Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Landscape Architecture

Abstract

Building upon work by feminist art historians, this paper offers a critique of a classic text of modernist landscape architecture history, Norman T. Newton's Design on the Land, demonstrating how attempts to write women into this paradigm for landscape architecture history work to marginalize women's contributions. As an alternative, the author examines a study of l9th century Birmingham, England, by social and feminist historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall to illustrate how a feminist perspective combined with social history can act as a catalyst to produce more rigorous critical discourse within the field of landscape architecture history.