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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