Women in Eastern European Architecture: Equal Rights with Partial Emancipation
Mariann Simon
In the second of our articles to mark Women’s History Month, the Hungarian architect Mariann Simon discusses the frictions between egalitarian ideologies and gendered realities that faced women architects pursuing their careers in the post-war Eastern Bloc states.
‘The situation, opportunities, and wages of Hungarian women architects are equal to those of their male colleagues. They do the same work as men, and they can reconcile their family life and career, thanks to social infrastructure like mending services, laundries and restaurants.’
In this statement to the first International Union of Women Architects Congress in 1963, the Hungarian architect, Éva Spiró, described the perfect situation that women architects experienced under the socialist regimes established in the wake of the Second World War. My research has focused on tracing the history of these women, particularly in Hungary, and considering how ‘perfect’ this situation really was, what values it represented, and how it changed over time, especially by the 1980s and the fall of many such regimes.
As elsewhere, the Eastern Bloc socialist states introduced radical changes after the Second World War: women gained the same rights as men politically, ideologically and legally. Of significance is the fact that socialist ideology at this date not only appreciated but also expected women’s work, and in architecture women were able to enrol for architectural studies without limitation.
Accounts mention professionally-trained women architects in Eastern European countries already before the Second World War. Although the situation was different from country to country, their number was low and in Hungary (unlike in Poland and Romania), the number of women architectural students was officially limited between the wars. After 1945, the number of graduate women architects slowly increased. Despite the fact that politics needed designers, the proportion of women students had only increased to 35 per cent by the end of the 1970s. This figure looked better in other socialist countries: in Romania, this rate was consistently high, around 50 per cent during the 40 years after the end of the war, while in Poland the number of women studying architecture rose steadily to half of all students by the 1980s.
1. Sára Cs. Juhász at the Budapest state design office with the model of a factory in the background in the 1950s. © The architect’s heirs.
The majority of women architects were proud of their professional working status, especially those with a university degree. Interviews I undertook with them for my study Valami más: Beszélgetések építésznőkkel. (The Other: Conversations with Women Architects, Terc, 2003) confirmed this. They got a job, took on significant architectural commissions and realised their designs soon after leaving university. (fig. 1) Women architects felt that they were building up socialism and contributing to building the country, even if they did not believe in the Party. A noticeable feature of their responses was how they discussed their architecture without referring to gender. For example, in 1986, at a housing conference in Hamburg, to which the Western women organisers invited participants from East Germany, the guests declared that women worked just like men and refused to speak from a female viewpoint. Similarly, a few years later, when the Slovak architectural journal Projekt devoted a special issue to women architects, many interviewees spoke of themselves in the masculine form. Based on the declared – and internalised – equality of practice in the Eastern Bloc countries, women architects compared their designs and buildings to male architects’ designs and buildings. They did not want to be considered as lesser than their male colleagues; however, in so doing, this approach defined male architects as their benchmark. (fig. 2)
The avowed equality of the first decade or so after 1945 begin to shift after the end of the Stalinist dictatorship; the thaw reaching the Eastern Bloc countries around the middle of the 1960s. Politicians realised that they need a smaller workforce, especially of blue-collar workers. Women, who had been a significant labour reserve in the 1950s, were now sent back to the household and women’s issues were soon discussed primarily in the context of family. This official trend amplified the deeply ingrained attitudes toward women’s traditional roles as mothers and housekeepers and increasingly affected women of all classes. Thus women architects who graduated in the 1970s faced a double-bind. The women architects who had graduated in the 1950s and the early 1960s not only received commissions quickly and could build their buildings, they were still young and active. Meanwhile, the number of women graduates increased. In today’s terms: the architectural market decreased, there were fewer significant public commissions, and women architects lost their value because of their officially declared ‘double vocation’.
2. Sady Žoliborskie Estate, Warsaw, architect: Halina Skibniewska, 1958–63. © Wikimedia Commons.
According to the communist ideologists, women’s equality rested on two pillars: the work that freed them from economic dependency and public services that freed them from housework. Due to the low level of public services, women architects – at least those who intended to gain professional recognition – had to look for custom solutions. The most characteristic was the spousal collaboration, which appeared in each country. A dual-career method also worked when the partner was not an architect, but had a university degree and an intellectual profession.
In my interview series with Hungarian women architects, which focused on architects who already had professional recognition but came from different generations, I asked each of them: ‘What does success mean for you?’ If I concentrate on those who started their career in the middle of the 1980s – the most recent – a recurrent answer was the quality of architectural work and the possibility of doing creative work. Some of them also mentioned the joy of doing well and coordinating the profession and family. Interviews with women architects from other former socialist countries – with a similarly rich professional oeuvre – brought the same answer: that success and recognition meant realised buildings.
Another manifestation of success in architecture is usually seen as professional recognition: a higher position in the design office, a leading position in a professional body, or an international or national architectural prize. In this respect, women architects were radically underrepresented compared to their male colleagues. With few exceptions, in the design office, the woman’s highest position was heading a design team. At an institutional level, in the management of the Association of Hungarian Architects, women – such as Olga Mináry, Margit Pázmándy or Éva Spiró – were regularly elected, but never as its head. Throughout its 40-year-long existence in the German Democratic Republic, the Board of Directors of the Academy of Architecture appointed only one woman, Iris Dullin-Grund. There was a clear predominance of men at the decision-making level in collectives and on committees.
3. Children’s Diagnostic Home, Bratislava, architect: Milica Marcinková, 1963–67. © Register of modern architecture, https://www.register-architektury.sk.
It is a recurrent statement, or rather assumption, that women are better in the field of small-scale and of home-related design projects: dwellings, community buildings, heritage protection. (fig. 3) Ironically even the first Congress Report of the International Union of Women Architects, founded to represent architects from across the globe, defined one of its objectives as women architects’ involvement in the problems faced primarily by women and children. However, reviewing the fields where women architects made a name for themselves in the Eastern European profession, we find a great variety, in contrast to the above statement. For example, we find several successful women in industrial design in Hungary. One of Slovakia’s exemplary women architects, Viera Mecková, designed cultural centres and office buildings, while in her free time she developed visionary architectural projects. In urban design, women were active in each country. In Poland, Romania and the GDR, there were women university professors, but the Technical University of Budapest in Hungary is yet to promote its first female professor in architecture.
To sum it up, Eastern European women worked in all architectural design fields, although we rarely find their name as the chief designer of the most prestigious buildings. When searching for period photos made at design offices, we see men and women alike sitting around a drawing board, looking in an authentic manner at a plan or an architectural model – representing equality. On the other hand, as evidence of the gendered nature of their experience despite apparent equality of opportunity, we find articles in picture magazines that are dedicated to female but never to male architects. We see features on Iris Dullin-Grund from East Germany or Éva Spiró from Hungary, and they are presented as lovely, attractive women.
Mariann Simon PhD is an architect, and retired Professor at Szent István University, Faculty of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism, Budapest. She is author of more than 170 articles and book chapters on modern and contemporary architecture. Her collected essays about 20th-century Hungarian architecture were published in the bilingual book Újrakezdések/Restarts (Terc, 2016). She is the co-editor and author of the book Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945–1989, published by Routledge in 2017.
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