The Art & Architectural History Department and the Historic Preservation & Community Planning Program of the College of Charleston School of the Arts is hosting “Suffragette City,” an interdisciplinary symposium on gender, politics, and the built environment.  It is open and free to all College of Charleston faculty, staff, and students.

The aim of this symposium is to consider new research on the intersections of gender and politics in past and ongoing efforts to shape and reshape the physical form, social fabric, and conceptualization of cities worldwide, including design, development, preservation, representation, and other methods of creation and reform.

In many different societies and historical moments, women—among other gendered groups—have worked individually and collectively to transcend social, political, cultural, and economic restrictions to effect change in their communities.  From the building campaigns of the Regent-Pharaoh Hatshepsut to the urban politics of patronage in the European Renaissance, from charitable reform campaigns in Victorian tenement districts to militant resistance against neighborhood demolition in the Automobile Age, women’s efforts to exert their wills in the built environment have not only had powerful effects in the districts, city centers, parks, streets, and public squares they call home, but have also inevitably called into question the gendered social boundaries they transgressed in the process.

For more information, please contact Nathaniel R. Walker at walkernr@cofc.edu and Gayle L. Goudy at goudygl@cofc.edu