aka The Women’s Centre: Architecture as alias in Milton Park, Montreal

This paper finds inspiration in five photographs taken by Clara Gutsche between 1970 and 1972 of the Women’s Centre in Milton Park, Montreal. Located at 3694 Ste. Famille Street in an otherwise typical greystone single-family house, the Women’s Centre opened as a collective, self-proclaimed feminist space in 1969. Funded in part by the proceeds of the McGill Students’ Society’s Birth Control Handbook, it served as headquarters for the Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement (MWLM), the Front de libération des femmes du Québec (FLF), and a bilingual abortion counselling service (later Montreal Health Press/Les Presses de la santé de Montréal).

Appropriation of the former private domestic building suggests the Women’s Centre as a contested space in which women used the existing built environment to subvert traditional gender roles and norms. Here issues that were previously considered personal and private were deliberately politicized to challenge the position of women in the public realm.

As part of the photo-documentary project “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”: The Destruction of Milton Park,¹ Gutsche’s photographs describe a rare intersection between the women’s movement and the heritage conservation movement in Montreal, and an opportunity to explore its vernacular buildings through a gendered lens. Looking at the surface of the photographs, this paper asks how personal politics affect our understanding and use of space. Moving deeper in and through the images, it explores the tension between photography as a tool to recover women’s participation in the construction of space, and the constructed space of the architectural photograph.

¹ This project was co-created with David Miller.