Masters and weavers

On 19 January 1919, women were permitted for the first time to vote in the election of the German National Assembly. A few months later, the Bauhaus founding director, Walter Gropius, noted in a speech at its opening in Weimar: “No difference between the beautiful and the strong sex. Absolute equality, but also absolutely equal duties.”³ The new human being who was to be formed at the Bauhaus could also be female – at the time, this was by no means a matter of course.⁴ For the 1919 summer semester, 79 men and 84 women were admitted to the art school. At first glance, this might be considered a success, and apparently linked to the institution’s idea of reform. Black-and-white photos of the time depict female Bauhaus students as self-confident design pioneers with cropped hair and sometimes even wearing trousers. But the image of this new type of woman that is often associated with the Bauhaus does not tell the whole story. Shortly after the school’s founding, the entirely male council of masters felt overwhelmed by so many women. In September 1920, Gropius called for a “sharp segregation” from the “over-represented female sex”.⁵ The otherwise free workshop choice was extremely restricted for female students, who from then on were sent to the weaving mill to study. The male domains remained closed off to the “fair sex”. Numerous workshop directors made it blatantly clear that women were undesired – be it in pottery, graphic printing, at the metal workshop or in mural painting. Oskar Schlemmer, who joined the Bauhaus in 1921, has been quoted as saying, “Where there is wool, there is also a woman who weaves, even if only to pass the time.”⁶

The dawn of modernism in Europe is rightly understood as the dawn of women who first conquered the field of architecture – from Charlotte Perriand to Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky and Eileen Grey. At the Bauhaus, the pioneers were generally more tolerated than welcomed. 100 years after its foundation, it is time for an assessment that looks back on the Bauhaus from the present. When the American architect Robert Venturi received the Pritzker Prize in 1991, his longtime partner in life and work – Denise Scott Brown, with whom he co-founded Venturi Scott Brown Associates in 1964 – was left out. “Room at the Top. Sexism and the Star System” is the title of a lecture by Denise Scott Brown from 1973, published as a book in 1989,⁸ a sobering account of the institutional discrimination against women that she experienced during her career. To this day, women in architecture are often outsiders, and it is not self-evident that they will be taken as seriously as their male colleagues. Despite a petition, Denise Scott Brown was not retroactively awarded the Pritzker Prize alongside her husband. But the 87-year-old architect has never given up the fight for equality. In a recent interview, she offered a word of advice to young female architects and university graduates: Another thing is accepting that architecture trains you for many, many things and not necessarily in architecture. But if you can, try and do it on your own terms.