Women and modernity in interior design: a legacy of design in Sydney, Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s

Abstract

This thesis argues that women were seminal to the development of interior design as a discipline and profession in Sydney, Australia. Covering the period from the 1920s to the 1960s, this study identifies Thea Proctor, Nora McDougall, Margaret Lord, Phyllis Shillito and Mary White as foundational leaders who progressively advanced interior design in Sydney through individual and collective understandings of design. Focussing on their contributions to this development, this study explains complex interrelationships between women and modernity in interior design. This emergence of the discipline and profession in Sydney situates the initiatives of these five women at a transitional phase of the field’s global development when ‘interior decoration’ is challenged by modern attitudes and artistic theories of ‘design’. Working as individuals, Proctor and her successors advance the profession—previously characterised as a ‘natural’ pursuit for women of ‘taste’ and ‘style’—by their artistic, rational and practical approaches to interior design. At a time when no distinct discipline exists in Sydney, the women offer instruction and forge new directions by reformulating previous overseas traditions: incorporating a wide-range of aesthetic and theoretical conceptions of design, demonstrating common and different approaches to practice, and integrating changes in requisite knowledge and skills in response to their times. The women’s programs are conventional and progressive, common and diverse, universal and particular in content and meaning. Working within a variety of settings, the women importantly establish professional jurisdiction situating interior design in a modernist context. Significantly, their contributions challenge past readings that have diminished the early women of interior design, and at the same time, embody all the conflicts, ruptures, paradoxes and contradictions that are cental to modernity. This research redresses the lack of institutional history of interior design in Sydney and links theories of modernism and modernity to issues of gender and profession to explain the women’s significant contributions to interior design at a critical juncture of the field’s development. As such, their stories and legacy of design in Sydney contribute to a wider picture of women and modernity in interior design.