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294 The Los Angeles Woman's Building individuals and groups. This chapter further considers the process that set up and maintained the women's environment encompassing these activities, the possibilities for its survival, and its future role. Some Precedents The first wave of active feminism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided several precedents for the Woman's Building's goals, activities, and physical presence, as well as its name. In the space between domestic and business life many nineteenth-century women's groups extended the cooperative, caring, and socially responsible modes that were limited and isolated within the private home and provided themselves with alternative physical environments to house their shared activities. Despite the differences in political orientation, the collective kitchens of the Cooperative Housekeeping Movement, the urban Settlement Houses and Women's Clubs, as well as the Woman's Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, are nineteenth-century structures that the Los Angeles Woman's Building can claim as its historical roots.1 The second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s has gathered women together again to focus upon many of the same needs for discovering and sharing personal, professional, and political experience and information. Essentially three types of physical space have been utilized for this feminist activity: living rooms, kitchens, and studios in private residences; storefronts and offices in commercial buildings; and classrooms and studios in educational institutions. The attributes of many of these physical structures within which the provisional and isolated activities have taken place often contradicted newly discovered feminist attitudes. Few women's groups in Los Angeles were neighborhood based; many were composed of women who came from all over the city to weekly meetings held in each other's homes. The private home or studio provided a setting for consciousness raising that aided the bonding process, and the intimate connection women found in these small groups was enhanced by the Sheila Levrant de Bretteville 295 personal as well as the shared cultural attributes of private space. Identification of Need and Search Process The Feminist Studio Workshop was among those growing nodes of feminist activity that moved from borrowed space to a space of its own. In the winter of 1973, Arlene Raven (an art historian), Judy Chicago (an artist), and I (a designer) formed an educational nonprofit corporation - Feminist Studio Workshop Inc. The purpose was to create an independent environment in which women in the arts could work with us, combining an exploration of themselves as women in society and the production of expressive forms that could be created from this process. We had previously initiated and nurtured the Feminist Art Program in the School of Art and the Women's Design Program in the School of Design at the California Institute of the Arts and had become acutely aware of the ways in which this male, hierarchical organization setting affected the value and content of the work. The first expression of our alternative environment was a brochure that announced the creation of a new working context: the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW). The name and the brochure gave form to our values and goals before we had actually begun to determine the physical expression of the FSW in terms of place.2 Our model was to create a studio/gallery, insular during the personal exploratory process, but opened periodically to the public for exhibitions, performances, lectures, and discussions. When thirty-two women arrived from all over the United States to become the first members of the Feminist Studio Workshop, we met in a private space (my home) while we negotiated with the California Institute of the Arts to lease the vacant Chouinard Art School building at Grandview. We proposed to Cal Arts that they lease it to us since we had the commitment of five existing women's groups and businesses and had
