Julia Morgan: Building the California Women's Movement

FAIN: FB-55747-11

Karen McNeill
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Oakland, CA 94611-4307)

"Julia Morgan: Building the California Women's Movement," is the first intellectual biography of America's most prolific woman architect and transforms Julia Morgan into a fiercely ambitious woman who devoted her career to building a landscape for modern womanhood. It is an interdisciplinary study that examines the intersection of biography, space, and gender in the United States and France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The feminist vision Morgan brought to the California landscape underscores the impact of the built environment on the everyday lives of women and challenges scholars to revise their understanding of modernity and architecture. Morgan and her clients used the built environment both consciously and unconsciously as a path to power, independence, and opportunity.