March 2024
March is Women’s History Month. In recognition of the month, we offer profiles of six accomplished and trailblazing women.
During a time when few women or African Americans owned land in the American colonies, Zipporah Potter Atkins is the first known recorded African American woman to own a house and land in colonial Boston. Purchasing her property in 1670, Atkins owned her property as a single woman, and maintained control of it through the course of her marriage.
Learn more here.
Considered the first woman to practice as a professional architect in the United States is Louise Blanchard Bethune is our next profile celebrating Women’s History Month. She participated in the design of approximately 100 buildings in the Buffalo and New England areas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bethune was the first woman member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the first woman to be honored as an AIA Fellow.
Learn more here.
Jane Jacobs is our next profile. An urbanist and activist, Jacobs’ writings have been influential for more than five decades in the field of urban planning. She promoted a community-based approach to city building. With no formal training as a planner, her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve, and fail.
Learn more here.
Our next profile is about Beverly Lorraine Greene.
The first African American woman to be licensed as an architect in the United States, Greene began her career in the late 1930s working for the Chicago Housing Authority. She later moved to New York City, working for notable architecture firms.
Greene was part of many projects including the New York University campus project at the University Heights campus in the Bronx and the UNESCO Secretariat and Conference Hall in Paris, France.
Learn more here.
The next profile in our series celebrating Women’s History Month focuses on Edith Elmer Wood.
Wood was dedicated to improving public health through quality affordable housing. A member of the Regional Planning Association and founder of the National Housing Conference, Wood attended Columbia University’s graduate school at the age of 44. She became an expert on housing policy writing a series of influential articles and books on the subject. From 1933 to 1945 Wood helped develop the New Deal’s housing policies while working as a consultant for the U.S. Housing Authority.
Learn more here.
Our final profile in celebration of Women’s History Month is Ethel Bailey Furman, the first female African American architect to practice in the state of Virginia.
Born Ethel Madison Bailey in Richmond, Virginia, as a child Furman would accompany her father, who was one of the first licensed African American contractors in Richmond, to various job sites. While she was in high school her family moved to suburban Philadelphia where she graduated from Germantown High in 1910.
After architecture apprenticeships in New York City and beginning a family, Ethel brought her own family back to Richmond. Her career spanned over four decades during which she designed more than 200 buildings, including single-family residences, church projects, and two chapels in Liberia.
Learn more here.
