Therefore it is high time for women to come to the front! A woman has intuitions, and when she really doesn't know it is her proud boast that she can guess, and, surely, that does quite as well. When she builds a house she will feel it, as a poet does his poem. She will put herself in the place of that other woman whose destiny it is to live there. She will create for her all the delightful things she wants herself. She will warm that house comfortably, because she herself hates to shiver. She will put in plenty of cupboards, because without cupboards life is not worth living (to a woman)! Her kitchen will be in just proportion to the size of the house, and not a kind of baronial hall in which even the beetles look lonely. Having pity on mere human legs she will cease to build Towers of Babel.
Then, her genius being for detail, she will see that the interior work of the house is well and delicately finished. What impresses me most in comparing the work of an English and an American workman is that the American is more careful and deft. He leaves no dabs of paint, or seams of coarse cement. The Englishman is distinctly clumsier in his methods and his results.
The woman architect will pay especial attention to the plumbing, not only to its sanitary, but also to its ornamental aspect, which leaves much to be desired. And she will, if it is humanly possible, construct a bathroom for those of the household who need it most--the servants; and when she has done all this, then she has only done what is common in American houses built for families of comfortable, but not large incomes.
Further, the woman architect will study the economical use of electricity. She will not (being a woman) waste it by putting too much of it in impossible and unbecoming places, and yet at the same time she will know just where to place an artful lamp so that her long-suffering sister will at last be able to see, even at night, how her dress hangs. She will not be extravagant; for extravagance she leaves to her brother architects, who understand neither the value of space nor the wise economy of exertion. For this reason I urge that women should become architects, but only domestic architects. They must not meddle with cathedrals!