The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman's Building in Seattle, 1908-1921

Abstract

A modest, two-story wooden structure has stood on the University of Washington campus in Seattle since 1909. Known as the Woman's Building, it served to nurture cooperation among all women at the Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition and then, more importantly, between female students at the school and the community's clubwomen. In 1916, however, female separatism and the sisterhood that it cultivated lost the battle to a new ideology-that of women's equality with men in the larger society. Only seven years after its inception, the space, which fostered women's cooperation, was assigned for other purposes and no facility was substituted by the institution to serve such an outmoded goal. The history of the emergence and downfall of the Woman's Building serves to illustrate a national phenomenon of the era, that of women's efforts to halt, in colleges and all society, the demise of respect for women's collaborative efforts. Here is simply one example of the broad and unsuccessful effort to stay the erosion of sisterhood. Mature women, since the late nineteenth century, had formed their own clubs and societies in reaction to their