At the turn of the century, an MIT classmate of Marian Cruger Coffin wrote, "it was considered almost social suicide and distinctly matrimonial suicide, for women to enter any profession."
Of the four women students in her class of 500, Coffin said, "We were thrown in all our work in competition with the men, and the invasion of their province as well as our specialty (which was a new and untried architectural development), put us on our mettle to prove that we too were serious students and competitors."
Coffin's body of landscape design forms an important historical record of eastern American gardens. Construction dates range from pre-income tax days, through two world wars and the Great Depression, to the mid-twentieth century. During her 50 year career, clients included the du Ponts of Delaware, the Pells, Fricks, Huttons, and Sabins of New York, the Kinneys and Frelinghuysens of New Jersey, the Bullitts and Ballards of Kentucky.
Speaker Nancy Fleming lives in Weston and is a graduate of the Radcliffe Program in Landscape Design. She has her own landscape design firm and is the author of Money, Manure, and Maintenance, a recent Coffin biography.
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