THE PERFECT KITCHEN

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 48, 20 November 1926, Page 18

THE PERFECT KITCHEN

“THE WOMAN'S POINT OF VIEW

'•Miss Nora Dunphy, a twenty-two-year-old Diverpool girl, is to be congratulated upon being the first representative of her sex in England to obtain the degree of Bachelor of Architecture. Her success is likely to revive the controversy as to whether architecture is likely to benefit by an increase in the number of women architects, says the “Architects’ Journal.” "A good deal of nonsense is habitually talked about this matter. If women succeed in becoming good architects, and it is to be expected that manv of them will, they will do so becaus’e they have the capacity to become good architects, and not in any degree whatsoever because they happen to be women. “If women succeed in architecture such success will be partly due to their ability to resist .the influences of those self-appointed champions of their sex who would yet arbitrarily prescribe and curtail the architectural interests proper to women. These are the feminists who are for ever talking about cupboards, and sinks, and who try to mislead women into supposing that if they only, bring to architecture , their specialist’s knowledge of cupboards and sinks, they would be capable of a notable achievement which would not only rebound vastly to their credit as designers, but would set a definitely feminine stamp upon architecture, greatly to the advantage of this art “Let us take cupboards first. By cupboards the feminists invariably mean built-in cupboards. A cupboard which is part of a suite of furniture has little merit in their eyes. Yet one- is obliged to record the obvious fact that there must exist in the world millions of cupboards which belong to suites of furniture, and such cupboards are not merely a relic of

past times, but are still being turned out in large numbers by oui manufacturers of furniture.

“Architects must provide space for these cupboards, which they certainly could not do if every room in a house had its built-in shelves in recesses both natural and artificial. If we adopted such a policy we may be sure that the angry feminist would be the first to exclaim: 'How like a man to put a shelf fixtura in the very place where I wanted to put the dressingtable!’ , The furniture trade would suffer a great blow if we followed these advisers, and the art of furniture design would itself be injured if the cupboard, wardrobe, and group of shelves were to be denied their proper affinity to the other furniture pieces, as would necessarily be the case where the fixtures became part of the house and owed no allegiance to the tables, beds, and chairs, and other movable articles of use. “With regard to the sink, ‘the sink of a height that spells inevitable backache to the housewife,’ the male architect must acknowledge himself to be a frequent sinner. He can only plead in his defence that as housewives vary in height from 6ft. to 4ft., he cannot make simultaneous provision for people of such widely differing dimensions. If he makes the sink an average height he has done all that may reasonably be expected of him in this particular. “As for ‘labour-saving’ devices in general, most of these are of masculine invention, and not all of them are very popular with the women who mav be called upon to make use of them. One of the first conditions of women’s success in architecture is that thev should definitely get rid of ‘the woman’s point of view’ and cultivate with respect to the art a general intelligence which knows not sex.”