The Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Toward a Gendered History

Abstract

The question, raised by a male student in my twentieth-century architecture course, was simple: What happened to women in architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts after Julia Morgan? The answer, I found, is not. But first, why is it important? That women constitute half the human population is obvious, that excluding women from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (purported to be open to all students of merit between fifteen and thirty years of age) challenged the logic of universal rights held by the French Republic and contradicted the claim of equality and justice for all, is less so. To address the problem, I would like to begin by quoting an essay by renowned historian Keith Thomas, New Ways in History in the Times Literary Supplement , October 2006. Discussing changes in the historian's profession over the past forty years and the broadening of its perspective by drawing on other disciplines such as geography, art history, literary theory, and linguistics, Thomas pointed out the impact of poststructuralism and postmodernism in generating debate about knowledge of the past, and the transparency of versus constructed versions of the past. Historians today, he noted, are pragmatic and critical of their sources; they know sources do not mirror reality, that certain facts are contestable, and that events look different to different observers. But they also know that some things in the past really did happen, and that historians can often find out what they were. Referring to the rise of feminism in the 1970s, which led to a fundamental reassessment of how history should be written, Thomas concluded, Above all, it has become mandatory for all historians to consider the gender aspect of their topic, whatever it may be, with the strong implication that not to do so is as much a moral failure as …