Born: 14 February 1632, United Kingdom
Died: 27 July 1705
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Elizabeth Mytton
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
As Smithsonian Magazine noted in an article on female architects, because they were unlikely to get steady work if it was well-known a woman was designing the buildings, “working women architects, in an effort to survive in the business, disguised their efforts so well that no solid record links them to having designed anything at all.” The article cites as an example Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham, believed to have designed Wotton House in Surrey, England in 1704. “Wilbraham, an aristocratic Englishwoman who lived from 1632 to 1705 and studied architecture, is rumored to have designed 400 buildings. Wotton House, a 17th-century Baroque country estate commonly believed to be designed by William Winde, was attributed to Wilbraham by architectural historian John Millar based on designs she made for her family—though no drawings or invoices have her signature.”…
It’s also a documentation issue. Historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his architectural guides of England, bent over backward to undermine the works of Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham, describing them as “an enterprise of Lady Wilbraham” or that Wilbraham is “credited with the design.” “No other work in his book has these awkward designations,” notes historian Cynthia Hammond, observing that every work is “by” the men “with no other qualifications.