The lives and work of England's first practicing women architects are being highlighted in a new update to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in Britain (DNB), the country's standard reference of notable figures from British history. 

Crafted by Dr. Elizabeth Darling, reader in architectural history at Oxford Brookes University, the new entries signify part of an effort by DNB to mark the centenary of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 that allowed women in Britain to serve in certain branches of the government. 

Although women were not legally barred from practicing architecture at the time, they did face significant cultural barriers to entering the profession due to long-held apprentice-oriented training practices that were prevalent into the 20th century, according to DNB. Women architects existed prior to 1919, but only in small numbers. When architectural education began to take place within schools of architecture, according to DNB, women were able to undertake design education in greater numbers. The legacies of some of those women are captured in the new entries.  

The update includes a profile on Jocelyn Frere Adburgham, who lived from 1900 to 1979 and exerted considerable influence on the planning of post-World War II state-sponsored social housing in the United Kingdom. Adburgham, for example, served as a member of the Town Planning Institute and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) before helping to found the Housing Centre urban planning think-tank.

Also included is a listing for (Margaret) Justin Blanco White, a prominent Scottish socialist intellectual who attended the Architectural Association in 1929 and went on to pioneer the use of timber framing approaches within Modernist architecture. Blanco White's Shawms house in Cambridge from 1938 features stacked sets of sliding ribbon windows and is wrapped in timber siding. The bucolic Modernist home was listed as a Grade II building in 1996 by Historic England.

In a statement announcing the effort to highlight these architects, Darling said, “Today, much is made of the fact that women—architects or not—have been ‘hidden from history.’ As someone who has spent much of her career writing about women’s contributions to the built environment, I am convinced that this is not the case and that there are those who refuse to, or somehow cannot, see what is in plain sight, rendering women not hidden but rather ‘not seen.’ These new entries contribute to the process of reiterating how long women have been active and influential as practitioners of architecture.”