House Beautiful: Introducing American Women to the World

The first shelter magazine, House Beautiful, which began publication in 1896, introduced its largely female readership to a range of innovative approaches to architecture, typically before they appeared in journals published in the United States that targeted architects. Between 1896 and 1920, most of its writers, many of whom were also women, championed the Colonial Revival and other conventiuonal styles, but the magazine also consistently published the work of Arts and Crafts reformers. Editor Ethel Power later featured the International Style well in advance of the exhibition held in 1932 at New Yourk's Museum of Modern Art and later yet championed prefabricated construction. The role of well-informed female consumers as well as the wome who wrote for them thus needs to be taken into account in histories that too often only privilege male architects and architectural critics in their accounts of taste formation and the dissemintation of new styles.