“I wake up as a black woman every day, so it’s no surprise to me that I’m capable and I’m qualified,” Keisha Lance Bottoms told a CNN reporter after Georgia elected her as the nation’s first black female governor. In this statement, Lance Bottoms frames herself as unexceptional, one of many black women who are capable and qualified. What is exceptional was that it took this long for one of them to be elected as a governor.
Lance Bottoms’ 2026 statement is similar to one political philosopher Hannah Arendt made nearly 70 years earlier when questioned about the exceptionalism of her appointment as the first woman on the Princeton faculty. “I am not disturbed at all about being a woman professor, because I am quite used to being a woman,” Arendt said in 1959. Scholar Jennie Han interprets this remark in the context of Arendt’s work, writing that Arendt believed, “In claiming for oneself the status of an ‘exception,’ one forgoes the opportunity to challenge the boundaries of membership and the distribution of power and oppression that follow their lines.”
A risk of being considered “exceptional,” then, is that you can no longer advocate for others of your gender or community. Another is having outside attention focused on gender rather than ability. Architect Julia Morgan (1872 – 1957) experienced this in the late nineteenth century. Before she even set sail for Paris where she would become the first woman admitted to study architecture in the École des Beaux-Arts, Morgan was plagued by journalists obsessed with the “manliness” of her chosen career path. Even today, more than one female architect has needed to deflect attention from her gender and focus it on her talent. This is one of the challenges with being seen as “exceptional.”
While one of the earliest female architects to suffer the scrutiny of exceptionalism, Morgan was by no means the last. In the 1950s, architect and Dean of MIT’s architecture school Pietro Belluschi said, “I cannot, in whole conscience, recommend architecture as a profession for girls.” This statement is found at the end of a brochure titled, “Should you be an Architect?” His career advice first ran as a public service advertisement in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s before New York Life Insurance reprinted it in 1959 as a stand-alone brochure.
In the article, Belluschi directed all his remarks toward boys until the last paragraph when, after allowing that some women have done well in architecture, he said, “[I]t takes an exceptional girl to make a go of it. If she insisted on becoming an architect, I would try to dissuade her. If she still insists, she may be that exceptional one.”
In 1958, near the time Belluschi’s comments were published, just 1 percent of licensed architects in the US were women. Thirty years later in 1988, a hundred years after the American Institute of Architects admitted Louise Bethune as its first female member, this percentage had increased to just 4 percent. This slow gain is despite legislation like 1964’s Title VII barring discrimination in employment, 1972’s Title IX barring discrimination in education, and the activism of female architects. Other barriers still stood—and stand. In 2026, 28 percent of licensed architects are women, according to NCARB.
Cody Logan (aka clpo13), 2003 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
While we celebrate the historical “exceptional” women who succeeded in spite of the barriers to getting into and staying in their profession, we should also mourn for the women who were shut out or discouraged. The magnitude and impact of the resulting loss of their talent, vision, and brilliance are unknowable.
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