Women’s History Today: the Journal of the Women’s History Network is seeking expressions of interest for articles to be included in a Special Issue focused on tracing the education and career paths of women in the professions of the built environment with a special focus on educational institutions. The Special Issue, ‘Uneven Progress: women, education, institutions and careers in the built environment’ seeks to nuance our understanding of women’s role in the development of built environment education internationally.
The twentieth century saw significant progress in women’s access to university education internationally, with a growing participation of women in university contexts as students on full degree programmes as well as professionals in both academic and non-academic roles. By shifting the spotlight away from traditional institutional histories and towards networks of women who studied and worked within them, new and different kinds of histories become possible. This also helps to broaden the histories of the built environment by bringing women with less traditional career paths into the canon. By considering the experiences of a wider range of people who are part of design schools – from architecture to planning, landscape, engineering and more – this Special Issue will create the opportunity to support the development of a new understanding of these schools through an intersectional lens.
This Special Issue invites participants to question ‘official’ and ‘patriarchal’ institutional histories, by researching overlooked figures within their schools. By considering the experiences of a wider range of people who are part of design schools our understanding of the breadth of praxis that women employed to impact their built environment will become clearer. This in turn will expose the currently narrow and male defined historical canon.
We welcome articles on the topic from a global and intersectional perspective and from a variety of historical eras. Women’s History Today also encourages and supports submissions from PhD students new to publishing. Contributions can be either academic articles (6000 to 8000 words), or shorter contributions (1500 to 3000 words) on funded research projects, on archives or public history activities and events.
Abstracts (250 words) for proposals should be submitted to Joy Burgess at jburgess@womenshistorytoday.org by 12 May 2025, with initial drafts of papers due on 1 October 2025.