“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, but define yourself”—Harvey Fierstein
All living beings are blessed with certain unique characteristics that enable them to survive and prosper. The most amazing aspect is determination, which is fundamental to achieving one’s ambitions, a quality that forms the background of all successful stories of their heroes and heroines. Whether these are grappling with natural elements, discoveries, inventions, breaking glass ceilings, philanthropy, professionalism, community service, family problems, merely solving intricate problems or much, much more, determination is something that cannot be ignored.
Vince Lombardi, a famous football coach, rightly said: “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand”.
Undoubtedly, throughout the passage of time and compared to women, men have been found to have had greater attention as far as heroic deeds in all spheres of life are concerned. Contributions by females have mostly been underplayed and unrecognised. Their hard work, passion and accomplishments are hidden behind men’s fame as if to prove that only males have mental capabilities that are allegedly absent in females.
Besides, during the peak eras of patriarchy, women were openly discouraged from pursuing higher education or rubbing shoulders with men engaged in the so-called high-tech subjects, architectural engineering being one of them. When today’s woman has many privileges, these were not generously available in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Amid these disadvantages, born in 1872 in San Francisco, California, the United States of America, Julia Morgan became the pioneer of a profession that was purely under male domination. University of California, Berkley has had the honour of admitting her as the first female, majoring in civil engineering in 1894.
She joined Bernard Maybeck’s atelier, where she served as a draftsperson. At that time, Maybeck would encourage his male students to study in Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, regarded by the Americans as the most prominent school of architecture, admission to which was after a stringent exam and that too with an age limit. Likewise, he suggested the same to Julia, who took upon herself the idea and determination to join the school. Adamant to enter the institute, Julia sat for the entrance exam not just once but thrice, just as she was about to attain her age limit.
During the peak eras of patriarchy, women were openly discouraged from pursuing higher education or rubbing shoulders with men engaged in the so-called high-tech subjects, architectural engineering being one of them
Apparently, male bias prevented her from succeeding, but eventually she passed the exam in October 1898 and that too after Grand Prix de Rome winner, Francois-Benjamin Chaussemiche, took Julia under his wing. She became not only the first woman to graduate as a civil engineer, the first to have enrolled in the prestigious French institution and also the first licensed female architect in California.
Here was a woman who was bent on pursuing her dreams and asserting herself as an individual with an original identity in a world that was programmed to have male dominance. Requiring nerves of steel, tremendous courage and fierce determination, Julia eventually managed to carve out her path, going on to design more than seven hundred buildings over a span of 46 years.
Her most notable project was the El Campanil at Mills College, a reinforced concrete 72-foot-high bell tower completed in 1904 that withstood the horrendous 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires that destroyed more than 80% of the city’s buildings, proving her mettle in the field of engineering and architecture.
However, despite her achievements and due to the extreme influence of the prevailing male egocentricity, it was not until 2014 that she was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal, again, the first woman to receive the award in its 107-year history. This was more than fifty years after she died in 1957.
Beverly Willis (1928-2023), a famous American architect, declared at the ceremony: “We women, who graduated in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, were denied a phenomenal role model, of an incredible designer and successful practitioner”.
The list of underplayed women is long, but just to quote a few examples, here are a few names of those whose accomplishments have taken a backseat in men’s world. In politics, we have Cleopatra (69BCE to 30 BCE) of Egypt whose political acumen is overshadowed by romantic narratives. Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to run for president of the United States in 1872.
Benazir Bhutto was the first woman prime minister of Pakistan in 1988. Jeanette Rankin, who was elected to Congress in 1916, before women in America to be given the right to vote. Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress and the first to make a serious bid for the US presidency in 1972.
In science, there have been remarkable women too, like Hypatia of Alexandria, a renowned philosopher and mathematician in antiquity whose contributions to science were noteworthy even in the event of a scarcity of documentation on her life. Ada Lovelace, who is recognised as the first computer programmer, for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Margaret Hamilton, who developed the Apollo spacecraft’s onboard navigation software, fundamental to the success of the moon’s landings.
Chien Shiung Wu, also known as the “First Lady of Physics,” who worked on the Manhattan Project and conducted the Wu experiment, contradicting the law of conservation of parity. Rosalind Franklin, whose crucial X-ray diffraction data on DNA were used by Watson and Crick to determine the double-helix structure, often without attribution at that time.