Within the pattern of paradoxes that is contemporary Western architecture the position of women presents a disconcertingly predictable picture, reminiscent of the female experience in other areas of cultural activity.¹ There have been some formidable figures, generally unrecognised, as Berthe Morisot was among her friends the Impressionists, and a few internationally acknowledged by the profession (who else recognises architects?), but the number of women who occupy positions of professional responsibility in the basically commercial enterprises which make up the mainstream of modern architecture is small. 

The notable few have been sufficiently out of the ordinary not to disconcert the conventional assumption that the art of building is unsuited to the ‘feminine character’. Given the notably difficult and egocentric character of Frank Lloyd Wright, it is doubtful how much personal recognition would eventually have been accorded his early associate Marion Mahony. In the opinion of Birrell, almost from the beginning of Wright’s Oak Park practice she was ‘the mainstay of the office with her magnificent facility of expression in line, mass and colour’.² However, in 1913 she married the ill-fated Walter Burley Griffin, and they left Chicago for Australia to carry out their prize-winning design for Canberra. From this time on she submerged her own powerful intellectual and architectural capacities in her husband’s career: ‘I can best understand and help him and to a wife there is no greater recompense’.³ Heart balm to the anti-feminist! Her emotional and professional support clearly had a profound influence not only on the developing maturity of his work (she was the elder) but on its form and content. His practice clearly benefited from what their partner Lippincott described as her ‘intellectualising on economics’, while her extraordinary gifts as draftsman and renderer are evident in many of the drawings of their projects.