Title: Educator, Activist, Politician

Part of: Field: Agency and the Praxis of Activism. Volume 3 (1), pp.7-20

Authors: Leslie Kanes Weisman in conversation with Cristina Cerulli and Florian
Kossak

Year: 2009

Extract:

Interview conducted by phone on the 8th December 2009

C+K: There are three main topics that we wanted to talk
to you about in this interview and in relation to our
issue on agency and activism. We would like to learn
more about Universal Design as one form of ‘applied’
activism. We also want to talk about your most recent
involvement in local politics and how this changed your
work from an educator activist to a politician. But we
would like to start with what you called the feminist
experiment of the Women’s School of Planning and
Architecture, or WSPA.
Here at the School of Architecture of the University of
Sheffield we have a very interesting situation. Our intake
of undergraduate students is now more than 50% female and

almost 50% of our staff is female as well. And as you
have probably gathered from the Agency conference,
some of our approaches to teaching have feminist
backgrounds or their roots in feminist theory and
praxis. So we have already come a long way in this very
male dominated profession. Having a strong group of
female teachers within the School certainly changes the
atmosphere and also how and what we teach. However,
this is certainly still a long way away from what the
WSPA stood for, a School of Planning and Architecture
for women, run by women. But it was certainly also a
very different time. So can we start with asking you how
different the general situation in academia was when
you set up WSPA in 1974?

W: It was dramatically different. It helps to understand the historical
context in the USA in which the School emerged. In the 1970’s
the percentage of women in architecture, was very small, maybe
8 percent. While women In practice were relatively scarce,
in the academic world we numbered only a fraction of one
percent. There were very few women students. The Women’s
School of Planning and Architecture emerged because of the
resurgence of the women’s movement in the U.S in the 1960’s
and 1970’s. During those decades professional women’s groups
and organisations were being formed in virtually all the male
dominated professions – from women in law and medicine
to science and engineering. All of these groups were not only
questioning what we could do to increase our numbers, but also
how to go about discovering and defining the particular qualities,
values and concerns that we as women could bring to our chosen
work and professions. WSPA offered women in architecture,
planning, and the related environmental design professions and
trades – be they students, faculty, or practitioners – a personally
supportive and non-judgemental environment in which to
explore serious questions about our work. Could our experiences
of marginality as women in male-dominated fields help us work
more effectively with women and other marginalized groups
as potential clients? Could architecture actually serve the
greater good? How could we transform traditional architectural
education and practice to make it welcoming to women? Did
women experience buildings and places differently than men?
What did female headed single parents need in the way of
supportive housing? How could we synthesize the teaching and
practice of architecture as a social art and a formal art?

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