Session at Society of Architectural Historians Conference 2026 (Mexico City, 15-19 Apr 26) SAH, Mexico City, Apr 15–19, 2026
Deadline: Jun 5, 2025
We invite paper proposals for the session:
Women, Welfare, Labour: The Architecture of Philanthropy
Before 1950 women rarely worked as architects, although they shaped, planned, designed, and maintained space. In the early 1900s, excluded from professional practice, women throughout the world established soup kitchens, breast feeding centers, daycares and playgrounds, shelters, and reformatories that furnished the social welfare system on the one hand and the penal landscape on the other. Women’s Leagues, the YMCA, and Settlement Houses, for instance, invited women to work outside of the home and contribute to emergent social systems. Many activists, such as Melusina Fay Pierce (USA) and Hedwig Dohm (Germany), wrote about these initiatives in magazines and service articles. Others like Jane Addams (USA), Muthulakshmi Reddy (India) and Amanda Labarca (Chile) promoted social and spatial programs within neighborhoods. Welfare and philanthropy became avenues that permitted women to inform vectors of architectural production. This expanded conception of architecture as cultural production is a phenomenon that scholars increasingly define as architectural agency (Kathleen James-Chakraborty, 2021; Anne Hultzsch & Sol Pérez Martínez, 2023). Elaborating on the work of Dolores Hayden (1981), who explored the role of women in spatializing these structures of everyday life, this panel seeks to complicate the contribution of women’s philanthropic work in architectural history, while recognizing that the architectural spaces emerging from these forms of labor sometimes produced inequities of class, race, gender, and sex. We invite panelists to explore how the material dimensions of gendered labor—particularly in caregiving, maintenance, and institutional settings—make visible the social construction of architecture, while examining how the architectural modes that emerged from this complex terrain of philanthropic work reflect both gendered imaginaries and evolving conceptions of gender. Bridging the Global South and North, this panel welcomes papers from across the world to revisit how women’s philanthropy, charity, or welfare work before 1950 informs architectural histories.
Details:
Abstracts must be under 300 words, and the title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style. The submission should also include a two-page CV in PDF format.
Submissions and further info: https://www.sah.org/2026/call-for-papers-mexico-city
For enquiries please contact:
Session Chairs:
Tara Bissett, University of Waterloo tmbissett@uwaterloo.ca
Maria Pía Montealegre Beach, Universidad de Chile mmontealegre@uchile.cl