Where Are the Women Architects? by Despina Stratigakos

Author:Despina Stratigakos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

11. An image by Tom Morris encouraging women to embrace their editing power, March 2012. The image draws on the “We Can Do It!” poster created by J. Howard Miller in 1942 for the U.S. War Production Coordinating Committee as part of the World War II home-front mobilization campaign.

Given my prior interest, I noticed when, early in the morning of March 30, 2013, an editor with the user name CMdibev posted a brief entry on Schild. This editor, new to Wikipedia, had earlier in the same month posted numerous times on historical female figures, including on other women architects. Yet just thirteen minutes after the initial post on Schild appeared, a male editor, Der Krommodore, who has been posting on the site since 2008, had marked the article for immediate deletion (without the seven-day grace period for discussion usually afforded new entries). Admittedly, the entry on Schild seemed hastily written and was incomplete, and some of the criticisms were valid. But two things caught my eye (and raised my blood pressure): first, Der Krommodore asserted that Schild was not sufficiently accomplished to be listed on Wikipedia; and second, he expressed doubt that Schild had ever existed. During nearly twenty years of writing about women architects, I have certainly encountered dismissive attitudes toward the topic, but no one had ever denied the actual existence of my subjects. Der Krommodore, who identified himself as a Bavarian interested in linguistics as well as a monarchist and cigar-smoking, cognac-swilling insomniac, had Googled Schild and, finding nothing, assumed she was fictional. Eventually another editor told Der Krommodore to back off and give CMdibev time to complete the entry, but the latter seemed to give up. Over the next few weeks, however, other editors, in the kind of collaborative work that Wikipedia encourages, completed a detailed entry, thus saving Schild and baptizing her into the virtual world.

Still, the ease with which Der Krommodore could dismiss Schild was stunning—and this is exactly why ensuring the virtual presence of past women architects matters so much. As Mia Ridge, a young scholar and proponent of digital histories, argues, search engines are now shaping our conception of the world. A historian might spend decades undertaking research in archives and writing up discoveries in scholarly journals, but if the work does not have a presence online—and, specifically, a presence that is not behind a paywall—it is all but invisible outside academia. Ridge puts the dilemma plainly: “If it’s not Googleable, it doesn’t exist.”13 And because Wikipedia articles usually show up first in Google search rankings, intervening on the site is especially important in establishing online visibility.

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