May 13, 2015 • 46 mins
Interior design has been considered 'women's work' ever since Elsie de Wolfe became America's first famous decorator in the early 20th century. Cristen and Caroline investigate the feminization of interior design, the use of color and home decor and why 'decorator' became a dirty word in the industry.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline and the title of today's episode is
Designing Women and Caroline. I gotta be honest. When I
first started researching for Designing Women Women in interior Design,
(00:27):
I kind of just wanted you and I to talk
about Designing Women, the sitcom for half an hour. I
did too. This is a show that I grew up
watching with my mother, in addition to you know, all
the other shows like Murphy Brown and Golden Girls. Uh,
and of course Cagney and Lacy. Um. But yeah, no,
I I am in love with the sugar Baker Sisters.
(00:50):
Which is your favorite? Oh, Julia Julius sugar Baker. Now,
for listeners who might not be familiar with Designing Women,
let's give them a quick rundown of the show. And
don't worry. This isn't going to be an entire show
about the sitcom. But we have to indulge our childhood
sitcom loves from time to time. So one of the
reasons that I loved Designing Women when I was a
(01:12):
kid was because it is set in Atlanta, so everybody
had had a very wonderful accent. How Julius sugar Baker.
And there were two sugar Baker sisters, Julia who headed
up this interior design firm, and then what was her name,
Delta Birke Plater Susanne Susanne. How could I forget Susanne?
(01:32):
And Susanne was a former beauty queen and she always
had something to say that was usually inappropriate. And Julie,
would you usually have to step in? Yeah? Well, no,
I loved, I love Without getting too much on a
tangent about just my love for the show itself, Julius
sugar Baker is fantastic for the way that she, at
least once a show goes off on some incredibly amazing rant,
(01:55):
standing up for the little guy. Yeah. For people who
watched Scandal, Julius sugar Baker delivers her monologues and the
same kind of machine guns staccato. His characters do very
dramatically on Scandal, which makes Scandal even more enjoyable for
me because it makes me think of Julia sugar Baker.
(02:16):
But personally, Caroline, I don't want to be controversial, but
Julie was not my faith. Charlne was my girl, Sweet sweet,
sweet shar Charlene always got me giggling. Um. So, anyway,
Designing Women is a hilarious sitcom and also has been
cited as a very feminist show for its time. I
(02:36):
think in its original time spot it ran right up
before Murphy Brown and people are like, oh, look at
look at all these working women and their strong shoulder pads. Yes,
and they're very feathered, hairsprayed hair, so much feathering. Um.
But we're going to talk about designing women. I r
l not on television today and I learned that the
(03:01):
development of the interior design industry, which is stereotypically very feminine,
it is designing women. Um. But the way that it
was feminized and then professionalized it says a lot about
how we were grappling with gender roles, particularly at the
(03:24):
turn of the century and leading up to World War Two. Yeah,
it seems like for as for as often as we
have talked on the podcast about women not being sort
of welcome in the workforce for a long time, especially
if you were married and Tripoli, especially if you were
married with children into your design and at the time
decorating seemed like an okay and acceptable way for women
(03:48):
to not only work but earn a wage. Yeah, and
there was this idea that if you got into interior decorating,
as it was originally called, that you might not be
as interested in your marriage as you should be. So
there was this quote from Vogue in uh, someone once
(04:12):
said that a woman is either happily married or an
interior decorator. And there's still a little bit of that
stereotype lingering today, especially when we think of a decorator
versus a more serious interior designer, that perhaps these are
wealthier women who might be a little bit bored, and oh, well,
(04:32):
they're just of course they're gonna become decorators. And so,
of course, because it's us, we have to give you
the very colorful rundown of the history of where these
decorators came from, how this profession sort of came about,
and of course where all those kind of nasty stereotypes
about both fickle women and gay men in the design
(04:55):
industry came from. And a lot of this information is
coming from this amazing and very fascinating paper by Peter
McNeil called Designing Women, Gender Sexuality in the Interior Decorator
from eighteen ninety to nineteen forty, and it's really great
the way that he touches on not only just the historical,
you know, black and white aspects of the design field,
(05:17):
but also really digs into some of the sexuality, gender
and femininity issues. Yeah, because the entire construct of an
interior decorator is built on it being appropriate for women
because of how domesticity and those spaces where we live
(05:39):
were gender coded as feminine really starting in the late
nineteenth century in early twentieth century. So, for instance, in
we have the publication of the Decoration of Houses written
by Edith Wharton, Yes and Ogden Codman, and with this
(06:00):
text the figure of the capital l lady decorator begins
to emerge, and she's really cemented in the culture by
the time we get to the interwar period between World
War One and World War Two, when we're in this
cultural flux when socio economic independence really isn't exactly a
(06:21):
feminine trait, although of course that is in conflict with
the development of the so called new woman. So the
lady decorator is a safe space amid all of this
oh what do we do with women question? Well, not
to mention that the work itself of interior design is
downplayed a lot by describing it as a natural extension
(06:44):
of being part of the female nature. That, of course
we would want to decorate the house. We want to
arrange flowers and slitch fabric and wallpaper colors, things like that,
because that's just part of female intuition. Leave all of
that architecture and building two men with their rationality, and
on top of that gendered idea, there's also class that
(07:06):
plays on top of that, because, as McNeil points out
in his paper, this has been an historically overlooked industry
from an academic perspective because it was sort of cast
aside as a thing for again rich board ladies. Because
interior decoration, as it was called at the time, really
(07:27):
developed things to a combination of class disposal, income and commercialism.
And in a lot of ways, interior decoration was compared
to high fashion couturiers, where you outfit your home in
the same way that you might outfit your body. You
want all of the latest fashions. You wanted to look
(07:47):
good and make impressions on the people who come inside.
And McNeil says that it wasn't until Isabelle and Combs
A Woman's Touch that was published in that interior Decoration
really started to get some serious analysis and people started thinking, oh,
these women were actually making some significant impact in the
(08:11):
overall world of artcraft and design. It's kind of fascinating
that it took that long to get any serious academic look,
because again it goes along with the whole thing of
that work being downplayed and the field being almost invalidated
when it comes to women's participation. But uh, income rights
(08:32):
that women weren't just decorating, they were designing as an
outgrowth of the arts and crafts movement of the late
nineteenth century, and sort of in the wake of this period,
women actually did publish quite a few books on the topic,
including that Edith Wharton Ogden Codman book we mentioned earlier.
And so this is sort of the first wave of
women actually going out and getting these jobs that are creative.
(08:56):
They are sort of artsy FARTZI interviewed as more socially
appropriate for women to have um. But that leads us
to the question of whether women's participation in a job
like this, where it is centered around the home and
artsy ARTSI stuff, whether that has been liberating in terms
of giving them jobs, letting them earn a wage, or
(09:18):
whether that's just continuing the cycle of reaffirming gender norms
and women belonging in the home. Yeah, So for some
quick historical highlights, obviously we you know, we we start
writing about this stuff at the turn of the century
and early twenty century decorators or designers were really intent
(09:38):
upon rejecting dark, heavy Victorian interiors. There really was a
lot of change a foot. So the nascent professionalization then
starts to breathe this tension between architects and so called designers,
the masculine versus the feminine, design versus decoration, and and
(10:00):
this really starts to bubble up with Frank Alba Parsons
of the Parsons School of Design, who was instrumental in
actually formalizing interior design as a career, which is a
common theme that we've talked about a lot in terms
of industries such as teaching, where usually professionalization is shepherded
(10:21):
by men. So in the nineteen thirteen class Perspectives at
the school later known as Parsons, it declares interior decoration,
like architecture, has reached the dignity of a profession. And
in his nineteen thirteen book Interior Decoration, Parsons describes the
house as the externalized man. So some notable gendering going
(10:46):
on here. So meanwhile during this time, uh, the sort
of superstar interior designer of this period. LCD Wolf writes
in her seminal book The House in Good Taste, which,
let me tell you, you could really have a drinking
game to the amount of times that she writes the
word taste in the book called The House and Good Taste,
(11:08):
you can literally taste the house. You could, you could
taste amazing. Um yeah, it's like it's like a Willy Wonka. Yes, yeah,
And she writes in the book, in contrast to Parton's
attitude about the externalized man, I do wish to trace
briefly the development of the modern house the woman's house,
to show you that all that is intimate and charming
(11:28):
in the home as we know it has come through
the unmeasured influence of women. And speaking of lc Dwolf,
like you said, Caroline, she was a superstar. Architectural Digest
calls her America's first decorator, and despite the fact that
people in her day really wanted to write her off
(11:51):
as a frivolous actress turned decorator. She was involved in
suffrage and she also described her business as a model
for other women. She was incredibly successful, and so in
nineteen o five, she gets her first big break with
a commission to decorate New York's Colony Club, which was
New York City's first club exclusively for very exclusive women
(12:16):
and fun fact about her. She spread the word about
her decorating business with personalized business cards that were quote
embellished with her trademark wolf with nosegay crest. I looked
for a picture of this and I couldn't find one.
I don't know. That's what Architectural Digest said, And I
want a wolf with nosegay crest so badly. Now you think,
(12:38):
do you think the wolf was holding the bouquet or
just like had like a reef of flowers around his head.
I like to think that he was just biting the
nosegay with his giant claws, not claws, teeth, teeth claws,
same difference. They're all sharp and in describing the Colony
Club's interior, Architectural Digest calls it casual. It has a
(13:02):
feminine style. There was an abundance of glazed chintz, which
apparently immediately led to d Wolf being referred to as
the Chintz Lady, which I don't think I would like
that nickname, but whatever. Um goes on to describe wicker
chairs clever vanity tables, I wonder what makes them clever? Uh,
and the first of her mini trellist rooms. And she
(13:23):
was such a hit with her design of this all
lady club that she immediately gets all of these other
commissions and jobs, and she sort of circulates around, uh,
all sorts of famous wealthy families. Yeah, and so in
nineteen fourteen she publishes The House and Good Taste, and
two years later she's commissioned to decorate portions of the
(13:47):
Henry Clay Frick House now turned art mansion, which was
probably the most significant commission of her career because Frick
was this super duper wealthy guy and he had all
of these amazing art pieces and she kind of had
to go back and forth with him and over times
because I mean, the Wolf, when you gave her a budget,
(14:09):
what would just like take the money and run and
buy all sorts of extravagant furnitures and fabrics. And he
got a little concern from time to time about how
much money she was spending, and she tried to to
let him let her decorate more of the house and
he was like, l cie, oh, come on. It kind
(14:30):
of just sounds like any stereotypical conversation between an interior
designer and a client. Ever, But I think that just
illustrates that this woman would go to the ends of
the earth to find the right chair or whatever. I mean,
she was serious about design, and really early in her
book she writes, I know of nothing more significant than
(14:53):
the awakening of men and women throughout our country to
the desire to improve their houses. Is okay, Well, I
mean I can think of some things that are more
significant than that, but no, that's good, like throw pillows,
all the tassels. Now, No, I mean she she very
much took it seriously. And the thing is like it
(15:18):
was okay, and it was expected for Elsie Dwolf's to
take this kind of stuff seriously because of all of
the gendering embedded in this. And this is something again
that Peter McNeil really breaks down in that paper we
started earlier, because I mean, when you look at the
development of interior decoration, it's not just oh well, it
(15:42):
makes sense because of domesticity and we expect that to
be a woman's place. It wasn't just that there was
also ready made fashion and commercialism that McNeil writes sexualized
the house as an extension of the female body that
women or are obliged to care for and dress up.
(16:04):
So you also around this time have the rise of
department stores that facilitated and in some ways democratized for
people who couldn't hire say an Elsie d Wolf to
come and do it for them, who facilitated this entire industry,
And so women then become both the consumers and the
objects of consumption. Yeah, and of course other critiques come
into this because along with the rise of ready made fashion,
(16:29):
so fashion is becoming cheaper and more accessible, but also
with the rise of the moneyed middle class, so not
only is stuff more accessible, but you have more money
to buy more stuff. Then you start getting these critiques
of feminized decoration, design and fashion, where your people are
just saying, well, women are just it's just part of
(16:52):
their mercurial, uh, fickle natures that they want to change
fashions all the time. And so even Leisure magazine said
you know, like, hey, ladies, we've got this familiar feminine
urge to change things all the time, and so that
just sort of became part of the stereotype of how
women designers and consumers worked. Familiar feminine urge also to
(17:15):
me just sounds like a euphemism for menstruation or because
you are familiar feminine edge back ladies, buy some throw pillows,
I'll help and you see. All of this gendering, though,
reflected also within the arts and crafts movement and the
growing architectural industry at the time, where you have women's
(17:36):
intuitive designer and color schemes really positioned as female in
contrast to men's logic, rationality and neutral masculine color schemes.
We could go off on a tangent at this point
about the great masculine renunciation that effectively muted colors and
(17:57):
flamboyant styles out of uh male wardrobes at the time. Um,
but there was a publication on the magic of color
harmony in dress from n that said, the fascinating woman
is she who is clever enough to emphasize the charming
contrast between herself and man. And what better opportunity has
(18:19):
she then dressing and choice of color, So even color
itself and the enjoyment of color is coded as feminine. Yeah,
I remember was it on TLC or HDTV? There was
one of those home early home design shows where it
was entirely based around this like really soothing kindergarten teacher
(18:40):
type woman designer who would bring into your home like
a color wheel that was full of like natural things
like a red pepper or like bark from a tree,
and you would pick like, oh, what how do I
want my house to feel? And it was all about
feelings and colors. It's not like we have ever gotten
away from that ling and that idea that women and
(19:03):
color and color choices and how they feel that those
all go together. Yeah, I mean even when it comes
down to art. Apparently there was an idea that the
drawing was more male appropriate because it's it's literally linear
and more precise, whereas painting was more feminine because it's
(19:24):
more colorful and open to more abstraction. Yeah, and what
did they say? That same source talked about how like
it's more appropriate for a woman to sit there with
her watercolors when she could be helping someone paint a
wall in the actual house. Well, and we see this
gendering of these interior spaces very much still alive and
(19:46):
well today with things like man caves. And there was
also a Wall Street Journal article reporting on the men's
design site Trunk, and that's Trunk with no you only consonants,
and the reporter writes that Trunk is specifically targeting men
due to quote the off putting lee feminine world of
(20:09):
design magazines like El, Decor and most interior stores. Caroline
is shaking her head, ladies and gentlemen shaking her head. Well, okay,
for one thing, all of the stuff that's featured on
Trunk is stuff that I adore, like the styles and
and the decor and the fashion and everything, like, I
love it. It's I respond to that, and um I
(20:32):
also feel that it's kind of silly that, like in
a world where we have to have gendered lotion at
the drug store and shampoo for men um, that we
also have to have design websites from men. I I
get why someone who considers themselves to be masculine might
be off put by a website that is clearly dedicated
(20:55):
to I don't know, like pastels, Well, yeah, pastels are
florals or you know things like that. Like I get that,
but it's just the whole thing seems really absurd to me. Well,
it just seems like shouldn't we be past the point
of gendering pastels or gendering leather? Yeah, I mean I
think that plenty of people, whoever you are, respond to
(21:17):
light colors or dark colors, or like a fluffy down
couch versus a you know, a straight lined leather couch
or just you know, a good old fashioned bean bag chair. Caroline. Yeah,
but I love there was one quote in the story
about that, not to get off on attention, but I'm
going to um. There was also a line in that
article about Trunk where it talked about how like, oh god,
(21:38):
and like so many of the homes we visited, like
all these dudes had globes, and so it really seems like,
you know, men just want to decorate with things that
are like, you know, like rational and logical and that
can be used in real life. And I'm like, Okay,
what's old is new? We all use Google Maps, Okay,
nobody used as a freaking globe, so it's not logical
or functional. And then I just flipped the table over
(21:59):
and walk away. Though I do like to think of
in lieu of Google Maps, you just drive around with
like a globe and like one of those like car
seats for children, you have the globes trapped in UM.
But the thing is that we've been referring a lot
to interior decorators, which was also a very gendered choice
(22:21):
to call it decoration as opposed to design. But that
would soon change because the title of this podcast is
designing women. People go to school for interior design, so
we're going to talk about how that came to be
when we come right back from a quick break. So
(22:44):
it's interesting to watch how things change in interior design
or decorating UM as the field becomes more professionalized, just
like as Kristen said, in other fields, whether that's teaching
or whether that's the coffee industry. There's a whole slew
of things that happened when things in a particular industry
start to get professionalized. People start forming professional groups and
(23:07):
organizations to encourage basically the shoving out of anyone they
perceived to be an amateur. Well. Notably, the very first
professional organization for interior designers was started by women, hence
its name, The Women Decorators Club of New York and
it was founded in nineteen fourteen. And then some male
(23:29):
decorators at the time got together and like, hey, we
need an organization too, so they formed the Society of
Interior Decorators. And then finally in one we have the
gender neutral American Institute of Decorators, which was really formed
to uplift the industry from depression era dul drums and
(23:51):
attract more respectability. Emphasized professional qualifications, and it was really
attracting and in particular for more well established firms rather
than say L. C. Dwolf types who made fabulous business
cards and we're working independently. And so then in the
(24:12):
nineteen forties and the post war period, as men are
returning from World War Two, that's when we see even
more professionalization of the industry, which leads, like always to
even more masculinization. There's this influx basically into the conversation,
into the industry of architects, and then we see the
rise of industrial designers. And during this period after the war,
(24:35):
there's really an emphasis on specialization, marketing of the profession,
and the development of professional standards. And so you've got
all of these men coming in and they're focused on
a lot of the time that commercial design, not so
much what drapes. You know, Mrs Smith wants in her home.
Mrs Smith, she is the toughest customer, demands always, Jane,
(24:57):
Gremy and Caroline. And don't get us wrong, we are
not against men getting jobs. We're all about some employed
fellas out there. But as Pat Kirkham notes in her
book Women Designers in the USA nine to two thousand,
a lot of this came at the expense of them
sort of taking over the leadership, for instance, of the
(25:19):
American Institute of Decorators and pushing more female decorators to
the side. So in the nineteen fifties and afterwards you
really see women increasingly pursuing residential design. Stay in the houses,
ladies will take over the skyscrapers. And then with the
rise of interior design divisions in large architectural firms, men
(25:44):
usually held the top jobs there, so they're essentially building
a bit of a glass ceiling, although just beautifully designed ceiling.
Carolina is gorgeous. Yeah, And so this leads commercial design
to becoming really a boys club that women have to
fight extra hard to make their way through, and I remember,
so for the longest time I wanted to be an
(26:04):
interior designer. I don't know, I'm not exactly sure where
the idea came from. I want to say it was
just growing up watching a whole lot of TLC and
designing women and designing. You wanted to be Julian sugar Baker.
I wanted to be Julie, But I never saw them work.
They were either out being the supremes on stage if
anybody remembers that episode um, or they were just in
the house talking. And so I think it was. I
(26:27):
think it was those early home design shows like Trading Spaces.
But when I actually did shadow an interior designer for
a day just to kind of see what she did,
she herself had a business running out of her home. Um,
and she sort of burst my bubble because my whole
dream was like, no, I will work on an individual
basis with like individual clients in my in my head,
(26:48):
in my dream job, and I will make their homes beautiful.
And she was like, Uh, you've got to go to
school for a long time. You've got to work really hard,
and then you kind of do have to come up
through the more commercial stuff before you can sort of
break out on your own and establish your own firm
to where you are being an lc dwolf and working
(27:10):
with those smaller clients probably unless you have very wealthy
and well connected friends who are down to let you
redo their pool house. Yeah, who trust you with their
credit card basically. But I was like, I don't want
to design an office, nor do I feel like I
would want a job that's not recession proof, because it
(27:32):
was during the recession. So I gave up that dream.
Now I have designed myself a beautiful disk space and
the beautiful podcast. You know, Caroline, you could always do
an interior design podcast, That's true. I'd be like, and
then I really like purple, but also blue. That's cool,
(27:54):
So maybe I'll stick with this one you call the
room of one zone sign Caroline. Um. But so going
back to before, I got off on a tangent sparked
by the idea of commercial design being a boys club
that I would not want to fight my way through personally,
just just me. It's during this time, after the war,
(28:17):
in the nine fifties and sixties that decorator, the term
decorator really becomes kind of an ugly term. Nobody wants
to be called a decorator anymore, because as things are
getting more professionalized, people were saying, oh, well, calling yourself
a decorator, that's that could be somebody who comes into
(28:37):
your house to paint or wallpaper your walls. But really
there was there was a little bit more to it
than just saying like, oh, a designer would be a
more accurate term. Well, these guys didn't want to be
called decorators period, because that was a lady's job. We
had the lady decorator established, you know, in the early
twentieth century. So I have a feeling there was um
(29:00):
ick factor with that, and also there was this concern
for keeping the more amateurish and intuition driven women out
of more lucrative areas of the field. And Kirkham writes
about how the feminine in quotes and domestic qualities that
had led this people in this industry to argue women's
(29:22):
particular suitability to interior design at the beginning of the
century were now ignored, as was women's experience as homemakers.
So decorator was out, interior designers was in. And Frank
Lloyd right by the way, once publicly sneered at an
a i D event about inferior desecrators. Yeah, apparently he
(29:46):
just went on and on about it until the woman
he specifically named, one specific female designer, believe it was
Dorothy Draper. Yeah, and she's not related to Don Draper
ha ha, and she actually it up to sort of
physically put a stop to his anti woman ran essentially
inferior desecrators. Yeah, that's like such an eighth grade. Yeah,
(30:10):
such an eighth grade burn. Um. So we're gonna take
a massive leap now, though, and look at the industry today,
because like it or not, Frankloyd, right, inferior detecrators make
about thirty billion dollars a year as an industry, and
it is still very much female dominated. An article over
(30:31):
at Interior design dot Net reports that women out number
men in the field around two to one. And that's
in stark contrast to those stats we were giving in
our podcast on women in Architecture a while back. Yeah,
and the reasons why it is so popular with women
today really might not be that different from why it
attracted so many women in the past. I mean, in
(30:53):
the past it had given so many women who were
sort of living off the beaten path anyway, whether they
were coming out of the arts and crafts movement, whether
they didn't really want to get married and they just
wanted to work. It sort of gave them a path
to earning a living and having a respectable job, essentially,
and so New York School of Interior Design professor and
(31:13):
author Judith Gura suggests that the popularity of this field
with women partially has to do with the fact that
the industry allows women to take time off to raise families,
and the barrier of entry is lower since licensing isn't
necessary as with architecture, so you're not necessarily in school
and working toward a license for as long as you
(31:35):
would be if you were going to be an architect.
And on the one hand, that's great, and on the
other hand too, that gendering still seems largely intact, at
least as reflected in a quote from designer Barbara Berry
speaking to the website Interior Design, who said, I've never
felt the glass ceiling. As a woman, I feel uniquely
(31:57):
suited for design center around the home. And in talking
about how there are few and far between female starchitects,
you know those all star architects. The list of Marquis.
Female interior designers is quote nearly endless interior design reports.
(32:19):
And this is something you can see reflected to over
at El Decor that has a gallery upon gallery of
incredible female interior designers like Charlotte Moss, Holly Hunt, Muriel Brandolini,
Josie A. Tory, and Jill Stewart among some of its
female favorites. But when you start looking at this list
(32:39):
of names, and we started thinking, oh, okay, cool. This
is an industry that seems it was built up around
women and still remains pretty female friendly. But when you
look at these lists of all of these successful female
interior designers, it is great that this is an industry
that really has been built around women and will seems
(33:01):
very female friendly. But at the same time too, a
lot of the lists also make the industry seem pretty
not diverse. I mean, yeah, women, yea women, but is
it all just white women? Well? I think so much
of that goes back to class issues from the very beginning.
(33:21):
I mean, who was paying for interior decorators the new
white upper crust middle class and up. You know, people
who were oil tycoons, railroad tycoons, people like that, we're
paying for designers, and the people they were seeking out
because it was a female dominated field tended to be women,
(33:43):
and because of just the way that class structures were
sub those women tended to be white. They weren't these
wealthy oil barons weren't out searching for women of color
to come into their homes and decorate because those jobs
simply weren't open and available to women of color. Well,
and I think that phrase right there, come into their
homes says a lot too, because I have a feeling that,
(34:04):
from what we know about racism, that this idea of
someone of color coming into your home, into your private space,
would be reboting for a very long time. And this
is a sentiment that's echoed by renowned designer Sheila Bridges,
who is speaking to the Root about it. She says
(34:25):
design has always been a pretty elitist profession, so they've
definitely been challenges along the way, and many of them
have had to do with being black, And she references
the complexion of the industry, which she says remains basically
a hurdle for a lot of young black designers. But
she thinks that things like you know what, I'm obsessed
(34:47):
with HDTV basically shows and the Internet and designer collaborations
that are making design more accessible to a whole wide
swath of people are helping kind of open young people
bo's eyes to career possibilities or even just hobby possibilities,
that that there's more out there for them to do. Yeah,
and and she goes on to echo exactly what we
(35:10):
were talking about just a moment ago, about how African
Americans haven't had what she calls a long history of
being professional designers, mainly because we only just recently gained
the luxury of choosing it as a career. And it
was interesting in this interview that she was doing with
the Route Uh, the interviewer mentioned that they had talked
(35:34):
to other prominent black interior designers before and asked them
the same question of has race ever been a barrier
for you in your industry? And they all just declined
to even answer the question. It seems like it's still diversity,
is still something that is swept under the very expensive carpet. Yeah,
(35:57):
and I'm sure you know there might be an effort
there not to other yourself basically, if you're already feeling
like such an outlier in the industry, that you've chosen, Um,
you might not want to focus too much on what
sets you apart, but more about what makes you such
a standout talent. Yeah, and and and she was very encouraging.
Bridges was for young black students interested in designed to
(36:20):
go for it and network their way in and but
but still being cognizant that, yeah, there probably are going
to be some extra hurdles along the way. And I
gotta tell you, Caroline, I was also really surprised that
this was one of the only even blog post independent
blog posts I could find even addressing this issue of
(36:44):
diversity ethnic diversity within the interior design field. And perhaps
I just wasn't looking in the right places, But I
almost wonder if it's if it is even a concern. Well,
I think again, so much of that goes back to
a clientele and what names they're familiar with, especially from
their other fellow incredibly wealthy friends, and that if somebody
(37:07):
uses one designer, they might pass that name along. And
so there's a lot of like maybe the perpetuation of
the same type of designer or literally the same designer,
And there hasn't been as much room for for newbies,
people with different perspectives to come up through the ranks.
But then again, it's not like there's black design versus
white design. Well yeah, and that was something that Sheila
(37:29):
Bridges definitively said no to where the Route asked, well,
you know, is there a particular you know, black design
aesthetic and she was like, no, no, good design is
good design. Let's not make this like a race thing
at all. Um. Well, and I also though, wish that
we could have found some statistics too, comparing diversity within
(37:52):
residential design versus industrial design, because I wonder if the image,
if the picture would change at all when we're looking
more at commercial properties, businesses, public spaces versus private spaces. Um.
But speaking of private spaces, one rather surprising area of
(38:13):
diversity among early women interior designers that we've been talking about,
particularly the first half of this episode is when it
comes to sexual orientation. I assume going into this that
this was going to be you know, straight, white, wealthier women,
but it turns out that what Peter McNeill terms homeless
sociality was very common among the earliest interior decorators. Women
(38:39):
like Elsie d Wolf who was Boston married to Bessie Marbury.
They had one of the first open quote unquote Boston marriages,
which was essentially like, let's not call them lesbians in
New York society. But it's interesting that a sort of
lesbian designer stereotype never developed. Instead, we do still have
(39:00):
of the rich, straight white woman stereotype paired with the
very effeminine gay man stereotype. And I mean people were
writing even back in the thirties, there was one thing
we saw where, uh, some man, some man was writing
about fears of both fickle women and gay men ruining
(39:21):
what he called real art, that we have to take
it back from them. Basically, yeah, I mean, the gay
male interior decorator stereotype emerged really in tandem with the
lady decorator stereotypes because all of those kinds of things
of interest in home decor and domestic spaces and the
(39:42):
use of vibrant color was so deeply coded as feminine
that any interest in those kinds of things and in
commercialism and consumption was also coded feminine. So if you
were a guy who had a knack for and really
enjoy these kinds of things, well you were unquote effeminate man,
or you might have even been labeled a pansy, and
(40:04):
there was a lot of mistrust of you, particularly starting
in the interwar years. He was seen as sort of
the counterpoint to the frivolous flapper. You have the effeminate
man who is carrying all the shopping bags next to her. Yeah,
but it's funny because just like how high heels originated
as a man thing, so did interest in beautifying your home.
(40:28):
I mean, back in the eighteen hundreds, I mean, if
you were a wealthy man, you wanted to demonstrate your wealth,
and so you wanted to pick the most luxurious fabrics
and finishes for your home sort of demonstrate that. And
that sort of has all gone away to the point
where people write about, oh, you know, stereotypical husband just
(40:49):
being a guest in his wife's home because she's the
one who takes over all the decorating in the shopping well.
And nonetheless, though even with all of that stigmatizing a men,
gay or not, who were interested in decorating and designing, nonetheless,
within the industry, they were still more broadly respected than
(41:12):
icons like the Wolf and Dorothy Draper. There was still
more room and acceptance for gay men like Billy Baldwin
than there were for an LCD wolf, not being in
the industry at all but watching a whole lot of
home and Garden television. I want to say that attitude
still persists somewhat today. I mean, if you look at
(41:33):
the Nate burgass Is of the world, who is super
accessible thanks to his stint on Oprah and having a
target line, and then somebody like vern Yip, who was
who was a total design superstar um and has lived
in Atlanta. I don't know if he still does. Wasn't
he on Trading Spaces? Yes, he was loved Trading Spaces,
I know. And now he's like he's always in an
HDTV magazine also, which I'm always excited about. But it
(41:58):
seems like we just kind of look to the gay
male designer in our lives, whether that's in the pages
of a magazine or in real life, to to give
us the true and correct, fashionable design advice as opposed
to trusting a lady designer. Well, because according to stereotype,
he would offer us the best of both worlds. He has,
(42:19):
you know, the rationality of having the male brain, but
also the more a feminine design intuition to be able
to execute a well appointed room. So it's this episode
to me is just one oh one in how entrenched
(42:39):
gender norms have become in a very short amount of time.
It took about a century for us to just be like, oh,
you like color, Okay, you're either gay or you're a woman.
You like flowers? Gay or a woman? Like what? Yeah,
there's no room for a straight man to enjoy color,
flowers or decorating. Well, and that's what I wanted to
find too. Uh. In terms of adversity within the industry,
(43:01):
I know that there are straight male interior designers out there,
but I wonder if they are sort of the odd
men out um, So really relying on listeners for this one.
Curious to know what the status of these kinds of
identity politics are within interior design or maybe does it
(43:23):
just not matter? Are you just more collectively interested in
the design itself. Let us know mom Stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom stuff podcasts or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with you. Well,
(43:45):
I've got a Facebook message here from Sophie and she
is responding to our podcast on social Justice Warriors, and
she writes, Hi, I just want to thank you for
your episode about social Justice Warriors, specifically Tumbler users. I
feel any platform that is mostly used by young people
gets miscredited and questioned, So I get dang proud when
(44:06):
I see teenagers using trigger warnings or hashtagging food during
rabadon being so respectful to each other. I'm pretty sure
they didn't learn that from parents or in school. They
teach each other and it's brilliant. Tumbler is an awesome
place because people of all genders, sexualities, colors, and nationalities
are allowed a voice. It allows for beautiful things like
(44:27):
Blackout and Transvisibility Day to fill my feed and remind
me that my reality is not the only one. Thumbs
up to the podcast and police excuse grammar or spelling.
I'm Swedish, so thank you, Sophy, and your spelling and
grammar was fantastic. I have a Facebook message here from Crystal.
She says, Hi, I just started listening and love the series. Well, hello,
(44:50):
thank you, She says, I just listened to your hunting
podcast and it got me thinking about my last trip
that I want to share with you. My boyfriend and
I were out in the field and twin degree wendy
stormy weather for about eight hours looking for geese. After
freezing my bum off whenever I had to pee and
struggling to keep my clothes dry, I started looking up
(45:10):
female urination devices or fu D. I mean, how amazing
not having to drop my pants in cold weather. The
interesting part, though, is that when I mentioned it to
my boyfriend, he responded that it was weird and I
was quote not invited to future trips if I didn't
pee like a real country girl. I haven't had a
(45:31):
chance to test this, but I now have every intention
of busting out an fu D next time we head out. Anyways,
this gotta be wondering whether there's been a podcast on
these devices and the privilege of peeing while standing. Well, yes, indeed,
we do have a potty politics episode that would definitely
interest you, Crystal. Yeah, and I gotta say, Caroline for
(45:55):
a summer music festival season and all that I want
to fud. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sitting down
on Nope, I'm not gonna do it. If you have
any female urination device related thoughts or things about interior
design you would like to let us know. Mom stubb
at how stubworks dot com is our email address and
(46:16):
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Does it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to stuff Mom never told you. From how Supports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline and the title of today's episode is
Designing Women and Caroline. I gotta be honest. When I
first started researching for Designing Women Women in interior Design,
(00:27):
I kind of just wanted you and I to talk
about Designing Women, the sitcom for half an hour. I
did too. This is a show that I grew up
watching with my mother, in addition to you know, all
the other shows like Murphy Brown and Golden Girls. Uh,
and of course Cagney and Lacy. Um. But yeah, no,
I I am in love with the sugar Baker Sisters.
(00:50):
Which is your favorite? Oh, Julia Julius sugar Baker. Now,
for listeners who might not be familiar with Designing Women,
let's give them a quick rundown of the show. And
don't worry. This isn't going to be an entire show
about the sitcom. But we have to indulge our childhood
sitcom loves from time to time. So one of the
reasons that I loved Designing Women when I was a
(01:12):
kid was because it is set in Atlanta, so everybody
had had a very wonderful accent. How Julius sugar Baker.
And there were two sugar Baker sisters, Julia who headed
up this interior design firm, and then what was her name,
Delta Birke Plater Susanne Susanne. How could I forget Susanne?
(01:32):
And Susanne was a former beauty queen and she always
had something to say that was usually inappropriate. And Julie,
would you usually have to step in? Yeah? Well, no,
I loved, I love Without getting too much on a
tangent about just my love for the show itself, Julius
sugar Baker is fantastic for the way that she, at
least once a show goes off on some incredibly amazing rant,
(01:55):
standing up for the little guy. Yeah. For people who
watched Scandal, Julius sugar Baker delivers her monologues and the
same kind of machine guns staccato. His characters do very
dramatically on Scandal, which makes Scandal even more enjoyable for
me because it makes me think of Julia sugar Baker.
(02:16):
But personally, Caroline, I don't want to be controversial, but
Julie was not my faith. Charlne was my girl, Sweet sweet,
sweet shar Charlene always got me giggling. Um. So, anyway,
Designing Women is a hilarious sitcom and also has been
cited as a very feminist show for its time. I
(02:36):
think in its original time spot it ran right up
before Murphy Brown and people are like, oh, look at
look at all these working women and their strong shoulder pads. Yes,
and they're very feathered, hairsprayed hair, so much feathering. Um.
But we're going to talk about designing women. I r
l not on television today and I learned that the
(03:01):
development of the interior design industry, which is stereotypically very feminine,
it is designing women. Um. But the way that it
was feminized and then professionalized it says a lot about
how we were grappling with gender roles, particularly at the
(03:24):
turn of the century and leading up to World War Two. Yeah,
it seems like for as for as often as we
have talked on the podcast about women not being sort
of welcome in the workforce for a long time, especially
if you were married and Tripoli, especially if you were
married with children into your design and at the time
decorating seemed like an okay and acceptable way for women
(03:48):
to not only work but earn a wage. Yeah, and
there was this idea that if you got into interior decorating,
as it was originally called, that you might not be
as interested in your marriage as you should be. So
there was this quote from Vogue in uh, someone once
(04:12):
said that a woman is either happily married or an
interior decorator. And there's still a little bit of that
stereotype lingering today, especially when we think of a decorator
versus a more serious interior designer, that perhaps these are
wealthier women who might be a little bit bored, and oh, well,
(04:32):
they're just of course they're gonna become decorators. And so,
of course, because it's us, we have to give you
the very colorful rundown of the history of where these
decorators came from, how this profession sort of came about,
and of course where all those kind of nasty stereotypes
about both fickle women and gay men in the design
(04:55):
industry came from. And a lot of this information is
coming from this amazing and very fascinating paper by Peter
McNeil called Designing Women, Gender Sexuality in the Interior Decorator
from eighteen ninety to nineteen forty, and it's really great
the way that he touches on not only just the historical,
you know, black and white aspects of the design field,
(05:17):
but also really digs into some of the sexuality, gender
and femininity issues. Yeah, because the entire construct of an
interior decorator is built on it being appropriate for women
because of how domesticity and those spaces where we live
(05:39):
were gender coded as feminine really starting in the late
nineteenth century in early twentieth century. So, for instance, in
we have the publication of the Decoration of Houses written
by Edith Wharton, Yes and Ogden Codman, and with this
(06:00):
text the figure of the capital l lady decorator begins
to emerge, and she's really cemented in the culture by
the time we get to the interwar period between World
War One and World War Two, when we're in this
cultural flux when socio economic independence really isn't exactly a
(06:21):
feminine trait, although of course that is in conflict with
the development of the so called new woman. So the
lady decorator is a safe space amid all of this
oh what do we do with women question? Well, not
to mention that the work itself of interior design is
downplayed a lot by describing it as a natural extension
(06:44):
of being part of the female nature. That, of course
we would want to decorate the house. We want to
arrange flowers and slitch fabric and wallpaper colors, things like that,
because that's just part of female intuition. Leave all of
that architecture and building two men with their rationality, and
on top of that gendered idea, there's also class that
(07:06):
plays on top of that, because, as McNeil points out
in his paper, this has been an historically overlooked industry
from an academic perspective because it was sort of cast
aside as a thing for again rich board ladies. Because
interior decoration, as it was called at the time, really
(07:27):
developed things to a combination of class disposal, income and commercialism.
And in a lot of ways, interior decoration was compared
to high fashion couturiers, where you outfit your home in
the same way that you might outfit your body. You
want all of the latest fashions. You wanted to look
(07:47):
good and make impressions on the people who come inside.
And McNeil says that it wasn't until Isabelle and Combs
A Woman's Touch that was published in that interior Decoration
really started to get some serious analysis and people started thinking, oh,
these women were actually making some significant impact in the
(08:11):
overall world of artcraft and design. It's kind of fascinating
that it took that long to get any serious academic look,
because again it goes along with the whole thing of
that work being downplayed and the field being almost invalidated
when it comes to women's participation. But uh, income rights
(08:32):
that women weren't just decorating, they were designing as an
outgrowth of the arts and crafts movement of the late
nineteenth century, and sort of in the wake of this period,
women actually did publish quite a few books on the topic,
including that Edith Wharton Ogden Codman book we mentioned earlier.
And so this is sort of the first wave of
women actually going out and getting these jobs that are creative.
(08:56):
They are sort of artsy FARTZI interviewed as more socially
appropriate for women to have um. But that leads us
to the question of whether women's participation in a job
like this, where it is centered around the home and
artsy ARTSI stuff, whether that has been liberating in terms
of giving them jobs, letting them earn a wage, or
(09:18):
whether that's just continuing the cycle of reaffirming gender norms
and women belonging in the home. Yeah, So for some
quick historical highlights, obviously we you know, we we start
writing about this stuff at the turn of the century
and early twenty century decorators or designers were really intent
(09:38):
upon rejecting dark, heavy Victorian interiors. There really was a
lot of change a foot. So the nascent professionalization then
starts to breathe this tension between architects and so called designers,
the masculine versus the feminine, design versus decoration, and and
(10:00):
this really starts to bubble up with Frank Alba Parsons
of the Parsons School of Design, who was instrumental in
actually formalizing interior design as a career, which is a
common theme that we've talked about a lot in terms
of industries such as teaching, where usually professionalization is shepherded
(10:21):
by men. So in the nineteen thirteen class Perspectives at
the school later known as Parsons, it declares interior decoration,
like architecture, has reached the dignity of a profession. And
in his nineteen thirteen book Interior Decoration, Parsons describes the
house as the externalized man. So some notable gendering going
(10:46):
on here. So meanwhile during this time, uh, the sort
of superstar interior designer of this period. LCD Wolf writes
in her seminal book The House in Good Taste, which,
let me tell you, you could really have a drinking
game to the amount of times that she writes the
word taste in the book called The House and Good Taste,
(11:08):
you can literally taste the house. You could, you could
taste amazing. Um yeah, it's like it's like a Willy Wonka. Yes, yeah,
And she writes in the book, in contrast to Parton's
attitude about the externalized man, I do wish to trace
briefly the development of the modern house the woman's house,
to show you that all that is intimate and charming
(11:28):
in the home as we know it has come through
the unmeasured influence of women. And speaking of lc Dwolf,
like you said, Caroline, she was a superstar. Architectural Digest
calls her America's first decorator, and despite the fact that
people in her day really wanted to write her off
(11:51):
as a frivolous actress turned decorator. She was involved in
suffrage and she also described her business as a model
for other women. She was incredibly successful, and so in
nineteen o five, she gets her first big break with
a commission to decorate New York's Colony Club, which was
New York City's first club exclusively for very exclusive women
(12:16):
and fun fact about her. She spread the word about
her decorating business with personalized business cards that were quote
embellished with her trademark wolf with nosegay crest. I looked
for a picture of this and I couldn't find one.
I don't know. That's what Architectural Digest said, And I
want a wolf with nosegay crest so badly. Now you think,
(12:38):
do you think the wolf was holding the bouquet or
just like had like a reef of flowers around his head.
I like to think that he was just biting the
nosegay with his giant claws, not claws, teeth, teeth claws,
same difference. They're all sharp and in describing the Colony
Club's interior, Architectural Digest calls it casual. It has a
(13:02):
feminine style. There was an abundance of glazed chintz, which
apparently immediately led to d Wolf being referred to as
the Chintz Lady, which I don't think I would like
that nickname, but whatever. Um goes on to describe wicker
chairs clever vanity tables, I wonder what makes them clever? Uh,
and the first of her mini trellist rooms. And she
(13:23):
was such a hit with her design of this all
lady club that she immediately gets all of these other
commissions and jobs, and she sort of circulates around, uh,
all sorts of famous wealthy families. Yeah, and so in
nineteen fourteen she publishes The House and Good Taste, and
two years later she's commissioned to decorate portions of the
(13:47):
Henry Clay Frick House now turned art mansion, which was
probably the most significant commission of her career because Frick
was this super duper wealthy guy and he had all
of these amazing art pieces and she kind of had
to go back and forth with him and over times
because I mean, the Wolf, when you gave her a budget,
(14:09):
what would just like take the money and run and
buy all sorts of extravagant furnitures and fabrics. And he
got a little concern from time to time about how
much money she was spending, and she tried to to
let him let her decorate more of the house and
he was like, l cie, oh, come on. It kind
(14:30):
of just sounds like any stereotypical conversation between an interior
designer and a client. Ever, But I think that just
illustrates that this woman would go to the ends of
the earth to find the right chair or whatever. I mean,
she was serious about design, and really early in her
book she writes, I know of nothing more significant than
(14:53):
the awakening of men and women throughout our country to
the desire to improve their houses. Is okay, Well, I
mean I can think of some things that are more
significant than that, but no, that's good, like throw pillows,
all the tassels. Now, No, I mean she she very
much took it seriously. And the thing is like it
(15:18):
was okay, and it was expected for Elsie Dwolf's to
take this kind of stuff seriously because of all of
the gendering embedded in this. And this is something again
that Peter McNeil really breaks down in that paper we
started earlier, because I mean, when you look at the
development of interior decoration, it's not just oh well, it
(15:42):
makes sense because of domesticity and we expect that to
be a woman's place. It wasn't just that there was
also ready made fashion and commercialism that McNeil writes sexualized
the house as an extension of the female body that
women or are obliged to care for and dress up.
(16:04):
So you also around this time have the rise of
department stores that facilitated and in some ways democratized for
people who couldn't hire say an Elsie d Wolf to
come and do it for them, who facilitated this entire industry,
And so women then become both the consumers and the
objects of consumption. Yeah, and of course other critiques come
into this because along with the rise of ready made fashion,
(16:29):
so fashion is becoming cheaper and more accessible, but also
with the rise of the moneyed middle class, so not
only is stuff more accessible, but you have more money
to buy more stuff. Then you start getting these critiques
of feminized decoration, design and fashion, where your people are
just saying, well, women are just it's just part of
(16:52):
their mercurial, uh, fickle natures that they want to change
fashions all the time. And so even Leisure magazine said
you know, like, hey, ladies, we've got this familiar feminine
urge to change things all the time, and so that
just sort of became part of the stereotype of how
women designers and consumers worked. Familiar feminine urge also to
(17:15):
me just sounds like a euphemism for menstruation or because
you are familiar feminine edge back ladies, buy some throw pillows,
I'll help and you see. All of this gendering, though,
reflected also within the arts and crafts movement and the
growing architectural industry at the time, where you have women's
(17:36):
intuitive designer and color schemes really positioned as female in
contrast to men's logic, rationality and neutral masculine color schemes.
We could go off on a tangent at this point
about the great masculine renunciation that effectively muted colors and
(17:57):
flamboyant styles out of uh male wardrobes at the time. Um,
but there was a publication on the magic of color
harmony in dress from n that said, the fascinating woman
is she who is clever enough to emphasize the charming
contrast between herself and man. And what better opportunity has
(18:19):
she then dressing and choice of color, So even color
itself and the enjoyment of color is coded as feminine. Yeah,
I remember was it on TLC or HDTV? There was
one of those home early home design shows where it
was entirely based around this like really soothing kindergarten teacher
(18:40):
type woman designer who would bring into your home like
a color wheel that was full of like natural things
like a red pepper or like bark from a tree,
and you would pick like, oh, what how do I
want my house to feel? And it was all about
feelings and colors. It's not like we have ever gotten
away from that ling and that idea that women and
(19:03):
color and color choices and how they feel that those
all go together. Yeah, I mean even when it comes
down to art. Apparently there was an idea that the
drawing was more male appropriate because it's it's literally linear
and more precise, whereas painting was more feminine because it's
(19:24):
more colorful and open to more abstraction. Yeah, and what
did they say? That same source talked about how like
it's more appropriate for a woman to sit there with
her watercolors when she could be helping someone paint a
wall in the actual house. Well, and we see this
gendering of these interior spaces very much still alive and
(19:46):
well today with things like man caves. And there was
also a Wall Street Journal article reporting on the men's
design site Trunk, and that's Trunk with no you only consonants,
and the reporter writes that Trunk is specifically targeting men
due to quote the off putting lee feminine world of
(20:09):
design magazines like El, Decor and most interior stores. Caroline
is shaking her head, ladies and gentlemen shaking her head. Well, okay,
for one thing, all of the stuff that's featured on
Trunk is stuff that I adore, like the styles and
and the decor and the fashion and everything, like, I
love it. It's I respond to that, and um I
(20:32):
also feel that it's kind of silly that, like in
a world where we have to have gendered lotion at
the drug store and shampoo for men um, that we
also have to have design websites from men. I I
get why someone who considers themselves to be masculine might
be off put by a website that is clearly dedicated
(20:55):
to I don't know, like pastels, Well, yeah, pastels are
florals or you know things like that. Like I get that,
but it's just the whole thing seems really absurd to me. Well,
it just seems like shouldn't we be past the point
of gendering pastels or gendering leather? Yeah, I mean I
think that plenty of people, whoever you are, respond to
(21:17):
light colors or dark colors, or like a fluffy down
couch versus a you know, a straight lined leather couch
or just you know, a good old fashioned bean bag chair. Caroline. Yeah,
but I love there was one quote in the story
about that, not to get off on attention, but I'm
going to um. There was also a line in that
article about Trunk where it talked about how like, oh god,
(21:38):
and like so many of the homes we visited, like
all these dudes had globes, and so it really seems like,
you know, men just want to decorate with things that
are like, you know, like rational and logical and that
can be used in real life. And I'm like, Okay,
what's old is new? We all use Google Maps, Okay,
nobody used as a freaking globe, so it's not logical
or functional. And then I just flipped the table over
(21:59):
and walk away. Though I do like to think of
in lieu of Google Maps, you just drive around with
like a globe and like one of those like car
seats for children, you have the globes trapped in UM.
But the thing is that we've been referring a lot
to interior decorators, which was also a very gendered choice
(22:21):
to call it decoration as opposed to design. But that
would soon change because the title of this podcast is
designing women. People go to school for interior design, so
we're going to talk about how that came to be
when we come right back from a quick break. So
(22:44):
it's interesting to watch how things change in interior design
or decorating UM as the field becomes more professionalized, just
like as Kristen said, in other fields, whether that's teaching
or whether that's the coffee industry. There's a whole slew
of things that happened when things in a particular industry
start to get professionalized. People start forming professional groups and
(23:07):
organizations to encourage basically the shoving out of anyone they
perceived to be an amateur. Well. Notably, the very first
professional organization for interior designers was started by women, hence
its name, The Women Decorators Club of New York and
it was founded in nineteen fourteen. And then some male
(23:29):
decorators at the time got together and like, hey, we
need an organization too, so they formed the Society of
Interior Decorators. And then finally in one we have the
gender neutral American Institute of Decorators, which was really formed
to uplift the industry from depression era dul drums and
(23:51):
attract more respectability. Emphasized professional qualifications, and it was really
attracting and in particular for more well established firms rather
than say L. C. Dwolf types who made fabulous business
cards and we're working independently. And so then in the
(24:12):
nineteen forties and the post war period, as men are
returning from World War Two, that's when we see even
more professionalization of the industry, which leads, like always to
even more masculinization. There's this influx basically into the conversation,
into the industry of architects, and then we see the
rise of industrial designers. And during this period after the war,
(24:35):
there's really an emphasis on specialization, marketing of the profession,
and the development of professional standards. And so you've got
all of these men coming in and they're focused on
a lot of the time that commercial design, not so
much what drapes. You know, Mrs Smith wants in her home.
Mrs Smith, she is the toughest customer, demands always, Jane,
(24:57):
Gremy and Caroline. And don't get us wrong, we are
not against men getting jobs. We're all about some employed
fellas out there. But as Pat Kirkham notes in her
book Women Designers in the USA nine to two thousand,
a lot of this came at the expense of them
sort of taking over the leadership, for instance, of the
(25:19):
American Institute of Decorators and pushing more female decorators to
the side. So in the nineteen fifties and afterwards you
really see women increasingly pursuing residential design. Stay in the houses,
ladies will take over the skyscrapers. And then with the
rise of interior design divisions in large architectural firms, men
(25:44):
usually held the top jobs there, so they're essentially building
a bit of a glass ceiling, although just beautifully designed ceiling.
Carolina is gorgeous. Yeah, And so this leads commercial design
to becoming really a boys club that women have to
fight extra hard to make their way through, and I remember,
so for the longest time I wanted to be an
(26:04):
interior designer. I don't know, I'm not exactly sure where
the idea came from. I want to say it was
just growing up watching a whole lot of TLC and
designing women and designing. You wanted to be Julian sugar Baker.
I wanted to be Julie, But I never saw them work.
They were either out being the supremes on stage if
anybody remembers that episode um, or they were just in
the house talking. And so I think it was. I
(26:27):
think it was those early home design shows like Trading Spaces.
But when I actually did shadow an interior designer for
a day just to kind of see what she did,
she herself had a business running out of her home. Um,
and she sort of burst my bubble because my whole
dream was like, no, I will work on an individual
basis with like individual clients in my in my head,
(26:48):
in my dream job, and I will make their homes beautiful.
And she was like, Uh, you've got to go to
school for a long time. You've got to work really hard,
and then you kind of do have to come up
through the more commercial stuff before you can sort of
break out on your own and establish your own firm
to where you are being an lc dwolf and working
(27:10):
with those smaller clients probably unless you have very wealthy
and well connected friends who are down to let you
redo their pool house. Yeah, who trust you with their
credit card basically. But I was like, I don't want
to design an office, nor do I feel like I
would want a job that's not recession proof, because it
(27:32):
was during the recession. So I gave up that dream.
Now I have designed myself a beautiful disk space and
the beautiful podcast. You know, Caroline, you could always do
an interior design podcast, That's true. I'd be like, and
then I really like purple, but also blue. That's cool,
(27:54):
So maybe I'll stick with this one you call the
room of one zone sign Caroline. Um. But so going
back to before, I got off on a tangent sparked
by the idea of commercial design being a boys club
that I would not want to fight my way through personally,
just just me. It's during this time, after the war,
(28:17):
in the nine fifties and sixties that decorator, the term
decorator really becomes kind of an ugly term. Nobody wants
to be called a decorator anymore, because as things are
getting more professionalized, people were saying, oh, well, calling yourself
a decorator, that's that could be somebody who comes into
(28:37):
your house to paint or wallpaper your walls. But really
there was there was a little bit more to it
than just saying like, oh, a designer would be a
more accurate term. Well, these guys didn't want to be
called decorators period, because that was a lady's job. We
had the lady decorator established, you know, in the early
twentieth century. So I have a feeling there was um
(29:00):
ick factor with that, and also there was this concern
for keeping the more amateurish and intuition driven women out
of more lucrative areas of the field. And Kirkham writes
about how the feminine in quotes and domestic qualities that
had led this people in this industry to argue women's
(29:22):
particular suitability to interior design at the beginning of the
century were now ignored, as was women's experience as homemakers.
So decorator was out, interior designers was in. And Frank
Lloyd right by the way, once publicly sneered at an
a i D event about inferior desecrators. Yeah, apparently he
(29:46):
just went on and on about it until the woman
he specifically named, one specific female designer, believe it was
Dorothy Draper. Yeah, and she's not related to Don Draper
ha ha, and she actually it up to sort of
physically put a stop to his anti woman ran essentially
inferior desecrators. Yeah, that's like such an eighth grade. Yeah,
(30:10):
such an eighth grade burn. Um. So we're gonna take
a massive leap now, though, and look at the industry today,
because like it or not, Frankloyd, right, inferior detecrators make
about thirty billion dollars a year as an industry, and
it is still very much female dominated. An article over
(30:31):
at Interior design dot Net reports that women out number
men in the field around two to one. And that's
in stark contrast to those stats we were giving in
our podcast on women in Architecture a while back. Yeah,
and the reasons why it is so popular with women
today really might not be that different from why it
attracted so many women in the past. I mean, in
(30:53):
the past it had given so many women who were
sort of living off the beaten path anyway, whether they
were coming out of the arts and crafts movement, whether
they didn't really want to get married and they just
wanted to work. It sort of gave them a path
to earning a living and having a respectable job, essentially,
and so New York School of Interior Design professor and
(31:13):
author Judith Gura suggests that the popularity of this field
with women partially has to do with the fact that
the industry allows women to take time off to raise families,
and the barrier of entry is lower since licensing isn't
necessary as with architecture, so you're not necessarily in school
and working toward a license for as long as you
(31:35):
would be if you were going to be an architect.
And on the one hand, that's great, and on the
other hand too, that gendering still seems largely intact, at
least as reflected in a quote from designer Barbara Berry
speaking to the website Interior Design, who said, I've never
felt the glass ceiling. As a woman, I feel uniquely
(31:57):
suited for design center around the home. And in talking
about how there are few and far between female starchitects,
you know those all star architects. The list of Marquis.
Female interior designers is quote nearly endless interior design reports.
(32:19):
And this is something you can see reflected to over
at El Decor that has a gallery upon gallery of
incredible female interior designers like Charlotte Moss, Holly Hunt, Muriel Brandolini,
Josie A. Tory, and Jill Stewart among some of its
female favorites. But when you start looking at this list
(32:39):
of names, and we started thinking, oh, okay, cool. This
is an industry that seems it was built up around
women and still remains pretty female friendly. But when you
look at these lists of all of these successful female
interior designers, it is great that this is an industry
that really has been built around women and will seems
(33:01):
very female friendly. But at the same time too, a
lot of the lists also make the industry seem pretty
not diverse. I mean, yeah, women, yea women, but is
it all just white women? Well? I think so much
of that goes back to class issues from the very beginning.
(33:21):
I mean, who was paying for interior decorators the new
white upper crust middle class and up. You know, people
who were oil tycoons, railroad tycoons, people like that, we're
paying for designers, and the people they were seeking out
because it was a female dominated field tended to be women,
(33:43):
and because of just the way that class structures were
sub those women tended to be white. They weren't these
wealthy oil barons weren't out searching for women of color
to come into their homes and decorate because those jobs
simply weren't open and available to women of color. Well,
and I think that phrase right there, come into their
homes says a lot too, because I have a feeling that,
(34:04):
from what we know about racism, that this idea of
someone of color coming into your home, into your private space,
would be reboting for a very long time. And this
is a sentiment that's echoed by renowned designer Sheila Bridges,
who is speaking to the Root about it. She says
(34:25):
design has always been a pretty elitist profession, so they've
definitely been challenges along the way, and many of them
have had to do with being black, And she references
the complexion of the industry, which she says remains basically
a hurdle for a lot of young black designers. But
she thinks that things like you know what, I'm obsessed
(34:47):
with HDTV basically shows and the Internet and designer collaborations
that are making design more accessible to a whole wide
swath of people are helping kind of open young people
bo's eyes to career possibilities or even just hobby possibilities,
that that there's more out there for them to do. Yeah,
and and she goes on to echo exactly what we
(35:10):
were talking about just a moment ago, about how African
Americans haven't had what she calls a long history of
being professional designers, mainly because we only just recently gained
the luxury of choosing it as a career. And it
was interesting in this interview that she was doing with
the Route Uh, the interviewer mentioned that they had talked
(35:34):
to other prominent black interior designers before and asked them
the same question of has race ever been a barrier
for you in your industry? And they all just declined
to even answer the question. It seems like it's still diversity,
is still something that is swept under the very expensive carpet. Yeah,
(35:57):
and I'm sure you know there might be an effort
there not to other yourself basically, if you're already feeling
like such an outlier in the industry, that you've chosen, Um,
you might not want to focus too much on what
sets you apart, but more about what makes you such
a standout talent. Yeah, and and and she was very encouraging.
Bridges was for young black students interested in designed to
(36:20):
go for it and network their way in and but
but still being cognizant that, yeah, there probably are going
to be some extra hurdles along the way. And I
gotta tell you, Caroline, I was also really surprised that
this was one of the only even blog post independent
blog posts I could find even addressing this issue of
(36:44):
diversity ethnic diversity within the interior design field. And perhaps
I just wasn't looking in the right places, But I
almost wonder if it's if it is even a concern. Well,
I think again, so much of that goes back to
a clientele and what names they're familiar with, especially from
their other fellow incredibly wealthy friends, and that if somebody
(37:07):
uses one designer, they might pass that name along. And
so there's a lot of like maybe the perpetuation of
the same type of designer or literally the same designer,
And there hasn't been as much room for for newbies,
people with different perspectives to come up through the ranks.
But then again, it's not like there's black design versus
white design. Well yeah, and that was something that Sheila
(37:29):
Bridges definitively said no to where the Route asked, well,
you know, is there a particular you know, black design
aesthetic and she was like, no, no, good design is
good design. Let's not make this like a race thing
at all. Um. Well, and I also though, wish that
we could have found some statistics too, comparing diversity within
(37:52):
residential design versus industrial design, because I wonder if the image,
if the picture would change at all when we're looking
more at commercial properties, businesses, public spaces versus private spaces. Um.
But speaking of private spaces, one rather surprising area of
(38:13):
diversity among early women interior designers that we've been talking about,
particularly the first half of this episode is when it
comes to sexual orientation. I assume going into this that
this was going to be you know, straight, white, wealthier women,
but it turns out that what Peter McNeill terms homeless
sociality was very common among the earliest interior decorators. Women
(38:39):
like Elsie d Wolf who was Boston married to Bessie Marbury.
They had one of the first open quote unquote Boston marriages,
which was essentially like, let's not call them lesbians in
New York society. But it's interesting that a sort of
lesbian designer stereotype never developed. Instead, we do still have
(39:00):
of the rich, straight white woman stereotype paired with the
very effeminine gay man stereotype. And I mean people were
writing even back in the thirties, there was one thing
we saw where, uh, some man, some man was writing
about fears of both fickle women and gay men ruining
(39:21):
what he called real art, that we have to take
it back from them. Basically, yeah, I mean, the gay
male interior decorator stereotype emerged really in tandem with the
lady decorator stereotypes because all of those kinds of things
of interest in home decor and domestic spaces and the
(39:42):
use of vibrant color was so deeply coded as feminine
that any interest in those kinds of things and in
commercialism and consumption was also coded feminine. So if you
were a guy who had a knack for and really
enjoy these kinds of things, well you were unquote effeminate man,
or you might have even been labeled a pansy, and
(40:04):
there was a lot of mistrust of you, particularly starting
in the interwar years. He was seen as sort of
the counterpoint to the frivolous flapper. You have the effeminate
man who is carrying all the shopping bags next to her. Yeah,
but it's funny because just like how high heels originated
as a man thing, so did interest in beautifying your home.
(40:28):
I mean, back in the eighteen hundreds, I mean, if
you were a wealthy man, you wanted to demonstrate your wealth,
and so you wanted to pick the most luxurious fabrics
and finishes for your home sort of demonstrate that. And
that sort of has all gone away to the point
where people write about, oh, you know, stereotypical husband just
(40:49):
being a guest in his wife's home because she's the
one who takes over all the decorating in the shopping well.
And nonetheless, though even with all of that stigmatizing a men,
gay or not, who were interested in decorating and designing, nonetheless,
within the industry, they were still more broadly respected than
(41:12):
icons like the Wolf and Dorothy Draper. There was still
more room and acceptance for gay men like Billy Baldwin
than there were for an LCD wolf, not being in
the industry at all but watching a whole lot of
home and Garden television. I want to say that attitude
still persists somewhat today. I mean, if you look at
(41:33):
the Nate burgass Is of the world, who is super
accessible thanks to his stint on Oprah and having a
target line, and then somebody like vern Yip, who was
who was a total design superstar um and has lived
in Atlanta. I don't know if he still does. Wasn't
he on Trading Spaces? Yes, he was loved Trading Spaces,
I know. And now he's like he's always in an
HDTV magazine also, which I'm always excited about. But it
(41:58):
seems like we just kind of look to the gay
male designer in our lives, whether that's in the pages
of a magazine or in real life, to to give
us the true and correct, fashionable design advice as opposed
to trusting a lady designer. Well, because according to stereotype,
he would offer us the best of both worlds. He has,
(42:19):
you know, the rationality of having the male brain, but
also the more a feminine design intuition to be able
to execute a well appointed room. So it's this episode
to me is just one oh one in how entrenched
(42:39):
gender norms have become in a very short amount of time.
It took about a century for us to just be like, oh,
you like color, Okay, you're either gay or you're a woman.
You like flowers? Gay or a woman? Like what? Yeah,
there's no room for a straight man to enjoy color,
flowers or decorating. Well, and that's what I wanted to
find too. Uh. In terms of adversity within the industry,
(43:01):
I know that there are straight male interior designers out there,
but I wonder if they are sort of the odd
men out um, So really relying on listeners for this one.
Curious to know what the status of these kinds of
identity politics are within interior design or maybe does it
(43:23):
just not matter? Are you just more collectively interested in
the design itself. Let us know mom Stuff at how
stuff works dot com is our email address. You can
also tweet us at mom stuff podcasts or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with you. Well,
(43:45):
I've got a Facebook message here from Sophie and she
is responding to our podcast on social Justice Warriors, and
she writes, Hi, I just want to thank you for
your episode about social Justice Warriors, specifically Tumbler users. I
feel any platform that is mostly used by young people
gets miscredited and questioned, So I get dang proud when
(44:06):
I see teenagers using trigger warnings or hashtagging food during
rabadon being so respectful to each other. I'm pretty sure
they didn't learn that from parents or in school. They
teach each other and it's brilliant. Tumbler is an awesome
place because people of all genders, sexualities, colors, and nationalities
are allowed a voice. It allows for beautiful things like
(44:27):
Blackout and Transvisibility Day to fill my feed and remind
me that my reality is not the only one. Thumbs
up to the podcast and police excuse grammar or spelling.
I'm Swedish, so thank you, Sophy, and your spelling and
grammar was fantastic. I have a Facebook message here from Crystal.
She says, Hi, I just started listening and love the series. Well, hello,
(44:50):
thank you, She says, I just listened to your hunting
podcast and it got me thinking about my last trip
that I want to share with you. My boyfriend and
I were out in the field and twin degree wendy
stormy weather for about eight hours looking for geese. After
freezing my bum off whenever I had to pee and
struggling to keep my clothes dry, I started looking up
(45:10):
female urination devices or fu D. I mean, how amazing
not having to drop my pants in cold weather. The
interesting part, though, is that when I mentioned it to
my boyfriend, he responded that it was weird and I
was quote not invited to future trips if I didn't
pee like a real country girl. I haven't had a
(45:31):
chance to test this, but I now have every intention
of busting out an fu D next time we head out. Anyways,
this gotta be wondering whether there's been a podcast on
these devices and the privilege of peeing while standing. Well, yes, indeed,
we do have a potty politics episode that would definitely
interest you, Crystal. Yeah, and I gotta say, Caroline for
(45:55):
a summer music festival season and all that I want
to fud. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sitting down
on Nope, I'm not gonna do it. If you have
any female urination device related thoughts or things about interior
design you would like to let us know. Mom stubb
at how stubworks dot com is our email address and
(46:16):
for links to all of our social media as well
as all of our blogs, videos, and podcasts, including this
one with all of our sources so you can follow along.
Head on over to stuff mom Never Told You dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
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