Frances Henley’s involvement in the construction of Wheeler School in Providence can be interpreted as a means of positioning herself in the collective memory of the city by linking her name with the values of education. Both Henley and Mary Colman Wheeler, the founder of the eponymous school, had artistic backgrounds, which made the association of the two women natural and interesting.

The idea to found a school for women exclusively came from Miss Wheeler’s practice of instructing girls in the art of painting. However, she turned to a more classical format of a holistic system of teaching. Wheeler founded her private school in 1889, after a rich experience in France and Germany. She was trained as an artist and studied in Paris for six years, before she returned to Providence in 1882. Henley, who graduated cum laude from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1897 was also interested in sharing the principles of architecture and interior design with young women. She disseminated her ideas about residential architecture not as a teacher, but as a professional, who was invited to give public speeches to the Clubs and association that she was also a member of.

To accommodate the increasing number of students, Miss Wheeler decided to build a new structure, commissioning Franklin J. Sawtelle (1846-1911), a renowned architect in Providence, in 1910 to make the project for a new building on Hope Street. Sawtelle died unexpectedly just one year later, while in the middle of the design of the school. As a result, Henley took over the entire project. She added an elevator to the main building of the school in 1913, and she signed the project alone.

Later she was asked to design a playground dedicated to hockey and athletic activities that would become part of Wheeler School, in Rumford, a project originally known as “Wheeler School Farm.” The project, even though apparently minor, shows her ability to appropriate the natural terrain in a successful landscape design, as the lot is still being used today for athletic scopes. Moreover, it shows Henley’s personal and professional knowledge of the sportive technical equipment, as she was herself teaching women how to play basketball. She remained the consulting architect for the school for about 25 years.

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How to become respected and how to keep your femininity when doing a male's job? This was quite a burden for Rhode Island's first female architect, starting 1897 when she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. Henley was probably one of the few women designers to request equal social rights with men in her profession. As a lifetime member of the Providence Plantations Club, she succeeded to make herself even more visible in the public sphere of Rhode Island through 'women power.'

The women who gathered under this society were businesswomen, as well as women interested in the social and economic life and political life, at a moment just before they were granted the official right to vote by the US Constitution in 1920. The club was a success, starting with about 150 members and it reached more than 1300 members, just one year after its inception. As the only female architect of the society, Henley got involved in promoting the Club in terms of its visuals and interior design.

Since the commencement of the club in 1916, which gathered in different locations, the members envisioned a building to host the meetings and tea parties, including rooms for rent for women who came from different corners of the state. The lot on Abbott Park finally came into the possession of the association in 1923 and Henley was named in the Building Committee for the construction of the new building. The chosen project was built following the design project of the Boston-based firm Andrews, Jones, Biscoe and Whitmore in August 1926.

Henley was commissioned with the interior design for several parts of both buildings that were planned for hosting the variety of functions necessary for the new space: the dressing room of the swimming pool, found at the basement level of the building, the dormitories placed on the 5th floor, and an apartment for Marion Louise Simon Misch, one of the important members of the club, on the 4th floor. Misch’s apartment contained a “music room.” Mrs. Misch was not the only member of the society that Henley designed a cozy, fancy place for. Clara B. Earterbrooks, who occupied the position of chairman of the Finance Committee, and was also part of the Building Committee of the Providence Plantations Club, sought out Henley's services to design her little house in Hortonville, Massachusetts.

Henley was aware of the tremendous advantage of connections that this society had to offer. Linking her name with the design of the building where this society was gathered, a place of multiple connections and possibilities, provided Henley with a portal to attract clientele. Being part of this society which grew to more than 2500 members was an efficient way to present her creations and to make her visible as the only independent female architect in the public sphere of the state. The club's space was also an opportunity for Henley to teach young women interested in the profession of architecture how to overcome the societal prejudices. With the decline of the society, the building was sold to Morris Gaebe and Edward Triangolo in December 1962 and made part of the Johnson & Wales University campus.

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In 1978, three women engaged in a conversation about the role women professionals could play in changing women’s lives. Within 16 months, they had started a business: the Women’s Development Corporation. Katrin Adam, Susan Aitcheson, and Joan Forrester Sprague were coordinators of the Third Session of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA), held in August 1978 at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, a program focused on design by and for women. They soon met and invited Alma Felix Green to join them, a former employee of the Providence mayor’s office with ties to the local community. The WDC exists today as one of the largest nonprofit housing developments in Rhode Island, developing scattered-site, low-income housing, with an emphasis on community investment and a participatory design process. Over nearly 40 years, they have provided housing for between 9,000 and 10,000 people.

In the early years, the WDC focused its efforts on Providence’s Elmwood, then “a multi-ethnic neighborhood in which more than half of the residents are single, widowed, or divorced women… [with] the state’s highest percentage of families receiving welfare payments.” At the outset, the organization also sought to help support and empower community women professionally, in addition to providing housing opportunities. They organized workshops to teach women how to go into business—how to get help from the Small Business Administration, plan a business, sell services to the government, and so forth—as well as training women to be eligible for employment as carpenters’ and painters’ apprentices in the construction industry. The WDC provided transportation and child care for these programs, as required. This emphasis on self-empowerment was and is critical to the mission of the WDC, originally serving a client group of marginalized women by offering “a chance for stable housing within a support system network that encourages independence and self-sufficiency.” Today, they also build alliances with elderly, disabled, veteran, and homeless communities.

The WDC addresses a number of social issues in their developments. First, they seek to tackle the stigma of low-income housing that leads many communities to resist such development initiatives. They rehabilitate triple-decker houses, transforming existing buildings into multiple apartments in scattered-site plans that blend into the neighborhood. The WDC manages the properties themselves to ensure that the housing will be taken care of, maintaining a good reputation for low-income housing. Second, according to Aitcheson, they “thought it was very important to try to be sure that the housing is responding to the people who live in it… So we spent quite a bit of time in participatory design process where families could tell us about where they live and why they live and how they live.” Taking direct input, they designed spaces intended for single mothers: a standard plan of three- and four-bedroom apartments has more, smaller bedrooms to allow for greater privacy alongside a shared open space, visible from the kitchen, to facilitate group play. Substantial storage spaces significantly ease quality of life, while parking directly in front of the unit and small, fenced-in backyards with lighting address security.

Finally, since opening their doors in 1979 the WDC has held a commitment to building environmentally conscious, energy efficient homes. In the 1990s, when it had become the largest producer of low-income housing in the state, the organization expanded this emphasis on environmental conservation to historical preservation. They joined forces with the Providence Preservation Society to address affordable housing and the preservation of endangered historic homes in the inner city. The high costs of preservation standards can make it prohibitive to maintain buildings in low-income neighborhoods, resulting in the destruction of turn-of-the-century structures. The WDC bought, renovated, and managed historical houses as low-income rental properties, protecting the buildings as well as the neighborhood itself, preventing gentrification and displacement.

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From August 13–26, 1978, 78 women from 17 states as well as Canada gathered at Roger Williams College (today Roger Williams University) in Bristol, RI, to discuss the integration of values and identities they held both as women and as designers. The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA, pronounced “wis-pa”) met for its Third Session organized around the relationships women have—personally and professionally—to their home and work environments, historically, cross-culturally, and based on differences in race and socio-economic class.

Conceived by seven women in 1974, the WSPA was “a ‘school’ of our own where we could learn from each other—all of us teachers and students, exchanging questions, challenging convention, inventing new areas of inquiry and research, and sharing knowledge in a supportive atmosphere where women’s accomplishments would be visible, their skills respected, and their differences valued.” The WSPA held four sessions between 1975 and 1979, each organized in August and lasting two weeks with approximately 60 women in attendance, as well as a symposium in 1981 with well over two hundred women in attendance. Each session was held in a different state, to help make it easier for women all across the country to be able to attend. Women were invited to bring children between the ages of 3 and 12, and child care was provided to enable women to participate fully in the session. While there were instructors and students, the spirit of the program was cooperative and non-hierarchical, and courses were often team-taught.

This radical approach to education was mirrored in WSPA’s programming: the course covered energy-conscious design, feminist analysis of the built environment, and the politics of architecture and planning, particularly as related to social housing projects. The group explored their local surroundings, visiting colonial homes and mansions in Newport, and went on walking tours of Newport and Bristol to gain a sense of the daily life of women in the area. They visited the Junius Eddy House in Little Compton (1975), the first solar air-heated house in the state. Women presented on their own environments in slide presentations of dwellings and workplaces, with a particular focus on “Women’s Anonymous Architecture of the West Coast” to balance their location in the Northeast. They held seminars on the “ecology of sex roles,” examining personal perceptions and biases about the built environment based on traditional sex roles, and on China, looking at women’s daily life as experienced in four weeks of travel in China in 1977 at the invitation of the Architectural Society of China. Workshops covered low technology energy conservation, working in the private and public sectors, the feminist curricula in academia, as well as planning for the future of WSPA.

The middle weekend was a break-out session, which could be attended separate from the rest of the program (as 31 women did), with workshops on energy conservation, women’s professional organizations and networking, the challenges of neighborhood revitalization, and a presentation by the newly initiated Women’s Policy and Program Division of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which also ran a workshop on Community Block Grants. Throughout, conversations centered on how, as women architects, they could do what they wanted to professionally with the lifestyle they desired, and how they could help other women in the process. The participants were not building a school, per se, but a space in which to network, workshop, and think collaboratively—a means of connection that allowed them to support each other in fostering creative growth.

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“Over ten years ago, two women, both lovers of antique Colonial furniture, decided to popularize its beauty by making artistically perfect, made-to-scale doll’s furniture. Equipped with a child’s circular saw, they opened a tiny shop in the tiniest State in the Union. “ Tynietoy Catalogue, c.1930

Responding to a halt in trade during World War I that saw an end to the importation of European toys, Marion Perkins made her first piece of miniature furniture, a ladderback rush chair, in 1917. Encouraged by fellow member of the Handicraft Club in Providence, Amey Vernon, the two set up a small workshop space at the Club, first in the basement of the John W. Mitchell House, and subsequently in the carriage house of the Truman Beckwith House, which allowed space for a showroom as well.  This was the beginning of the Toy Furniture Shop and their line of Tynietoy furniture. Perkins had studied in the department of Decorative Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and after working briefly as secretary for Rhode Island’s Governor Lippitt she embarked on a career as an interior designer. Perkins used her practical knowledge and expertise to create high quality miniature furnishings, at a scale of one inch to one foot. Much of the furniture was modeled on the American colonial period, which Perkins would have been familiar with from the Pendleton House Collection of American and European decorative arts, donated to the RISD museum by Charles Pendleton in 1904.  Well-known Providence artist, Sydney Burleigh assisted in the design of the furniture and dollhouses, and as the company’s output expanded, the manufacturing moved to larger quarters on Market Square, where the RISD auditorium now stands. The company had around sixty employees by 1927 made up of RISD students and veterans from the First World War, who were responsible for hand painting the details and decoration of the pieces, as well as assisting with the construction of the dollhouses and furniture. Thus, Perkins can been seen as part of a wider national movement after the War, which saw a renewed interest in the socially beneficial impact of design, demonstrated locally by RISD’s rehabilitation program for wounded veterans, established in 1919. Tynietoy offered six different models of dollhouse, all based on traditional New England house styles, the most expensive of which was the Colonial Mansion, partly inspired by Pendleton’s residence in Providence at 72 Waterman Street, which was itself used in the design of the interiors of Pendleton House. The quality of the Tynietoy furniture, combined with the fact that it was made to scale, set it apart from other companies producing miniature furniture during the period. The company was at its most active in the 1920s, and was duly credited with enhancing appreciation for colonial style American furniture, both nationally and internationally, evidenced by the fact that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired the first room of miniature furniture Perkins exhibited at the Handicraft Club. After the stock market crash in 1929, the business began to struggle, although it managed to stay afloat until the early 1950s.  From business records, it appears that the company was taken over by new management in 1940, the year in which Vernon died. Perkins died in December 1947. The story of Tynietoy offers a rare example of female entrepreneurship in a period when women were not encouraged to work, let alone run a company. Perkins, much like the founders of the Handicraft Club, aimed to promote an appreciation of hand-crafted design, both within the local community and further afield, offering her own form of historic preservation in miniature. 

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In 1904, ten women gathered together, led by former school teacher Julia Lippitt Mauran, to form a club in Providence devoted to “the promotion of interest in all kinds of handicraft and to provide a place where such work could be done.” This was, in part, a response to the growing interest in hand crafted design sweeping the country in the later decades of the 19th century, which saw the establishment of the first American arts and crafts society, founded in Boston in 1897.

In a report on the arts and crafts convention held in Boston in 1907, Mary Parsons, president of the Handicraft Club from 1904 – 1909, emphasized the crucial role of the Club in creating a center of activity for those interested in arts and crafts in Providence. Thus, the Club’s embattled search for a permanent home in the first ten years of its existence caused a great deal of alarm amongst its officers and members alike. Between 1904 and 1925 the Club had to move premises four times. This begun with informal meetings at the Froebal School, where Julia Mauran had been a teacher, and a brief period at Maxcy House at 7 Cushing Street, to a twelve year stint at the Truman Beckwith House, 42 College Street, from 1907 to 1919. They were forced to move again when the House was rented to another party, at which point they established what they thought would be their permanent home in Mitchell House, 227 Benefit Street, only to return to Beckwith House for good in 1925.

With the purchase of Beckwith House, the Club also took on the responsibility of preserving the historic building, designed by the architect John Holden Greene, and completed in 1826. Renovations included extensive redecoration, and the installation of a bow window in the south wall of the carriage house, the first floor of which was occupied by the workshop and showroom for the miniature furniture company, Tynietoy, established by Club members Marion Perkins and Amey Vernon in 1917.

Through providing the equipment required for crafts such as metalwork and book binding, among many others, and in encouraging the entrepreneurial activities of its members, the Club brought such endeavors out of the home and into a more public arena, endowing these women with a sense of pride and accomplishment in the skills they gained and the crafts they produced. In addition to offering classes and lectures by external practitioners from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the Club served as a site in which women could exchange ideas and draw inspiration and knowledge from one another. The Club also staged exhibitions of members’ work, which were open to the public, and thus encouraged an interest in and support for handicrafts within the local community. During both first and second World Wars the Club devoted much energy to the war effort, knitting socks and scarves for the Red Cross and raising money for their Red Cross Unit by selling craft items.

The Club remains active in the community to this day, maintaining a strong sense of its heritage. In an effort to preserve the work of Perkins and Vernon, the Club acquired a Tynietoy dollhouse in 2013, and is still in the process of furnishing the Colonial style mansion with Tynietoy furniture. Thus, the Club continues its dual mission of promoting an interest in handicraft and historic preservation.

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