Angela's Story Angela is a qualified architect and works with a firm of architects in Stockholm, Sweden. She lives reasonably close to her work place in a modest, but restored, apartment that she obtained on a mortgage last year. Angela is a single woman, in her late 30s. She enjoys her work and is making what she describes 'as a comfortable living'. She argues that there are certain frustrations associated with her profession, however. One concern is the unspoken assumption that, as a woman, it is more appropriate for her to be involved in the design of domestic housing rather than have her expertise directed towards commercial or public buildings. However, for the most part, Angela is happy to be concerned with domestic architectural design. She has always felt, for example, that conventional building plans for kitchens and laundries - areas traditionally associated with female domestic activity - are poor. These rooms may be located in parts of the house which experience extremes of temperature, for example, and this is crazy because they are areas in which women, traditionally, do a lot of work. They are often relatively small, too, which discourages family participation in kitchen and laundry activities and suggests that they are places where women are expected to work alone. In contrast, Angela notes, the parts of the house associated with leisure and recreation, the games room, the bar, the sitting room - even the barbecue area - get prime locations and are often more spacious. "Interestingly", Angela says, "These areas are frequently associated with male activities or male control, except of course when it comes to cleaning them!" Angela enjoys talking with her clients about these issues. "It can be exciting to design homes that challenge some of the gender-based assumptions about life and work in the home." She says. Angela also has concerns about the trend towards bigger and bigger houses.       Some of these palatial homes built for wealthier end of the market make no sense at all. After all, fewer and fewer people are living in the sort of nuclear family that requires that amount of space and, if you think about it, it is absurd to have homes with three to four bathrooms when people in other parts of the world are lucky to have a tap in their street. No, I think we need to promote denser settlement of the near city area, with people living closer to their work places and to the facilities they need. This means returning to smaller, more compact homes although, of course, these sort of projects should not be developed without respect for the existing, established communities.       Although she enjoys designing homes and considering the implications for women, Angela thinks that women architects should be more influential in the design of bigger commercial, government and public buildings. As she says:       Government offices and inner-city buildings generally house the sort of services that employ vast numbers of women in clerical, secretarial, retail and even cleaning jobs. Part of the frustration of women in the city is that they are living and working within the constraints of a man-made environment. For example, it has only been in the last few years that the operators of some car parking stations have provided special places for women with babies or small children.       But despite some improvements that make the city more 'woman-friendly', there are other questions about the use of urban space which need confronting. Angela asks:       Why is it that the women's toilets and mothers' rooms are frequently found in the most inaccessible place in the big department stores? Why are secretaries expected to work in small, public areas while their bosses sit behind big desks in enclosed offices? Why are there never enough toilets for women in theatres and concert halls so that we always have to queue? Of course, some of these questions might seem rather trivial in view of the bigger issues associated with the life and death struggles of women elsewhere, but, I think, they do point to broader underlying questions about the nature of women's environments and about the control women have over them. Development for women must address these underlying questions.       Source: Adapted from Williamson Fien, J. (1993) Women's Voices - Teaching Resources on Women and Development, Global Learning Centre, Windsor, pp. 18-19.