Women with attitude

摘要

In October 1917, four women made their way to 34-35 Bedford Square, London, and walked through the doors of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. Gillian Cooke, Irene Graves, Ruth Lowy and Winifred Ryle would be the first women to join an institution that had hitherto strenuously resisted attempts to widen its intake. Indeed, the decision to admit women, taken in July 1917, was one born largely of financial expediency: the war had depleted student numbers drastically just as the school had taken an expensive lease on new premises. But it also reflected a personal and political commitment to women's education by its President, Henry Martineau Fletcher, and his daughter Janet would join the AA a few years later. Although the women's advent did not go unprotested by male colleagues - there was a vituperative exchange of letters in the AA Journal between Ryle and an anonymous male student in early 1918 - neither she nor her contemporaries were prepared to give up having entered training. As she wrote 'we are happy in being among the pioneers of the women students at the AA' and looked forward to being associated with plans for social reform and reconstruction after the war.