It’s Not An Easy Job

Within professional settings, we are culturally conditioned to discredit the personal. We are encouraged to understand romantic entanglements as diluting professional achievements and to undervalue the roles traditionally taken on by wives. This bias results in systemic erasure of wives’ achievements when they form professional partnerships with their spouses. Not only are wives undervalued in performing caring and supporting roles, they also suffer erasure when in professional roles while working in partnership with their husbands. Denise Scott Brown was infamously excluded from the Pritzker Prize when it was awarded to Robert Venturi, and Patty Hopkins was blatantly edited out of a photograph for a BBC program titled The Brits Who Built Modern Britain. It seems that the architectural discourse cannot hold both roles simultaneously: a woman is either a wife or a professional collaborator. Many studies seeking to addres…