Erasing a Woman:
The Canon, Absence, and Gender

Conferring meaning is perhaps the central task of the scholar. As Hall suggests, meanings are articulated (and come to stick, tenaciously) through the stories we tell as disciplinary practitioners. As these stories accrue, as their residue becomes so weighty it seems to have the substance of reality, meanings fix and crystallize, entombing what was a story, a description, in an architecture of meaning. A Truth. The central task of the contemporary feminist scholar must be to exhume these dead truths and perform an autopsy: examine and display their decayed innards and help make new stories stick–at least for a time.

One of the first steps in this process is to demonstrate how meanings can accrue and stick because they simply reflect the easy truths that are part of an uninterrogated cultural knowledge. As James Weirick writes of Mahony Griffin:

Writing in 1988, nearly twenty-five years into the history of Griffin scholarship, James Weirick is the first author to analyze the lack of correct biographical material on Marion Mahony Griffin. He correctly identifies the cause of misinformation, I think, when he calls it "a disregard verging on contempt." Mahony Griffin was not studied for her own contributions to architecture, but to situate (and sublimate) her and her work in relation to the men in her life, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. Because the goal was not to establish her place in the architectural canon, the specifics of her life (spelling of her name, dates of birth and death for example) fell victim to the primary scholarly effort–to establish and fix the canon of "great men" whose genius–personalities, buildings and texts–would become central to the story of architecture. As Thomas Tallmadge wrote in the forward to his Story of Architecture in America, the canon was composed of:

Tallmadge was right, for as Williamson points out, the rule of the architectural canon is "once a name is on record in several histories, it is likely to appear again" (211). Conversely, once a name is left out of the histories of its time, it is unlikely to appear later, except by a great effort to reassess the discipline in the way that feminist scholarship has attempted to reclaim the work of early women practitioners.

In these ways, the process of canon formation in the discipline of architecture works in much the same way as it does in other disciplines–the canon is a great part of the discursive apparatus constructed by disciplinary practitioners to create meaning–to turn buildings into Architecture, the privileged term in the binary pair. As Garry Stevens asserts:

The canon is one such "intellectual instrument"; one of the stories this instrument weaves is about gender in architecture. The works of women, because they are not part of the "major" canon, are perhaps good, but not great.

The canon has a three part construction–great men, great monuments, and great texts. Architects, the great men, design buildings and, sometimes, write texts, which sometimes, become part of the canon. Architectural historians write texts that canonize great men and great monuments, and which, sometimes, become part of the canon. Both are necessary for the existence of architecture; this is not to say that without architectural historians (or architects, for that matter) we would not inhabit buildings, for clearly we would. But we would not have the discourse that has valorized architecture and those who produce it. The discourse is the architecture. Therefore, historians occupy a very important position in the discipline; in fact, critics like Stevens assert that the "discipline" is entirely composed of scholars, while the "profession" is made up of architects (206).

I begin this first chapter with a discussion of recent biographical treatments of Mahony Griffin, then provide a context for this study with a brief biography which attempts to introduce a competent and compelling woman whose life and work are too little known. This Marion Mahony Griffin perhaps lurked beneath the surface of earlier depictions, but was hidden behind a caricature description–one that was part woman and part Woman, informed, formed and deformed by the notion of Woman that plays at the edges of the discourse of architecture. I then discuss the larger architectural canon, women's almost total exclusion from it, Marion Mahony Griffin's position in it, and her related treatment in the canon of Griffin studies. I argue that within Griffin studies, early depictions treated her with a "disregard verging on contempt." When she was mentioned, the very facts of her life were treated with a disregard that suggested even minimal scholarly efforts were wasted on her. Moreover, the details of her life that were included in these minimal representations worked to gender her in ways that kept her from the canon of "great men." After tracing the early secondary scholarship concerning Mahony Griffin, and examining the ways in which it undermined her professional contributions by focusing on personal idiosyncrasies (whether accurate or not), I suggest that Mahony Griffin's treatment is not anomalous, but is the standard in the field, as the case of Julia Morgan attests.

Two book-length treatments of Mahony Griffin's life have been discussed for over ten years–Anna Rubbo's which was first mentioned in 1987's "Marion Mahony Griffin: A Portrait"–and Aja Preliasco's which is now fighting to find a home at its third publishing house. Although as late as 1996, it was still general knowledge within Griffin studies that at least two biographies were nearing publication, four years later, there is still no published biography of Mahony Griffin. Preliasco suggested wryly that "the movie may be out before the book." In addition, though scholars have called for its publication for more than ten years, Mahony Griffin's own text The Magic of America is no closer to publication.

Although the fight for a complete discussion of Mahony Griffin's life is far from won, there do exist several fine article-length biographies of Marion Mahony Griffin and her work, but each of these has a narrow focus that leaves readers wanting and needing more information. Berkon and Kay's article for a 1975 Feminist Art Journal and Berkon's subsequent entry on Mahony Griffin for Susanna Torre's 1977 Women and American Architecture are brief, but accurate early biographical treatments of Mahony Griffin's life and work. Although they do not mention previous scholarly inaccuracies, Berkon and Kay do note and take issue with earlier "Historians who have seen her marriage as her [Mahony Griffin's] lifelong ulterior goal" (13). Although their article was published in 1975, it was not cited in Griffin studies until much later, and many articles and books written after it retained the inaccuracies of (male) scholarship that mar the early works on the Griffins. That such inaccuracies remained prevalent late into Griffin scholarship suggests that Berkon and Kay's feminist biography had little impact on mainstream architectural historians whose work on Mahony Griffin must not even have included a search of available secondary literature. Neither Berkon and Kay's article nor Berkon's encyclopedia entry are cited by Griffin scholars for more than ten years, until 1988, when the Australia's Monash University Gallery published a catalogue, Walter Burley Griffin – A Re-View, which attempted to reconsider the Griffins work and assert the possibility of professional, as well as personal, collaboration.

Anna Rubbo's 1988 "Marion Mahony Griffin: A Portrait" published in Walter Burley Griffin – A Re-View is a strong first effort as scholars began to try to tell Mahony Griffin's story within the larger story of the Griffins' architectural practice. Rubbo's strengths are in her ability to work outside typical architectural studies methodologies and to speculate that the historical attribution of the architecture to Griffin and the decorative work to Mahony Griffin might not be based in fact but in habit. The extensive quotations from MOA lend the article a sense of voice and of Mahony Griffin's energy and intensity, which had never been accessible to readers of secondary sources before this one.

Weirick's "Marion Mahony at M.I.T." is another strong biographical effort–he both corrects earlier misinformation about the facts of Mahony Griffin's life and attempts to push at the edges of scholarship about her architecture as well, wondering if her thesis designs from M.I.T., "The House and Studio of a Painter," might not have influenced Wright's choice to build a studio connected to his home. Weirick's speculation is strongly argued and is the first of several other speculative articles questioning the central claims of the first generation of scholars. One of these central shifts is that later (Australian) scholars move to drop issues of individual attribution and often write about the work of "The Griffins" (Weirick, Rubbo, Burns, Hamann, Proudfoot). Weirick's addition to the catalogue Walter Burley Griffin A Re-View, like Rubbo's, attempts to breathe life into the historical figure of Mahony Griffin and argue that scholars should take her text seriously.

This catalogue, rounded out by Conrad Hamann's essay, "Themes and Inheritances: The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony" and Peter Y. Navaretti's inventory of the Griffins Australian projects, represented a turning point in scholarship about the Griffins. Not only did these scholars expand Mahony Griffin's role in the architectural practice, they simply treated her with an intelligent dignity that seems wholly appropriate.

Janice Pregliasco, writing her "The Life and Work of Marion Mahony Griffin" in 1995, does not cite any of the earlier Australian scholarship on the Griffins. Although her biography is the most complete (and compelling) telling of Mahony Griffin's life, she becomes mired in the politics of attribution, making some strong claims for Mahony Griffin's work as designing architect on several important projects. Although the speculation is fascinating, and the assertions are no more or less scholarly than the speculations of the previous generation of scholars, the assertions are fundamentally like the speculations of previous scholars in that they privilege individual contributions and refuse to interrogate the disciplinary discourse that requires and respects only architects for whom individual attribution can be proven. Another Griffin scholar has since focused his career on refuting Pregliasco's assertions. This intense focus has undermined the authority of Pregliasco's research.

These authors, in spite of some of the limitations of the scope of their biographical treatments, employ Mahony Griffin's own text and words consistently in their telling of her life–this is very different than earlier scholars who tended to both dismiss her text and then characterize her (and her text) in specifically gendered (and dismissable) terms.

The Chicago fire of 1871 occupies a central space in the narrative of modern architecture, a story in which modernism is the phoenix rising from the ashes of a woman's (Mrs. O'Leary's) careless accident; the old song asserts playfully: "as her cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said, 'There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight.'" By mythic association, Mrs. O'Leary becomes the woman most central to the story of modern architecture, and her association is accidental–borne of an accident–she is blamed for her cow's carelessness. Born in 1871 in Chicago, Marion Lucy Mahony's autobiography describes her infant self being carried from the burning city in a clothes basket. Although the story was no doubt truly Mahony family lore, its inclusion in her narrative attempts to tie a second woman to the first cause of modern architecture, born the same year, growing and learning under the same influences that shaped modernism in Chicago.

After the fire, the Mahony family settled in an area just north of Evanston, Illinois, then known as Hubbard Woods, a neighborhood in Winnetka. According to Michael Ebner, in Creating Chicago's North Shore, Winnetka itself was founded by Unitarians (which may be what drew the Mahonys there, as they were also Unitarians); by 1880 it had a population of 584 and was more "like a pioneer town than a suburb" (83). The area of Hubbard Woods within Winnetka was "A smaller cluster of homes mostly larger in size, several of them owned by families associated with the merchandiser known as Carson, Pirie, Scott" (83). Mahony Griffin describes a pastoral childhood where she had easy access to a natural world that became central to her developing religious beliefs. Hubbard Woods offered intellectual opportunity as well, of which it seems likely the Mahonys would have been a part.

Mahony Griffin's father, Jeremiah Mahony, was an Irishman born in County Cork, Ireland, a "poet, journalist, and educator" (Rubbo "Portrait" 16) who according to Weirick, "had the reputation of being a better teacher drunk than most teachers sober" ("M.I.T." 49). Her mother, Clara Hamilton Mahony, was the daughter of a respected doctor who moved from New Hampshire to down state Illinois and had ties to liberal politics of Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster–her mother's reminiscences suggest that Lincoln was a guest in her parents' home (MOA IV 92). The public hall of Winnetka's Unitarian chapel saw discussions of literary works and contemporary issues (Ebner 84). Intellectual couples like Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross Lloyd–described in Ebner's book as "intellectual activists"–organized a variety of community activities and political actions; they considered Winnetka "a laboratory where he [Henry] tested his theories about the practice of democracy" (84). The Lloyds' beliefs were certainly in step with those of Mahony's parents–and they had friends in common, from liberal educators to the Unitarian minister Robert Collyer (84). This combined access to liberal intellectual activism and an unspoiled natural environment must have had a profound influence on the child Marion, for she attempted to replicate the combination throughout her life, though most specifically in Castlecrag, in Sydney, Australia.

This life in Winnetka ended after Mahony's father died when she was eleven and the family's youngest child was four (MOA IV 134). Pregliasco calls the death suicide (165), though Weirick writes that Mahony died "from a self-administered overdose of laudanum" (49). Weirick goes on to quote his obituary which suggested Mahony "was cursed with a physical organization which rendered him particularly alive to incidental evils" ("M.I.T." 49); such a comment seems to suggest not suicide, but the accidental overdose of an addict.

After their own home caught fire, sometime after her father's death (MOA III 77), the five Mahony children and their mother moved to the west side of Chicago, where Clara Mahony studied for and passed the Chicago Public School Board exam to become an elementary principal. Active in school reform, she served as principal of the radical Komensky school until she was 76 years old. In The Magic of America Mahony Griffin suggests she keenly understood her mother's position as a single parent, writing, "the whole responsibility in every field on her alone, economic, domestic, educational and social" (IV 137). Mahony Griffin's aunt Myra Perkins, herself never married, moved in with the family and became young Marion's confidant, encouraging her intellectual pursuits. Mahony Griffin reports that the women in her family were noted for their "refinement, intellect and good cooking" (MOA IV 91). It was in this household of strong women that Mahony Griffin was exposed to their women friends, people such as Ella Flagg Young, the educational reformer who helped Clara Mahony study for her Chicago School District Board exams (MOA IV 137), and Mary Hawes Wilmarth the Chicago suffragist (Weirick "M.I.T." 49). She never lacked successful women as role models.

Neither did she lack architects as role models. Mahony Griffin's cousin, Dwight Heald Perkins, studied architecture at MIT for two years (Davis 4); it is likely that this connection led Marion to MIT in 1890. Her education was funded by Anna Wilmarth, the daughter of her mother's friend Mary Hawes Wilmarth (MOA IV 152). In the pages of Magic of America devoted specifically to her own life, Mahony Griffin provides little information about the time in her life between her childhood in Hubbard Woods and her graduation from MIT, although she writes of her interest in the theater; she played, at various times, Beatrice, Portia, and Olivia (III 39) and according to Weirick, she was the first woman to take the stage in the dramatic productions at M.I.T. ("M.I.T." 51). She also writes of her friendship with her "idolized" Aunt Myra (III 76) her penchant for lying, (which she asserts must have been a general stand against authority) (IV 133) a habit of stealing change from her father (III 74) and a friendship of intellectual intensity with another Marion (Marion Lincoln Lewis), who Mahony Griffin described as a Pre-Raphaelite beauty of the "Burne-Jones" sort with whom she discussed Kant (III 72, IV 156).

Her senior thesis at M.I.T., titled, "The House and Studio of a Painter," was assumed to be lost for many years, but was discovered buried in the M.I.T. archives in the 1970s (Weirick "M.I.T." 50). The plan is for a house attached to a studio by means of as colonnade enclosing a courtyard garden. The house is vaguely Second Empire in style–which would have been quite popular in 1894–drawings show a mansard roof and French neo-classical details. The studio is a charmingly simple rectangular building with large windows and pedimented ends. The project itself is not particularly interesting (by which I mean it shows none of her later architectural preoccupations), but the concept is unusual as it connected a suburban home to a workplace. Weirick suggests that it is quite possible this unusual living/working concept influenced Wright's choice to build his studio adjacent to his home–a project he began working on in 1897-98, two or three years after Marion Mahony joined his office. The possibility certainly exists, and historians like Grant Carpenter Manson had been guessing at Wright's unusual decision for years, asking, "It is life in a Continental vein–paternalistic, imperious, strangely alien to American customs. Where did it come from?" (Weirick 52, Manson 46). Although David Van Zanten, in his "Frank Lloyd Wright's Kindergarten" connects the home studio to Henry Hobson Richardson's home office in Brookline, Massachusetts (59), he goes on to assert the differences between the two. Richardson's home would have been known to Mahony, studying in Boston, where Richardson's untimely death in 1886 made him something of a legend. Whether or not Mahony Griffin did influence Wright's decision to build his studio attached to his Oak Park home, Weirick's willingness to begin to speculate in new ways about the relationship architectural historians had established for Wright and Mahony Griffin opened the door to a new wave of speculative scholarship in Griffin studies. This new work has attempted to reexamine received habits of scholarship by noting that they, too are in good measure speculative.

When she graduated in 1894, Mahony Griffin was just the second woman to graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of architecture, and the first to succeed in placing herself in an apprenticeship position following graduation, in the office of her cousin, Dwight Perkins, who began practice in Chicago in 1888. She joined Perkins's office in 1894, following her graduation, and helped him complete the drawings for his eleven story office/theater building, Steinway Hall. As she writes in MOA, "One year in the office of D.H. Perkins getting out at that time the working drawings of Steinway Hall, with the whole drafting force lending me a hand to put me through my paces, gave me a sound foundation in that field" (IV 110).

After Perkins had to let Mahony Griffin go in 1895 due to an economic downturn, she briefly worked with two other architects who she identifies in the 1894 Classbook only as classmates from M.I.T. who did not graduate. Spencer and Hunt were at M.I.T. at roughly the same time as Mahony Griffin, but both had already studied or earned degrees at other institutions. It seems possible that they would be the classmates for whom Mahony Griffin worked briefly, before she moved on to Wright in his Schiller Building offices. Moreover, historian H. Allen Brooks discusses this 1896 period as the time in which "Wright apparently helped Myron Hunt with a double house in Evanston for Catherine White" (Prairie School 28). This is a commission which, according to architect Barry Byrne, Mahony Griffin also claims to have worked on, suggesting she was interacting with the architects of Steinway Hall during this time before the house was built around 1897 (Van Zanten "Early Work" 10). This means that at least some of the time she worked for Wright his offices were at Steinway Hall.

Placing Mahony Griffin within the creative milieu of Steinway Hall is not just a mental exercise–it was a time of mythic architectural activity in Chicago, the birth place of Sullivan's Kindergarten, within view, historians tell, of Sullivan's own office high in the Auditorium Theater tower. As Brooks argues, in introducing the importance of Steinway Hall's working environment, "Frank Lloyd Wright's development as an architect should be traced not only in the buildings he designed, but in the milieu in which he worked" ("Steinway Hall" 171). Such an environment is clearly important to Wright's and others' architectural development; Brooks closes his article by asserting, "Thus the group at Steinway Hall had had an influence far beyond the confines of official practice" ("Steinway Hall" 175). Yet, Mahony Griffin has never been placed in this hotbed of radical young Chicago architects, even though she had clear connections to almost all the other architects who moved through the office, including Griffin, the politically radical Pond brothers, and later Hermann von Holst. Because this is such an important architectural milieu, it is a stunning omission that Brooks makes not once, but twice, when he refuses to connect Mahony Griffin to this important architectural moment. Part of the work of this study is to begin to project her into those important moments of history which she may have inhabited but from which her presence has been occluded.

Mahony Griffin's presence at Frank Lloyd Wright's Studio is much more carefully documented. Architect Barry Byrne, who came to the studio in 1902 as a nineteen-year-old, lived until 1967, and was able to offer insight into the workings of Wright's studio and the lives of the architects who worked there. Other informants on studio life were Wright's second son John, the inventor of Lincoln Logs who also became an architect, and the sculptor Richard Bock whose own unpublished autobiographical manuscript informs several secondary sources on Wright. Mahony Griffin seems to have been a close friend of not just Wright, but his wife Catherine (Kitty), who was within a few months of Mahony Griffin's age and with whom she was photographed early in the century. From the Wright's home, connected to the studio in which Mahony Griffin worked, Catherine Wright ran a kindergarten for her own children and others in the Oak Park, Illinois neighborhood. Mahony Griffin's life-long interest in children and education would have been shared with Catherine Wright.

It was Byrne who suggested that Mahony Griffin was "the most talented member of Frank Lloyd Wright's staff, and I doubt that the studio, then or later, produced anyone superior" (109). Wright's son John, in an often quoted letter to historian Mark Peisch (now in the Avery Architectural Library) recalled as a child first fearing Mahony, writing that she: "was so ugly, and her laugh so boisterous that I was afraid of her. Later, after seeing and appreciating her beautiful drawings, I thought she was beautiful" (qtd. Pregliasco 166). Though often described by contemporary scholars as "homely," Mahony Griffin seemed to possess a dynamic personality that made her attractive to others, although most early secondary sources omit references except those to her physical appearance. Brendan Gill, in his biography of Wright entitled Many Masks, somewhat more charitably describes her as a "gaunt, beaky, beauty" (186) and "A tall young woman of Irish ancestry, in appearance and disposition much like Yeats's beloved Maud Gonne" (187). And certainly photographs of her from this period depict a young woman with strong, but attractive features, usually dressed theatrically, with flowing, unfitted dresses skimming her tall, willowy frame. Byrne, though describing her as unattractive, goes on to suggest she was a "fiery, spectacularly brilliant person" (qtd. Rubbo "Portrait" 18). Richard Bock wrote that she was a "brilliant intellectual and a match for Wright in debate. She served as a source of practice and training for his lecturing" (qtd. Pregliasco 166).

Byrne also describes the informal competitions Wright would hold in the studio among employees, to design the details of a project: stained glass, murals, mosaics, linens and furnishings. Occasionally, staff even designed plans and elevations as well. Byrne remembers that Mahony Griffin won most of the competitions, and that Wright filed the results of the competitions for future use. Wright retained credit for all these designs–and Byrne asserts that Wright sharply reprimanded anyone who referred to "Miss Mahony's design" (Van Zanten "Early Work" 10, Pregliasco 166, Rubbo "Portrait" 20, Manson 217).

Gill asserts that Mahony Griffin seemed to be "one of the few people whom Wright appears not to have dared patronize" (187) and it seems that Mahony Griffin did have some sort of intense intellectual friendship with Wright. Byrne reports that their lively conversations promised an interesting day in the studio, writing, "Her dialogues with Frank Lloyd Wright, who we all know is no indifferent opponent in repartee, made such days particularly notable" (qtd. Rubbo 18). Gill adds, later in his story, that Wright "felt drawn to women who assumed an embattled posture vis-à-vis accepted rules of male conduct . . . Marion Mahony, Mamah Cheney, and Miriam Noel, to say nothing of his third wife, Olgivanna Milanov (246). Whatever Mahony Griffin would have thought about being listed among Wright's lovers (we can assume not much, based on her anger at Wright following his defection from his family), it seems clear Wright respected her enough to grant her huge responsibilities within his office.

Grant Carpenter Manson, another Wright biographer, asserts that in a more conventionally organized office, she would have held the title of "head designer" (217). Mahony herself suggested that she was hired by Wright as "superintendent of his drafting force" (Berkon 75). Though the title would have been hollow when she was first hired in 1895 and was Wright's only employee, it does seem clear that she took up such a role as more employees were hired. She was also put in charge of creating many of Wright's presentation drawings, and historian Eileen Michels notes an improvement in Wright's drawings starting with the rendering for the Francis Apartments (302). In her autobiography, Mahony Griffin notes that the first project she worked on in Wright's office was the Francis Apartments (IV 110).

During the time she worked for Wright, she completed work on at least three independent projects: a house for her mother and herself, an addition to her brother's farmhouse in Elkhart, Indiana (from which a stained glass window exists in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago), and a Unitarian Church in Evanston, Illinois. Mahony Griffin originally designed an octagonal plan for the church, one not unlike Wright's octagonal studio. But the congregation wanted something more conservative and "more Gothic" (Pregliasco 171). The little Neo-Gothic church that resulted was built in 1903 of rough-faced limestone–historian Carl Condit wrote of it:

The project for which Mahony Griffin is perhaps best known during her years in Wright's studio did not come to be associated with her until long after its publication in 1910. Wright's portfolio, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, von Frank Lloyd Wright, published in Berlin after he left the country, is according to historian Vincent Scully, "one of the three most influential architectural treatises of the twentieth century" (Studies and Execated Buildings 5). The portfolio, drawings of Wright's work through 1909, established the Sullivan school as part of a movement of international modernism, introducing it to Europe for really the first time. Part of the portfolio's success was its use of Mahony Griffin's distinctive drawing style–it was influenced by the sparse detail, continuous line, and skewed perspective and dramatic space of Japanese prints. The visual effect of these drawings was heightened by the contrast between the linear style of Wright's architecture and the curvilinear forms of the naturalistic environment in which Mahony Griffin sited the structures. Most historians now credit her with at least half the drawings in portfolio (Rubbo "Portrait" 15, Gill 209, Berkon 75, Brooks "Frank Lloyd Wright" 20, Pregliasco 170). According to Pregliasco, Byrne retained an annotated copy of the monograph which attributed more than half the drawings to Mahony (170). Rubbo suggests that, "However, Wright's eagerness to suppress co-authorship probably led him to delete her characteristic monogram from the published drawings" ("Portrait" 21). H. Allen Brooks asserts that of the 27 attributable drawings, 17 were by Mahony Griffin and ten were by Mahony Griffin and others ("Wasmuth Drawings" 202).

When Wright left for Europe with Mamah Cheney, a married client and neighbor, abandoning his own wife and six children as well as his practice, he collected fees on a number of unfinished projects in order to finance his trip and left the rest to a young architect at Steinway Hall named Hermann von Holst. Though it seems Wright first offered the opportunity to Mahony Griffin and others in his studio, most of them had had prior bad experiences in business dealings with Wright; they all refused. von Holst had no prior experience with Wright's architectural style and immediately hired Mahony Griffin to complete Wright's commissions. Of the eight projects that came from this period, four were built. The projects for Henry Ford's estate of Fairlane, near Detroit, Michigan, the house for Childe Harold Wills, the designer of Ford's Model T, a commercial building and a project for a small house were not built. A house for David Amberg in Grand Rapids, Michigan and a cluster of three houses in a development called Millikin Place, in Decatur, Illinois were all built. The discourse surrounding these houses and their attribution will be discussed in the following chapter, but in terms of Mahony Griffin's personal and professional life, this period was important. Working with von Holst at Steinway Hall reunited her with Griffin, who had left Wright's studio several years before over non-payment of wages (the reason most of Wright's employees–including his own son John–eventually had to leave). Griffin worked out the landscape schemes for the Millikin Place houses, and may have collaborated with Mahony Griffin on the actual designs. This professional proximity led Mahony Griffin to fall in love.

In The Magic of America, she describes falling in love with Griffin:

Marion Mahony was forty years old in the spring of 1911 when she found herself in love with the thirty-four-year-old Griffin, who lived with his parents in Elmhurst, Illinois and was described by Van Zanten as an "imperturbable bachelor" ("Early Work" 19). The courtship began with the joint purchase of a white canoe which they used for weekend camping explorations of the Chicago River and connecting waterways. In her short essay "The Autobiography of Xantippe," Mahony Griffin describes their weekends sleeping in canvas bags with the boat "Allana" as her bed (MOA IV 274-276). After one such weekend, June 29, 1911, they eloped to Michigan City, Indiana (the Indiana Dunes), on the east side of Lake Michigan, and were married.

Mahony Griffin began drafting her presentation drawings for Griffin soon after their marriage. The project that would change their lives was the announcement of an international competition to design the new Australian national capital, Canberra. The competition was announced in April, 1911, before the Griffins married, though it seems likely that procrastinating Griffin did not begin much work on the plans until several months later, at Mahony Griffin's prompting. Mahony Griffin composed the presentation drawings with several other architects, including Roy Lippincott who would later marry Griffin's sister Genevieve and accompany the Griffins to Australia.

Magic of America provides insight into both the work on the project and the Griffins' temperaments and collaboration. She asserts that while Griffin was still a university student he noted the newly federated Australia and guessed that an international competition would be held to plan a suitable capital:

In order to complete the many drawings for this project, Mahony Griffin employed a rendering technique she had developed which produced inked drawings on satin fabric in a lithograph inspired technique that employed photographic dyes (Peisch 111). The resulting renderings are now a part of the architectural drawing collection at the National Archives of Australia. Mahony Griffin's drawings were the only ones of the 137 entrants that sited the capital within the context of Canberra's semi-arid mountains–the other mainly European and North American architects depicted a green city and a blue sky. Mahony Griffin's renderings captured the rich variety of ochres, golds, browns, and russets that comprise the Australian landscape neither of the Griffins had seen but for black-and-white photos. Such a depiction of the beauty of the harsh landscape perhaps resonated with the judges. On May 23, 1912, Griffin was declared the winner of the competition. Although some critics were unimpressed with the results of the competition, several cited Mahony Griffin's unusual presentation drawings as perhaps influencing the judges. Peisch notes that "A British critic, commenting on the fact that an unknown American architect had won such a distinguished prize, said that the beauty of the renderings probably had a great deal to do with the judges' decision to award the prize to Griffin's plan" (111). Pregliasco quotes Town Planning Review's assessment of the competition:

Already Mahony Griffin's contributions were being subsumed in her husband's work, but this early assessment suggests that those contributions to the partnership were an important part of the Griffins' ability to win important commissions.

Of the last important commissions the Griffins were to undertake in the United States, one seems to have come to Griffin through Mahony Griffin's influence. The housing development of Rock Crest/Rock Glen in Mason City, Iowa is the most extensive planned community of Sullivan School dwellings built. Dr. Robert McCoy, in his detailed 1968 Prairie School Review article, best describes the sequence of events that led Wright, and then Griffin to Mason City. He asserts (and his assertions are supported by the recollections of Mahony Griffin in MOA and Barry Byrne) that Joshua Melson of Mason City first came to Wright for the design of a house–Wright designed a house and Mahony Griffin drew up a perspective drawing that was later published in the Wasmuth portfolio. For whatever reason, Melson did not build at the time, but when he was still seeking a house in 1911, he approached not Wright but Mahony Griffin, with whom he seems to have had a good relationship, according to McCoy (16). By her own telling, Mahony Griffin attempted to brush off Melson when he approached her; she was busy and knew his history of requesting plans and never building. In any case, Melson then

Mahony Griffin then shared drawings of her husband's work, and soon Griffin traveled to Mason City and returned with a commitment signed by the buyers to reclaim the land, which had been used as a garbage dump, and maintain large tracts along the creek as open common space after houses were built. Mahony Griffin's perspective of colored ink on silk depicts as community of sixteen homes set in the green ravine of a meandering creek. Five of these homes were built to the Griffins' designs, but other architects of the Sullivan school also designed homes for this area. More than a dozen houses were built: the Griffins', Barry Byrne's, Drummond's, Wright's and those by a local builder/architect Elinear Broaten. Although Mahony Griffin's exact role in these commissions is not known, she clearly was point of contact between these clients and Griffin and she undoubtedly created the presentation drawings that were such convincing arguments in themselves for the intelligence of hiring Griffin for the job.

In 1913, Griffin was appointed Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction, and moved to Australia in order to oversee the construction of Canberra from the city that was the previous national capital, Melbourne. Mahony Griffin and the Lippincotts stayed in Sydney, where they opened another architectural office. It is through the Sydney office that most private commissions came, while Griffin fought the battle to keep his Canberra plan intact. During this time, the Griffins designed two of their most important early Australian commissions: Cafe Australia (1915) and Newman College (1916). Griffin's appointment was terminated after a heartbreaking and disillusioning interaction with the Australian federal government, and both Mahony Griffin and the Lippincotts joined Griffin in Melbourne in 1917 where they stayed until the 1920s, the Griffins living in the one room house Pholiota (mushroom).

It was in 1925 that Mahony Griffin "half in a temper, half in desperation" (III 118) at the state of their marriage, returned alone to Sydney and another community planning experiment, this time along an unspoiled stretch of Sydney's Middle Harbor. They called their suburb Castlecrag, and it became a true experiment in communal and community living. Like Melson house in Mason City, the first houses at Castlecrag were built of native stone to integrate the buildings more thoroughly with the natural landscape. Later, the houses used concrete blocks and Griffin's patented Knitlock system.

Jill Roe, in her account of life in Castlecrag entitled, "The Magical World of Marion Mahony Griffin," describes Castlecrag as a center of Theosophical and Anthroposophical thought in Sydney. According to Roe:

The Griffins were committed Anthroposophists–Weirick and Rubbo suggest that their interest in occult religion and Steiner may have intensified following their disappointments over Canberra ("Spirituality and Symbolism" 58-59, "Numinous World" 126), disappointments which they seemed to associate with a growing materialist bent in Australian culture which they felt, left unchecked, would destroy the country's natural beauty (Roe 94-98). In addition to creating a lecture series in Anthroposophy at Castlecrag, Mahony Griffin spent an active life developing a "little theatre" which is still in use, acting in and costuming plays, teaching local children, and generally being the heart and soul of Castlecrag.

Although The Magic of America asserts Mahony Griffin's interest in drama from her teen years, the religious beliefs she came to later in her life asserted the centrality of dramatic creativity to the creative soul. Mahony Griffin worked tirelessly to develop Castlecrag's open air theatre, which according to Roe was performing the most interesting and progressive dramatic work any where in Sydney, at that time (90). Mahony Griffin writes about costuming these plays, asserting, "Indeed, my own knack at costuming was, I am convinced, the only faculty that ever won real admiration from my husband. . . ." (III 58). Indeed, the Griffins' penchant for arriving in public in full costume is noted in several sources. Roe quotes sculptor Bim Hilder's first experience of the Griffins, when he encountered them in 1926 in a Sydney Bohemian haunt called Pakies:

That such costuming was one of Mahony Griffin's great loves is clear from the descriptions that fill her letters to Griffin during the time he spent apart from her in India, and indeed from her interest in her own clothing, which is often described in some detail in MOA and in letters, and was regularly remarked upon in outside sources.

It was in 1935, during the height of the Great Depression, that Griffin's services were sought (through Anthroposophical connections) to consult in the project of building a university campus in Lucknow, India. Griffin eventually went to India, where he was inundated with both private and public commissions. After a series of letters entreating Mahony Griffin to give up her semi-retired status and join him in India, she came in 1936, and the two began one of the most architecturally fruitful periods of their career. Griffin died in February of 1937 of peritonitis suffered following a ruptured gall bladder. The Magic of America contains the letter Mahony Griffin wrote to her sister-in-law, Genevieve Lippincott, telling her of the death:

After Griffin's death, Mahony Griffin stayed briefly in India to finish drawings for projects and to see through several commissions (like the Pioneer Press Building). She returned to Castlecrag briefly in 1938 to settle Griffin's estate and then returned to Chicago where she began writing The Magic of America as an epithet to Griffin's life and an explication of their professional work and philosophical beliefs. She continued to work late into her life, mainly on community planning schemes, but also lecturing, drawing and teaching. She died on August 10, 1961 at Cook County Hospital at the age of 90.

Only a very few of the women who took up highly public professional lives at he turn of the century were able to enjoy satisfying personal lives as well. In the course of her professional career, Mahony Griffin worked among, and had her abilities noted and admired by some of the most famous architects of her time, while in her personal life she married Walter Burley Griffin, the man whose architectural style "delighted" her–whose work she claimed she loved more than she loved the man. Their 26 year marriage led them both to great achievements, creatively and intellectually. They practiced architecture in the US, in Australia, and in India designing as many as 500 structures and communities of which roughly half were built. Five hundred projects is a huge number, representing an incredible level of creativity–particularly at that time for their small office.

Mahony Griffin's life and work are not well known, perhaps in part because her career spanned sixty years and three continents. However, the scholars in many fields who work to recover women's lives and contributions are discovering that it also seems likely that many women, like Mahony Griffin, fell victim to the machinations of a male-centered history which allowed many of their achievements to be attributed to the men in their lives. In Mahony Griffin's case, her employers, Dwight Perkins, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Hermann von Holst, and her husband Walter were regularly credited with her work, often in entirety, while she was credited with designing "linens" or "tiles"–of carrying someone else's grand vision to the details. This brief biography serves as background for the following chapters' discussions of the ways in which Mahony Griffin's life, work, and autobiography have been characterized in later sources–characterizations that gendered her, asserting at every turn she was not an architect because she was not a man.

Based on Williamson's study of fame in architecture, Marion Mahony Griffin is the only woman to have achieved canonization, though at a minor level. She is mentioned in five of the twenty-four survey texts Williamson examines, more than any other women, and in fact, the only American-born woman to be mentioned in three or more texts, which is the basis for inclusion in Williamson's "Index of Fame." Her first mention is in Wayne Andrew's 1947 Architecture, Ambition, and Americans: A Social History of American Architecture and the most recent in the 1982 Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, where her 1+ column mention places her firmly in Stevens's list of minor architects. Reyner Banham, one of this century's most renowned architectural critics, said of Mahony Griffin, that she was "America's (and perhaps the world's) first woman architect who needed no apology in a world of men" (101). The statement reveals the level of respect accorded to both Mahony Griffin's talent and the strength of character that enabled her to find success in a thoroughly male professional world. Other early sources mention her briefly, though they tend to focus on her husband. It is interesting, then, that even this modest level of respect did not find its way into Griffin studies or more general studies of the Sullivan School.

Perhaps because early secondary sources were primarily interested in Walter Burley Griffin or Frank Lloyd Wright, they included much misinformation about Mahony Griffin–from misspelling her family name (Mahoney) and her first name (Marian) to incorrectly dating her birth, her death, her marriage, together with details about her graduation, her family relationships and her birthplace. Although including information that substantially gets wrong even the basic facts of her life seems, as Weirick would say, "appalling," other early authors writing on Griffin simply refer to his "wife," leaving Mahony Griffin unnamed and absent from the history. As H. Allen Brooks writes in a 1966 review of Mark Peisch's book, "No author can achieve perfection, yet careless documentation is inexcusable. . . . This sampling from among these numerous errors of fact and interpretation is sufficient to make its point. That so much . . . is unreliable cannot help but jeopardize the whole" (226). Brooks suggests that such lax scholarship is widely considered inexcusable; therefore, I assert that perhaps the scholarship concerning the Griffins, particularly Mahony Griffin, as filled with errors as it is, should at least lead us to question many of the truisms that these same scholars have invented about the Griffins and their work.

While such a record of scholarship is indeed appalling, especially when, as I will argue later, historians of this generation have leveled charges of poor scholarship against feminist historians attempting to recover Mahony Griffin's contributions to the discipline, what is even more startling are the ways in which early scholars of the Griffins and scholars of the Sullivan School depicted Mahony Griffin. The number of comments about her physical appearance, her "stormy" relationships with others, and her "bitterness" serve to create a gendered picture of her, one that is in conflict with the standard picture of the architect as a rational and cultured "gentleman." In addition, because the history of professionalization in architecture has consistently presented a picture of a man as a great architect, and has described his attributes in masculine terms, clearly the presentation of Marion Mahony Griffin in gendered language undermines her position to architectural practice and greatness. I do not argue that such use of language was entirely intentional, or that its purpose was to keep women from the architectural canon. Rather, such gendered readings of women in the arts represent the status quo–a habit of scholarship that habitually omits the contributions of women; as Battersby argues, "the achievements of women who have managed to create are obscured by an ideology that associates cultural achievement with the activities of males" (305).

In architecture, such has been the norm since the first woman graduated from architecture school and began (and ended) her practice with one building, the Women's Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exhibition. The first woman to graduate with a four-year degree in architecture in this country (also from MIT), Sophia Hayden, became ill soon after her graduation with what American Architect and Building News referred to in an 1892 article as "brain fever." The illness was used in the article to illustrate women's innate incompatibility with the architectural profession, stating: "If a building of which a woman seems so proud is to mark the physical mien of its architect, it will be a much more telling argument against the wisdom of women entering this especial profession than anything else could be" (134).

In addition to entering her professional life at a time when women's creativity was generally dismissed, Mahony Griffin's professional life was written into a history of western philosophy and aesthetics that has refused to credit women with creative impulse. For example, depictions of Mahony Griffin are consistently in keeping with Kantian notions of women's subordinate relation to genius. Kant would suggest, in Observations on the Feeling of Beautiful and Sublime, that the woman with intellectual pursuits "might as well have a beard" (78) suggesting her interests make her ugly, and even ridiculous and unnatural (83). But as Battersby asserts, "The rhetoric of genius operates to exclude women on so many different and contradictory levels. . ." (7). The contradictions, of course, vary according to place and time, and the idiosyncratic ideas of the rhetor espousing them. As Battersby summarizes:

Battersby goes on to argue that such beliefs were further entrenched in 19th century rhetoric of genius. It seems not surprising, then, that early depictions of Marion Mahony Griffin consistently portray her in contradictory, but always gendered terms: sometimes an unnatural woman, but always as embodying negative female attributes as Kant and other theorists of genius like Rousseau, Duff, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Otto Weininger asserted. While Schopenhauer theorized genius as related to creative, as opposed to procreative abilities, Weininger could only assert a circular argument: "A female genius is a contradiction in terms, for genius is simply intensified, perfectly developed universally conscious maleness" (Battersby 114). He adds to that assertion one more female lack–the lack of memory, without which genius is impossible. Once these terms of femaleness have been laid by the whole of the history of western philosophy, the characterization of women who create deviates little. In fact, in the twentieth century, modernism perhaps entrenches the cult of genius even more deeply than before. As Battersby argues, "'I am the author.' 'I am male.' 'I am God.' Romantic and modernist art binds these three sentences together in an unholy trinity" (43). The texts on Mahony Griffin present a female with delusions of genius: an ugly, ridiculous, unnatural, woman whose memory fails her. It was into this rhetorical history of women as creators that early sources attempted to situate the life and work of Mahony Griffin.

James Birrell's Walter Burley Griffin was first published in 1964, and is the earliest text to focus exclusively on one of the Griffins–here the focus is clearly Griffin. The 187 page text mentions Mahony Griffin on thirteen pages and includes near the beginning an extremely unflattering photo of her in her later years. The photo has had all background removed so that her masculine profile is laid against a blank, white page. The use of this photo is interesting in several ways. Her age is never identified, nor is the photo's source. The background has been eliminated to accentuate her heavy brows, sharp nose, mannish haircut and leathery skin. She looks distinguished, but entirely unwomanly. In contrast, of the three photos of Griffin in the book, two are posed portraits which reveal his Hollywood good-looks, and one is a snapshot in which he exudes boyish charm. Birrell's text began the history of depicting them so.

H. Allen Brooks, writing eight years later, is compelled to include a quote suggesting that Mahony Griffin was "so homely she was almost distinguished" (Prairie School 79). Peter Harrison, writing in 1970, asserts, "Although she was less than six years older than Griffin, those who knew them in Australia assumed she was at least ten years older" (25). Other authors note that she was "taller than Walter," (Harrison 25) "angular," "sallow-skinned," and had a "beaked nose" (Brooks Prairie School 79, Rubbo "Portrait" 18, Preliasco 175) or "tomahawk profile" (Harrison 82). Harrison further asserts that she was not "part red-Indian" though her looks led some to that assumption (25). While providing physical descriptions may add another layer of character to the stories these historians hoped to tell, little physical description is typically provided about male architects, and in these texts Griffin's good looks are only described in contrast to Mahony Griffin's "homeliness." Moreover, in many cases, she is reduced to these descriptions, because they exist in the place of descriptions of her architectural work, which is always the focus of texts on male architects.

In addition to constructing her as physically unattractive, these texts create a character that is unnatural and ridiculous. As Judy Wells asserts, "Her achievement has been subverted over time with representations that depict her as a kind of overbearing crone. She is described variously as a 'battleaxe' (John Patterson, urban planner) or 'completely dotty' (David Marr) or 'the Castlecrag goat' (Bernard Hesling)" (123). Wells points to the language used in these popular Australian depictions of Mahony Griffin–language that reinforces her absurdity. Moreover, a recently well-received book on Canberra (published in 1993) maintains Mahony Griffin's "dottiness," using as evidence an anecdotal meeting with unnamed Australian visitor. Jim Gibbney writes of the ninety year-old Mahony Griffin that "Not long before her death, an Australian visitor found her trying to make contact with the spirit of her dead husband" (43). This 1993 source, as in the much earlier sources, substitutes this anecdotal information about Mahony Griffin for any substantive analysis of her real work on the Canberra project or her assertion that she was the driving will behind the project's completion.

Another of the ways in which she is shown as ridiculous is in her "old maid" status. She was forty when she married Griffin; although her autobiography contains a first-hand description of their courtship, these texts offer their own interpretations. As Birrell writes, "Although their acquaintances greatly admired Marion's technical ability, many felt she married Walter because of his stupendous rise to fame after Wright had left. . . " (14). Even the construction of the sentence undermines her work (technical ability) to her grasping attempt to catch Griffin's ascending star. There are several other problems with the unsubstantiated assertion. The first is that "many" of their acquaintances were not cited in Birrell's research, and the second, and more important, is that Griffin's "stupendous rise to fame" did not occur until after his marriage to Mahony in 1911.

In a similar vein Brooks writes, "Marion fell inextricably in love with Walter, offered her rendering services to him as bait, and on 29 June 1911, married him" (Prairie School 165). Mahony Griffin, in her own telling, did fall in love with Griffin. Griffin, we may assume from his letters to his wife that open Magic of America, also loved her. Brooks's use of the word "bait" suggests that the love was one-sided and Griffin entered into a business arrangement, an arrangement that had to be baited for him to accept. While this may certainly be true, there is scant evidence in the primary sources to suggest such a reading and Brooks does not cite anyone to explain this assertion, although it may have come from David Van Zanten's 1966 article, "The Early Work of Marion Mahony Griffin."

Van Zanten makes a similar assertion, also without citing a source: "What had been a friendship. . . now became love, at least on Marion's side" (19). He also discusses the Griffin's courtship in terms of battle–Mahony Griffin "pursued," laid "siege," and "took him by storm" (19). Harrison reports that Australian acquaintances wondered how the "shy Walter Griffin" could have proposed marriage. "The initiative," he writes "was attributed to Marion with the words 'Come along now, Walter, we must get married'" (25). All suggest a very reticent Griffin, pursued by a comical spinster, a very different picture than Mahony Griffin's depictions of their quiet weekend canoe trips camping and exploring the waterways of the Chicago area.

Moreover, in the process of casting Mahony Griffin in the role of the homely, desperate spinster who trades professional ability for domestic security, these sources tend to create a subtext (surely unintentional) that suggests Griffin was innocent, fey, virginal, possibly homosexual: Griffin is variously described as "sweet-natured" by Mark Peisch and "small, of slender build" according to Byrne (Kruty 18). Harrison reports "Griffin was then 34 and still living at the family home in Elmhurst" (25). Brooks offers that "The Studio match-makers paired off Griffin with Isabel Roberts, but this came to naught" (Prairie School 81). Gill, also without citing a source, characterizes Griffin in these ways most strongly:

Like the earlier authors, Gill's assertions cite no other texts, either primary or secondary, nor does he at any point in his book cite either Brooks or Van Zanten; the source of his assertions is entirely unclear. In this telling, though, Mahony Griffin becomes nearly predatory while Griffin is shy and virginal; the deal he makes, these sources suggest, is a sham marriage entered into as a professional, not a personal relationship.

Paul Kruty is able to distance Griffin from his wife without suggesting Griffin might have been homosexual by suggesting, "Griffin's sister, Gertrude Sater, always maintained that the only woman her brother had really loved was Wright's sister Maginel," ("Walter Burley Griffin" 35). Kruty also repeats the original courtship story, thirty years after Van Zanten originated it, suggesting, "Mahony, five years Walter's senior, fell in love with him and became convinced that her own future lay in joining hands with this talented man" ("Walter Burley Griffin" 26). Again, it is noted that she is older, enough older that it is remarkable (worth remarking upon), and Kruty's telling makes sure the reader knows the love was not mutual she "fell in love with him." Moreover, in this telling, it is clear that Griffin has the talent–enough more talent, in fact, that Mahony Griffin's future may have been in doubt if left to her own devices. Kruty even adds, for emphasis, that "Griffin's family was not as convinced of his feelings or of the wisdom of the match" ("Walter Burley Griffin" 26).

Whichever of these pictures the reader believes, Mahony Griffin is drawn as an "unlovable" woman who baited her husband into a marriage of convenience. Whether or not this was true, the result is that scholars are able to distance Griffin from any taint of Mahony Griffin's influence; the story that is repeated is that though they were married, he could not have loved her, found her attractive, or fallen under her intellectual influence. She simply drew for him.

Yet these depictions ignore the central evidence on the couple's intimate life that comes from MOA. Although Mahony Griffin on many occasions describes the couple's volatile relationship, for which she takes much of the blame, she never suggests that theirs was anything but a marriage of strong passions. In her autobiography she writes, "With that man of mine I was possessed. It was as if a demon took hold and shaped me to its whim," (IV 130-133). She goes on to assert that her marriage was "full of every joy and every anguish" and to explain the anguish, she quotes Rudolf Steiner "In love when one really loves a person there exists in the depths of his being a terrible antipathy to that person" (IV 156).

About the couple's brief separation in 1930, she writes, "at the end of that character testing decade. . . which followed the seven year battle over Canberra, I threw up my hands and ran away, this time to America. My parting words to Walt were–'Well now you are a free man'. His to me–'I'm a perfect damn fool'" (IV 156). Writing to her husband from the U.S., she alludes specifically to the love in their relationship, blaming it, in part, for their fiery battles: "I myself as you may remember have said that it was absurd to look upon the marital relationship, if it were based on love, as having any relationship to friendship, that it is more like that of enemies" (IV 137). Mahony Griffin here directly refutes those scholars who describe their marriage as a professional relationship based on a somewhat compatible friendship, asserting instead that their relationship is passionate, and sometimes not even friendly, because it is based on love. Again, whether or not the Griffins were in love much of their marriage seems less the issue here than the early historians' refusal to use available primary resources. Instead, they made speculative claims that directly ignored available primary sources, perhaps influencing later scholars like Kruty with their assertions.

In addition, the language employed in these secondary sources attempted to describe Mahony Griffin as an unnatural woman and in gendered terms. Harrison asserts that "By all accounts, Marion lacked most feminine graces" (25). Birrell describes her in overtly masculine terms when he writes, "Her forceful, businesslike, coldly intellectual manner, held her, and eventually Walter, apart from the family" (14). But to contrast her "coldly intellectual manner" Harrison calls her "impetuous" (39), a word often suited to a young girl, Birrell calls her "bitter and critical" (132), and Brooks claimed that "it is probably true she lacked the imaginative mind to create. . . " (164). Readers are also told variously, that she "was not much liked by Griffin's family" (Birrell 14), "that some standards at Castlecrag were lowered by Marion Griffin" (Birrell 132), and that when Griffin's design arrived too late for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition that "Marion must have failed in her role" (Harrison 67). Most of these comments are throw-aways, clearly the author's opinion, and entirely speculative: Marion must have failed in her role; it is probably true she lacked the imaginative mind to create. And some of such a list of comments might serve to deepen a reader's understanding of Mahony Griffin's character, if they were augmented by other information about her or her work. Although the next chapter discusses her work (and the gendered discourse surrounding it) in greater detail, similar comments also comprise the discourse about her work and writing, as well.

These comments represent nearly the total of information about Marion Mahony Griffin available to scholars and students using secondary sources. Although two very early sources mention the Griffins and even include Mahony Griffin in their indices (one mention in each text), in both cases she receives mention only because of her marriage to Griffin. Australian architectural critic and historian Robin Boyd's 1952 Australia's Home mentions Mahony Griffin as a subordinate clause, only in relation to the two other major architects in her life "In 1912, with Marion Mahony, another Wright pupil and his [Griffin's] future wife . . . " (141). In the 1947 book, Architecture, Ambition and Americans, Wayne Andrews also mentions Mahony Griffin, also as a subordinate clause, "He [Griffin] shared certain of Wright's objectives, as did his wife, the former Marion Mahony, who spent eleven years as the master's draftsman" (236). Mahony is characterized as a pupil, a wife, and a draftsman–a pencil in the master's hand–but not a highly educated architect in her own right. The characterization of Mahony Griffin (or Griffin for that matter) as pupil is simply wrong; both worked at Wright's side as colleagues; although in later years Wright would be the master, in the Oak Park Studio, in the case of the Griffins, he was an employer–both the Griffins were trained and experienced architects by the time they came to work for Wright. However, the compulsive assertion that Wright was the genius in the Oak Park Studio, Mahony Griffin the draftsman and Griffin the pupil awaiting his moment for individual glory is still the ascendant story in the discipline, and it mimics the telling of the Griffins' story as the story of the genius and the helpmate. The pattern is about denying the social nature of architectural collaboration, because a social reading of architectural practice would in many ways de-mystify the architect-as-god notion that floats about in our western cultural consciousness, introduced through romantic notions of genius and entrenched by modernist architects themselves, and perhaps Ayn Rand.

Although Boyd and Andrews dealt with Griffin's work in far greater detail than they did Mahony Griffin's, there were five important early books on the Griffins that provided somewhat more information on Mahony Griffin as well. The first of these, Mark Peisch's 1964 The Chicago School: Early Followers of Sullivan and Wright, contains by far the most sympathetic treatment of Mahony Griffin. Not surprisingly, it cites her The Magic of America and personal interviews the author had with her through the 1950s, as well as archival sources including letters and interviews with others. This reliance on primary resources, combined with a focus on Mahony Griffin's architectural work, creates a very different story than the one told by later historians. The single instance of personal information Peisch includes is about the Griffins' marriage:

Peisch's account of the Griffins' courtship and marriage is very different than Brooks's version of Mahony Griffin offering Griffin the "bait" of her rendering abilities. Moreover, his assertion of the couple's collaboration is one that would not crop up again in Griffin scholarship for nearly fifteen years.

It was Birrell's 1964 book that seemed to set the tone for Mahony Griffin's depiction in later texts. Several later authors picked up his repeated use of the word "bitter" to describe her. In addition, Birrell asserts several times that Mahony Griffin was less than generous with money, writing that she "intellectualised on economics" (184) and "refused financial advances to Lippincott" (132). Each time she is mentioned in Birrell's text, Mahony Griffin's character is drawn as cold, calculating ("she married Walter because of his stupendous rise to fame"), bitter, and alienating of pleasant Griffin's family and friends. This is a very different story than Peisch's "complete merging of personalities and ideals, an artistic union"–and yet it becomes the ascendant story in Griffin studies for nearly fifteen years, perhaps because this drawing of the creative woman is more in line with the easily available notions about her that exist in western culture.

In 1970, one more major secondary work was added to the canon of Griffin scholarship, in addition to an important master's thesis written by a respected Griffin scholar. Peter Harrison's master's thesis for the University of Sydney remained unpublished until 1995. Harrison's work was not widely circulated, so it is best examined not in terms of its impact on other scholars, but as containing the sort of characterizations about Mahony Griffin that are in line with the scholarship of that time–he writes about her appearance, her alienating influence on Griffin's friends (39), the inaccuracies of her memory (87, 90)–but he also incorporates a counter-discourse, based on Mahony Griffin's own voice in The Magic of America in which she relates, for example, her "delight" with the young Indian students she is training to do drafting work (88). Although joy and delight permeate her own writing, they rarely seep in to secondary sources, perhaps because her own writing has been historically dismissed as unreliable, as I discuss in chapter three. Although Rubbo would later write that "Harrison's antipathy to Marion Griffin is thinly disguised" ("A Creative Partnership" 83), even that "thin disguise" creates a more complex portrait of Mahony Griffin than any written before this time.

In contrast, Mahony Griffin haunts David Van Zanten's 1970 book Walter Burley Griffin: Selected Designs like a ghost. Though she drew the majority of the designs that comprise the book, she is only mentioned once in the accompanying text–as Griffin's unnamed "wife" when Van Zanten writes: "Three of the following pieces are taken from undated and unidentified texts transcribed by Griffin's wife in her manuscript biography, The Magic of America" (31). Although Van Zanten discusses the chronology of Griffin's work in detail, never does he mention that "Griffin's wife" was an architect who drew the majority of the drawings included in his book, and she is therefore reduced to the role of typist (and a poor one at that–he goes on to assert he has had to correct some spelling errors and typos).

There is no real accounting for this omission; Van Zanten wrote a 1966 article for the Prairie School Review entitled the "Early Work of Marion Mahony Griffin" and so was clearly aware of Mahony Griffin's work. Although the thesis of that article was that Mahony Griffin clearly had no influence on her husband's later architecture because her own architectural work was "derivative and decorative" (21), Van Zanten admits her existence and his very willingness to argue such a proposition assumes that the question of how to attribute Griffin's work already existed. Perhaps his later erasure of her life and work in relation to Griffin's is based on his assumption that his earlier article had dealt with the issue thoroughly.

However, perhaps Van Zanten's most stunning omission is his most recent. In an essay for Berkeley and McQuaid's 1989 Architecture: A Place for Women, Van Zanten's "Frank Lloyd Wright's Kindergarten: Professional Practice and Sexual Roles," makes the audacious claim that Wright had a commitment to a feminine, nurturing environment for his employees at the Oak Park Studio. While such a claim demonstrates established scholars' unfathomable ability to misread and misunderstand primary sources, the essay also entirely omits reference to any of the women who did pass through Wright's "kindergarten" as architects or artists. For Van Zanten, Wright's access to feminine nurturing (thin as it was) is more interesting than an examination of real sexual roles in professional practice.

H. Allen Brooks's 1972 The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries is still considered the seminal work on the "Prairie School." According to its cover, it is "The finest study of architectural history this writer has ever read. . .it is a definitive work. . . ." And Brooks's scholarship is amazingly good. He combines and synthesizes primary sources, secondary scholarship, photographs, and architectural plans with a variety of appropriate non-architectural materials (literary sources, social histories, and memoirs). The result is a focused analysis of the architects of the Sullivan School and a taste of the social milieu that produced them and their work.

In spite of the truly fine scholarly effort that produced this book, Brooks seems to have the same blind spots concerning Mahony Griffin that previous historians displayed. Though Mahony Griffin appears throughout his text, she disappears, and is therefore erased, at important junctures. For example, when Brooks discusses the failure of the Sullivan School to maintain itself, he notes that the architects to join the movement later (Bentley, Van Bergen, Willatzen, Francis Sullivan and Berry) "were not the equal of Purcell, Elmslie, Griffin, Byrne or obviously Louis Sullivan and Wright" (343). Mahony Griffin is erased–she is included among neither the great nor the lesser architects of the movement–she simply disappears, despite that her 13 year tenure in Wright's office makes her perhaps the longest practitioner within the movement.

Brooks goes onto assert, still in an effort to explain the "death" of a seemingly vital movement, "The movement's accelerated growth, rapid though it was, was inevitably affected by the departures of Wright, Griffin, and Purcell" (344). Brooks is attempting to assert that the movement did not dissolve from the scandal surrounding Wright's departure to Europe with Mamah Cheney. From a simple argumentative standpoint, it would seem to be in Brooks's interest to lengthen his list with the addition of Mahony Griffin's name, for simply by the numbers, a movement of under twenty practitioners that loses four of its members would be even more "inevitably affected." But Brooks seemingly undermines his own argument by omitting Mahony Griffin's departure. There are, I think two possible explanations for this, which are probably closely related: he does not think of her as an architect, or he believes she is so discredited as an architect that to include her name would assign her an importance contrary to the argument the rest of the text asserts.

Both possibilities seem likely. Earlier in the book, when Brooks attempts to introduce readers to the characters of his story, he describes the birth of the movement at Dwight Perkins' Steinway Hall building, the building that Mahony Griffin first worked on, under her cousin's supervision, after college. In naming the central characters of his story, Brooks attempts to name the members of the group Wright refers to in his An Autobiography as The Eighteen–a "little luncheon roundtable" (The Prairie School 31). Wright, in his reminiscences names ten men, mostly Steinway Hall regulars. To that group, Brooks adds six more names, for a total of sixteen, then suggests that "It is also possible Webster Tomlinson should be included, too" (31). He cannot come up with an eighteenth name, even when guessing.

Of course, Mahony Griffin may not have been the eighteenth name. But the possibility never even occurs to Brooks, though she was at the time a young architect working in the same architectural office as several of the men Brooks names: Perkins, (Myron) Hunt, (Robert) Spencer, and Wright. In "Chicago of 1900: The Griffin's Come of Age," Paul Kruty places both Wright and Mahony Griffin at Steinway Hall until late 1898 (12). In addition, when identifying Steinway Hall architects, Brooks writes, "Three of them studied at M.I.T." (Prairie School 29). The three he mentions: Perkins, Hunt and Spencer; in spite of the fact that she was the only Sullivan School architect to graduate from M.I.T., Brooks leaves Mahony Griffin absent from this list and this important architectural milieu.

Brooks makes clear that it was an important historical moment in his 1975 book, Prairie School Architecture: Studies from "The Western Architect." I quote the following material at length because Brooks's use of specifically gendered language reveals the reason he does not think of Mahony Griffin as an architect (she is not a man); in addition, it reaffirms that Brooks's blind spot about Mahony Griffin's contributions was most certainly gender related:

Brooks fails to mention Mahony Griffin twice–in connection with either Steinway Hall or the Oak Park studio–two of the most important moments in the history of the Sullivan School. At the same time, Brooks works to establish the importance of Steinway Hall by naming it the birthplace of the movement, but limiting its founders to four "men," although historians know five architects inhabited the Steinway Hall offices at this time, the four men Brooks names and Mahony Griffin. In addition, it is important to note that Brooks's repeated use of "men" to describe the architects at both the Oak Park studio and Steinway Hall reinforces his omission of Mahony Griffin's name and reflects his inability to envision Mahony Griffin as an architect.

Brooks's inability to recall Mahony Griffin into his history of the Sullivan School is curious, because to have thought of her would have potentially solved a problem (that eighteenth name) he was actively investigating. The problem with such omissions is not that they are purposefully attempting to keep women from their rightfully earned position in the canon, but that every time habit leads those producing disciplinary discourse to not think of women as architects, they produce a secondary source that reinforces that habit of scholarship by further erasing a woman's signature from a past in which she was present.

For example, in her 1974 master's thesis, "The Work of Marion Mahony Griffin: 1894-1913," Donna Russ Munchick asserts that "she [Mahony Griffin] evidently had little to do with the mealtime meetings of 'The Eighteen,' a group that included Wright, the Pond brothers, Myron Hunt, Robert Spencer, Dwight Perkins, and later, Walter Burley Griffin" (16). She cites only Brooks for this assertion, not mentioning that Brooks had cited Wright for ten names of the group, and then had been left guessing. In fact, the only primary source available concerning "The Eighteen" is Wright's An Autobiography, which recalls only ten names. That Brooks's assertions about The Eighteen are mainly conjecture falls away in Munchick's text, showing the ways in which later scholars are influenced by that early secondary scholarship. Early scholarship helps form and shape research questions, limiting what is and is not a legitimate area of inquiry; because Brooks's highly praised book ignores the possibility that Mahony Griffin might have been a charter member of the Steinway Hall milieu and therefore Wright's "Eighteen," speculation into the issue is finished and scholars feel free to offer that "she evidently had little to do with" this group of men with whom she worked nearly every day.

It is in Brooks's second book, Prairie School Architecture: Studies from the Western Architect, even more than his first, that Mahony Griffin is written from the historical record. Here, she become merely a corollary to Walter Burley Griffin. Brooks's introduction to that book includes brief biographies of all the major players of the Sullivan School, who are listed alphabetically. Mahony Griffin appears not under her own name, but under her husband's where her date of death is mistaken and she is given credit for "beautiful renderings" and "furniture and interior ornament" for Wright's houses, which Brooks insists were "designed, under Wright's direction" (xv). Brooks ends by adding, "She influenced Griffin, yet none of his post-marriage work was entirely by her hand" (xv). Note that Brooks assures readers that the work is "his"–"his post-marriage work." Moreover, this single reference is all readers learn of Mahony Griffin–none of her work from The Western Architect is included, although Brooks himself, in his earlier book, worked to correctly attribute to her the houses in The Western Architect that had been published under von Holst's and/or Wright's names. Although it can certainly be argued that the omission was simply an editorial decision, the consistent decisions to omit Mahony Griffin except as dependent clause in discussions of her husband's work, while at the same time including the work of male architects more tangentially associated with the Sullivan School, reveal a pattern of omission, a habit of scholarship, not just in Brooks's work, but across the scholarship on the movement.

Mahony Griffin is not an isolated example of this habit of scholarship that does not see women as architects. That Mahony Griffin has a traceable history in texts is yet another way in which she is exceptional in the architectural canon. Although much of what was written undermined her position to architecture and the architectural canon of great men and monuments, a history exists which later scholars can compare against existing primary documents. One of America's most prolific architects, Julia Morgan, best known for her design of the Hearst family's San Simeon, had no such afterlife in secondary sources, which kept her so invisible her recovery required a heroic effort. Morgan lived at roughly the same time as Mahony Griffin–she was born in 1872 and died in 1957. Like Mahony Griffin she was an early pioneer as a women receiving formal architectural education. She attended engineering school at Berkeley, beginning in 1890, the same year Marion Mahony went to M.I.T. After Berkeley, she worked briefly for architect Bernard Maybeck. In 1896, she went to Paris and was the first woman admitted to Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the first to receive a certificate from the Ecole six years later in 1902. Like Mahony Griffin, she practiced architecture nearly all of her adult life, retiring in 1951 at age 79. Her work was remembered only in relation to her richest client (Hearst), though she designed nearly 800 structures, mainly in and around Berkeley, California–houses, churches, YWCAs and women's clubs (Boutelle 109-110).

In spite of her major contributions to the development of an important regional style in California, in 1972, Morgan was all but unknown. Sara Holmes Boutelle made recovering Morgan's life and work her life's work; although she could find only one published work on Morgan when she began her search, she eventually gained access to primary sources and wrote Morgan's first biography, Julia Morgan, Architect. Before Boutelle took up the project of her recovery, Morgan was so invisible that photographs of her with Hearst compiled in a book on San Simeon identified them as "Mr. Hearst and Secretary" (Boutelle 115). Books on Bay Area architecture by eminent architectural historians Lewis Mumford and Vincent Scully did not even mention Morgan, much less describe her work, and she received no attention in early surveys of American architecture–even those surveys that spent time discussing the development of Bay Area architecture. If her name is now known, it is due to Boutelle's recovery and the subsequent work by Diane Favro to compile Morgan's drawings into the book Julia Morgan. Morgan's drawings from her study at the Ecole were discovered, as Boutelle writes, "literally in garbage cans in the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley" (112).

Such stories represent not the exception of the historical treatment of women in architecture, but the general practice. A professionally dressed woman pictured with a client is assumed a secretary. A wealthy client is more historically noteworthy than his architect–if the architect is a woman (Mahony Griffin's historically drawn relationship to Henry Ford and Fairlane reflects a similarly unusual–for architectural studies– focus on the client, just as historians' focus on Hearst's role in San Simeon). Archival materials which could help in the recovery process are misplaced for years (or left in garbage cans). In such situations, creating an accurate biography requires that the author begin from nothing, because secondary sources either do not exist, or are suspect because of the lack of respect previous scholars have had for their subject.

Julia Morgan's example suggests that the monumental task of excavating an entire career may be more possible than reclaiming a life that has been half-written with disregard and contempt. Not only does the discourse of architectural history mistake the facts of women's lives and mistell their stories, the same disregard characterizes the stories of their work, which is also gendered and dismissed.