Events

Thursday, Feb 27, 2025

Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series: Dolores Hayden

Domestic Revolutions, Then and Now

 

Thursday, Feb 27, 2025

5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Sciame Auditorium (Room 107)
141 Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031

Headshot of Dolores Hayden
 

This lecture is part of the Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series "Still Making Space for Gender."

Dolores Hayden (she/her) writes about the history and politics of American-built environments. Among her notable books are Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (Pantheon, 2003) and Redesigning the American Dream (Norton, 1984). In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995) she explores preservation and public art. The Grand Domestic Revolution (MIT Press, 1981) documents material feminists’ campaigns to reform housing, neighborhoods, and cities.

Before she retired from Yale as Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies in 2017, Hayden taught at MIT and UCLA. She's received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages, and she's received many awards including the National Building Museum's Scully Award for lifetime achievement in the built environment, and the Ucelay Award from the Spanish Ministry of Transportation and Planning for pioneering work on gender.

Hayden is also a widely published poet. Her third collection, Exuberance (Red Hen Press, 2019), explores risk in the voices of female and male stunt pilots from the earliest years of American aviation.

"Domestic Revolutions, Then and Now": Housing and urban infrastructure were controversial topics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, part of broad debates about how to define public and private life in urban, and industrial societies. At the center is the labor of social reproduction, the everyday nurturing of children and the elderly as well as other adults often called care work. Is it recognized and supported? Or is care work taken for granted until it is missing? The pandemic foregrounded these questions, but they were the subject of my 1981 book, A Grand Domestic Revolution. A century and a half ago, some women in the suffrage movement campaigned to reshape cities and suburbs to support gender equality. Because these activists challenged the spatial and economic constraints of “woman’s sphere,” I called them “material feminists.” They believed the vote was not enough. They argued the built environment had to change to recognize women’s unpaid nurturing work. I will discuss some of their projects and update their influence in both the US and Europe in 2025.

Suggested Reading: The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (MIT Press, 1981).

"Still Making Space for Gender" centers women and LGBTQIA+ folk in the built environment. While the discourse framing gender morphs and gender identities broaden and become more intersectional, the predicament remains the same. Women and LGBTQIA+folk continue to struggle against exploitation and fight for equal rights and equity opportunities in the United States, with this situation troubling unrelenting claims of exceptionalism at home and abroad. Although gender politics are ever present, achievements are hard-won and sometimes rolled back in the face of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other ingrained expressions of exclusion. Buildings, cities, and landscapes are not only where battles over gender unfurl, but these spaces also foster identities and incite change. In this lecture series, trailblazing women and LGBTQIA + design practitioners, scholars, and activists—working in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—insist that gender must remain in sharp focus if we are to shape equitable and just built environments.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

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