Female Architects

In the April 13th edition of the New York Times there was an article about a number of women now gaining purchase as architects in a field hitherto solidly dominated by males and pretty much closed to the ladies.  I am interested more than a little because for two decades I was married to an architect graduated from the Harvard School of Design in 1956, a student of Walter Gropius and Jose Luis Sert, as he called himself then.  Her career had the inevitable set back in becoming a mother four times over in rapid succession when day care was an unusual remedy and stay at home moms were thought psychologically necessary (we both thought so, and in retrospect so do our grown children,  I might add), but once back at work she met resistance frequently when she was the only woman, for instance, on a design team.  This long winded prelude gets me to the Times article which was front page of the Arts section and featuring photographs of six rising stars in the business.  I use the word business because that is really what the news article is all about--women getting secure positions in a business, architecture, hitherto controlled and dominated by males.  I would have called this piece of news a fit for the Business section of the newspaper.  Furthermore, I am quite sure if they were profiling six rising males there would never been the photographs.  Overall the piece seemed completely sexist in its implications.  Female business achievement is not straight forward in some way, it has to be gussied up as a form of artistic endeavor, the area assigned to women and gays, by and large. The photographs were perhaps even a more egregious slap at women, since the decision to run them seemed to operate on the age old notion that males need to have the gaze when dealing with women.  "Lovely to look at, lovely to hold," sang Fred Astaire all those years ago, and women are still tortured by the imperative to look at them.  I remember my wife and feel guilty at how I tried to manipulate her. When I met her she generally wore an old grey flannel skirt, sneakers, a dull grey sweater with the collar of a man's shirt sticking out; it was her uniform.  After we were married I got her into thigh length skirts and dresses and black boots; you can't keep a gay man down when there is a chance to buy women's clothing!  Of course, at home she wore mu-mus covered with juice and cereal stains, but when she returned to work after ten years and I took over the household tasks because my teaching permitted the time at home, she took to wearing pants suits, elegant fabrics, minimal decoration, straight lines, and I don't think I ever saw her in a dress again.  I think of my sisters and my mother's constant admonitions on their clothing, on "how you look", something she never said to me or my brother.  We were all of us short people except one sister who loomed tall and big; if she had been a male, she would have been a football star.  As it was, her teenaged years were a torture of being an outcast, an ugly, clumsy, insecure, immediate object of fun, whose mother. fastidious and delicate, gave her no support.  There is a somewhat happy ending to this story when this sister moved to New York City, shed the pounds, became miraculously a tall, elegant, ravishingly beautiful woman, who now at ninety, at her birthday party showed herself to be the same majestic beauty.  But this story is ugly.  What about the person?  Who cares?  She is beautiful, worth looking at, that's all that matters in our male controlled culture.  Today's news is that one of Harvard's exclusive all male clubs declines to take female members because of the potential for sexual abuse.  As my wife used to say "if they can't control their dicks, they should cut them off."