Review: Long Island Landscapes and the Women Who Designed Them by Cynthia Zaitzevsky; Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century by Thaïsa Way

Abstract

Women interested in the male-dominated profession of landscape architecture worked hard to establish themselves in the early twentieth century; scholars today must have a similar determination to document their histories. Select repositories contain collections that have allowed for in-depth investigations, as is possible for the work of Beatrix Jones Farrand, Ellen Biddle Shipman, and Marian Cruger Coffin,1 but more often scholarship is a matter of slow digging followed by the equally slow weaving together of fragments in an attempt to get a sense of the whole. Such work is manifest in these books by Cynthia Zaitzevsky and Thaïsa Way. More than biographies of place, these address the varied educational backgrounds of their subjects, their quest for professional legitimacy, the New Woman and her place in the Progressive Era, and the gender biases that affected her. They introduce the reader to creative, resourceful, fearless professionals-an