chapter 2 – Behind the Scenes
p.38 – At the start of the twentieth century, female employment rose significantly. For example, in the field of clerical work, women were valued as typists, with the introduction of the typewriter in the 1880s for the processing of office work. By 1911, a quarter of all clerical workers were women, always on a lower pay compared to their male counterparts. Women working in design were, likewise, typically paid far less than men. Low-paid female workers were a key feature of the haute couture economy. A Paris-based fashion house would employ around 800 workers, the majority of whom were women on low wages. This included the front-of-house receptionists, models and sales personnel. Behind the scenes were the women who produced the garments, the seamstresses, pattern cutters and hand-finishers who produced exquisitely made clothing to order. The situation was worse in the cheaper off-the-peg market, where garments were produced in the sweatshops of the East End of London and New York's Lower East Side. The figurehead was usually a man, for example the Paris-based fashion designer Paul Poiret (1879-1944); fashion houses sold clothing on the promise of the individual, male creative genius.
p.51 – Much like the fashion industry and the world of typographic design, ceramics companies employed women on lower pay rates to perform skilled work behind the scenes.
p.52 – Women were employed by firms such as the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Factory in Denmark to decorate delicate items. The factory itself had been founded by Queen Juliane Marie of Denmark in 1775 to improve the economy, and women were employed in its studios during the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth to hand-paint the wares. In Europe and America during the nineteenth century, it was widely assumed that women were particularly suited to the delicate art of hand-decorating pottery; women could also order plain pots to decorate at home as a hobby. In the UK, the pottery industry had blossomed in the North Staffordshire area from the Industrial Revolution onwards, and firms such as Dalton, Minton and Josiah Wedgwood and Sons Ltd employed women to paint surface decoration at the finishing stage of production. A husband and wife team, Alfred and Louise Powell, established a studio at the Etruria works at Wedgwood around 1906 solely to train women as freehand painters. One of the most successful of these painters was Millicent (Millie) Taplin (1902-80), who studied parttime at Stoke School of Art then worked at Etruria and Barlaston from 1917 to 1962. She was a prolific and flexible designer, able to create popular and appealing patterns. Women were not permitted to design the three-dimensional form of the ceramic items, and their design and painting often went unacknowledged, with no maker's mark for surface decoration.
Chapter 3 – Pioneers of Modern Design
p.79 – The history of design has tended to down play the contribution of women working in heterosexual relationships, in a “designer couple.” The named, male partner takes centre stage and comes to stand in for both party's work. Aino Marsio-Aalto (1894-1949) is a prime example of this historical sleight of hand. Born in Finland, she trained as an architect at the Helsinki Institute of Technology and qualified in 1920.
p.80 – She had met Alvar Aalto on the same programme of study and joined his practice in 1924. They subsequently married. The couple were convinced by the aims of the Modern movement, and were part of an international network that included Le Corbusier, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius. The Aaltos' best-known project is the Paimio Sanatorium of 1933, where they designed everything from the building to its bentwood and tubular steel features and furniture. The Paimio chair, consisting of one sheet of bent plywood fixed to a curved, wooden frame, is possibly their best-known collaborative design. Aino can be solely credited as the designer of their summer retreat, the Villa Flora, of 1926. Located on the banks of Lake Alajärvi in the west of Finland, the simple model structure had a green, living roof. Aino was also the designer of the popular and practical Böljeblick glassware range of 1932, with its ridged profile applied to glasses, jugs and bowls in a range of colours. But most of her work was conducted in collaboration with her husband, including the foundation of the successful firm Artek, established in 1935 by the Aaltos, the art historian Nils-Gustav Hahl and the wealthy philanthropist, Marie Gullichsen. Aino was Creative Director of the organization, which showcased modern interior design for sale to the public. Under her able direction, Artek undertook over eighty interior commissions, including for Helsinki's Malmi airport in 1938 and 1948.
p.82 – The international reputation of the firm grew, and the Aaltos also raised their profile through the design of the Finnish Pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939. With its undulating wooden walls, covered with blown-up black-and-white photographs, it was a fitting structure to symbolize a country that had only gained independence in 1917. Aino died in 1949 at only fifty-four, but her legacy continues through the sustained popularity of Artek and the Böljeblick glassware.
Chapter 5 – Partners in Design
p.109 – Many female designers of the post-war era were married to fellow designers, their contribution to shared design work frequently overlooked. This was the era of the designer couple. Foremost among these couples were Ray (1912-88) and Charles Eames (1907-78). They met at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, in 1940, when Ray was a student and Charles a tutor, and married the following year.
p.110 – Their design careers merged from the moment they met. Ray's initial training was in fine art, and she brought a strong sense of colour and form to the partnership, while Charles focused on structure and materials. Ray's expertise in the visual is exemplified for her wartime designs for the cover of the important design journal Arts and Architecture. The combination of photographic imagery with curving, amorphic shapes in sage green was trailblazing in the pro duction of commercial design publications. Like many design partnerships – for example Aino and Alvar Aalto – a default male bias has meant that the woman's contribution to the outfit was constantly overshadowed, and collaborative work frequently credited only to the man. All of Aino Aalto's work was produced under the name Alvar Aalto Architects; Ray and Charles Eames worked under the Eames Office. Advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s boast “Designs by Charles Eames for Herman Miller,” when in fact Ray Eames had played an important role in the pieces. Later in the twentieth century, the equal contribution of Ray to the design process began to be acknowledged through the work of scholars such as Pat Kirkham and through the Eames Office itself, run by their daughter, Lucia Eames, and their five grandchildren.
p.125 – The design media was an important outlet for women working in design, and the publications surrounding the design process are a significant part of the history of design. The mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the monthly design magazine, as public and professional interest in the subject soared worldwide. One prime example of a woman working in this realm is Elizabeth Gordon (1906-2000), who was the Editor-in-Chief of the mass-circulation American lifestyle magazine House Beautiful from 1941 to 1965. In its pages, Gordon promoted the American Style of home design, merging modern comfort with familiar, traditional touches. Pitched roofs and wooden cladding featured alongside generous fenestration and simple forms.
Chapter 6 – Brand New Women
p.135 – The idea of building a brand identity, whereby buildings, products and logos are designed to sell a particular product and image, gathered huge momentum in the post-war era. In one sense, women had always been at the centre of branding: images of beautiful women had been used to sell products from Alphonse Mucha’s 1896 poster for Job cigarette papers to the idealized housewife of the 1950s in home cleaning product adverts.
p.146 – The Finnish textile designer Maija Isola (1927-2001) also used adventurous colours in her work, a staple of the Marimekko brand. Marimekko had been established by the textile designer Armi Ratia (1912-79) and her husband, Viljo, in 1951. Isola was first offered work by Armi in 1949, while still a student at Institute of Industrial Arts in Helsinki.

[Mara Gold · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books is great overview of women in design, not extremely detailed but it has enough depth to understand a bit about each designer. The author writes about many incredible women of history and the themes and topics are really diverse.

One thing confused me about this book, the lack of many very important Italian designers (Gae Aulenti, Anna Castelli Ferrieri, Cini Boeri to just name a few..) and the fact that author at some point says that Italy didn’t really have a design education and it explained the lack of women in design. What?!