Sarah Winchester
Apr. 21st, 2024 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogIt's become a particular pet peeve of mine, from both an architectural history perspective and a feminist history perspective, when people present Sarah Winchester, of Mystery House fame, as a fear-driven madwoman, building to escape the ghosts that haunted her.
She was a single woman at the turn of the 20th century, with a lot of money. She could afford to indulge her interests, which probably included architecture. The stories of seances and madness and building traps for ghosts came about after her death, and I think those stories spring originally from misogynist attitudes about women and a desire to make money from them.
She was a single woman at the turn of the 20th century, with a lot of money. She could afford to indulge her interests, which probably included architecture. The stories of seances and madness and building traps for ghosts came about after her death, and I think those stories spring originally from misogynist attitudes about women and a desire to make money from them.
