{"id":258,"featured":0,"modified":"2026-04-17 19:57:14","latitude":41.65084230000000076188371167518198490142822265625,"longitude":-71.26063179999999874780769459903240203857421875,"title":"A New Kind of School for Women","subtitle":"<em> </em>","fullsize":"https://rhodetour.org/files/fullsize/936935998f83c1b26f3fa8b5c0a7d2e2.jpg","address":"1 Old Ferry Rd, Bristol, RI 02809","all_locations":[],"zoom":16,"creator":["Allison Pappas"],"description":"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. <br />\r\n<br />\r\nConceived 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. <br />\r\n<br />\r\nThis 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. <br />\r\n<br />\r\nThe 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.","sponsor":null,"accessinfo":"South Hall, Feinstein College of Arts &amp; Sciences","lede":"Work places and dwellings: Implications for women – WSPA Third Session Brochure","website":"<a href=\"https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss77_bioghist.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Records of the Women’s School of Planning and Architecture Finding Aid, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.</a><a href=\"women%E2%80%99s%20networking,%20women%20and%20education,%20women%20architects,%20women%E2%80%99s%20spaces,%20public%20housing,%20sustainable%20development,%20social%20activism,%20collaboration\"><br /></a>","related_resources":["Berkeley, Ellen Perry. “Architecture: Toward a Feminist Critique.” In <em>New Space for Women</em>, ed. Gerda R. Wekerle, Rebecca Peterson, and David Morley, 205–218. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980.","Weisman, Leslie Kanes. “A Feminist Experiment: Learning from the WSPA, Then and Now.” In <em>Architecture: A Place for Women</em>, ed. Ellen Perry Berkeley and Matilda McQuaid, 125–133. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.","Weisman, Leslie Kanes and Noel Phyllis Birkby. “The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture.” In <em>Learning Our Way: Essays in Feminist Education</em>, ed. Charlotte Bunch and Sandra Pollack, 224–245. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983."],"factoids":["The WSPA emerged during the women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, as the values and ideas of second-wave feminism extended into the worlds of art and design. Many organizations and institutes were created to address the needs of women in all aspects of social life, some only newly recognized. Through the practice of “consciousness raising,” women sought to identify and question the social patterns dictated by gender norms in order to lead collection action for gender equity. Influential books and articles published at the time included: Betty Friedan, <em>The Feminine Mystique</em> (1963), Kate Millett, <em>Sexual Politics</em> (1970), and Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971, <em>Art News</em>)."],"files":{"https://rhodetour.org/files/fullsize/936935998f83c1b26f3fa8b5c0a7d2e2.jpg":{"id":1132,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"WSPA Third Session Participants, Roger Williams College, Bristol, RI","description":"A group of participants posed in front of the Mount Hope Bridge, an iconic feature of the local landscape near the Roger Williams campus. | Susan Aitcheson Private Collection | 1978","thumbnail":"https://rhodetour.org/files/square_thumbnails/936935998f83c1b26f3fa8b5c0a7d2e2.jpg"},"https://rhodetour.org/files/fullsize/985dc1ae551d6f76cf7a469f4fedee16.jpg":{"id":1133,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"WSPA Third Session, Roger Williams College, Bristol, RI","description":"The WSPA took advantage of their bucolic setting, holding workshops outdoors where women talked about the relationships they had—personally and professionally—to their home and work environments | Susan Aitcheson Private Collection | 1978","thumbnail":"https://rhodetour.org/files/square_thumbnails/985dc1ae551d6f76cf7a469f4fedee16.jpg"},"https://rhodetour.org/files/fullsize/6fb86395c0f42b4169df800145cd7772.jpg":{"id":1134,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"WSPA Third Session Coordinators Susan Aitcheson, Joan Forrester Sprague, and Katrin Adam (subsequently founders of WDC)","description":"Building upon conversations they had as coordinators of the Third Session, these three women would go on to found the Women’s Development Corporation in Providence, RI the following year. Still running today, the WDC is a nonprofit housing development that builds scattered-site, low-income housing, with an emphasis on community investment and a participatory design process. | Susan Aitcheson Private Collection | 1978","thumbnail":"https://rhodetour.org/files/square_thumbnails/6fb86395c0f42b4169df800145cd7772.jpg"},"https://rhodetour.org/files/fullsize/957424b8e1b088dc05c13d79e06c5436.jpg":{"id":1135,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"Women&#039;s School of Planning and Architecture, Third Session Poster","description":"This poster for the WSPA’s Third Session featured an iconic image taken during the First Session in 1975. The participants posed themselves as a giant women’s symbol. | Susan Aitcheson Private Collection | 1978","thumbnail":"https://rhodetour.org/files/square_thumbnails/957424b8e1b088dc05c13d79e06c5436.jpg"}}}