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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Upon entering the nineteenth-century stable that is now 48 Crestwood Road during the Great Depression, a visitor to the old Waterhouse estate ‘on the hill’ which lies between Warwick and East Greenwich would have found a gloomy, cavernous space. They might have seen a young girl playing on a tire swing that hung from a beam on the first floor, or perhaps they would have seen her father watching vigilantly out of one of the building’s few windows. His bargain with the landowner? To keep an eye on the comings and goings of workmen in lieu of paying the rent that he could not afford to pay.

What a surprise that visitor would have had when returning to the same property just over thirty years later… Upstairs: a light-filled and airy modern home replete with fashionable furnishings imported from Copenhagen, geometrical light shades, pale birch woodwork, crisp white walls and an abstract painting, all arranged around a black, cantilevered hearth of reinforced concrete set into white masonry. Downstairs: a barely begun drafting room soon to be fitted out with bespoke cabinets and bookshelves. Outside: a sprawling garden of one and a quarter acres with magnificent views of Greenwich Bay, also in the process of being tamed…

The authors of these changes were Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee and J. Carol Fulkerson. Pattee was an architect and landscape architect by profession and a keen traveller, photographer and conservationist by avocation who purchased the property in 1955. By that point the stable had already been converted into a habitable dwelling by its previous owners, but a lot of work remained to be done in order to bring the house and its grounds up to Pattee’s exacting standards. These emphasised a comprehensive understanding of design which integrated approaches to architecture, landscape architecture, ecology and interior decoration ‘for [the purpose of healthy] living’.

This was a philosophy that Pattee developed over many years as a result of her educational background. She began her career as an architectural draftswoman, having obtained a BS degree in architecture from MIT in 1916, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women from 1916 to 1918. Here, she would have learned about botany, planting and surveying. Ecology and conservation issues would have been present in her training too, but it was not until the 1950s that these came to the forefront of her work as an educator and advocate for good design practice.

One topic of concern to Pattee and the nascent conservation movement in Rhode Island in general at this time was the sustainable development of the local shoreline. For Pattee, this necessitated a reconciliation of the functional needs of people and the requirements of the natural environment. In recent times, this has been realised in the planning of the nearby Buttonwoods Beach. Today, these principles are so often taken for granted that it is easy to miss the novelty of the way in which Pattee's home reconfigured the relationship between house, user and landscape in order to reflect the integrity of all three.

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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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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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