A woman of her time, a leader of the ages

For young Lin Huiyin (1904-1955) it truly was a case of being in the right place at the wrong time. The 20-year-old had traveled all the way from China to Pennsylvania, the United States, no mean feat in the early 1920s, to attend the US state's eponymous university. Lin's designs were clear: to realize a long-held desire to study architecture. However, there was one big problem: She was a woman.

Despite her obvious, laudable ambitions, the university's architecture program under its school of fine arts summarily rejected her application on those very grounds.

However, its school of fine arts was a little more relaxed, and Lin would enroll there, completing all her courses over the years — including compulsory ones in architecture — with one notable exception. The university's regulations did not countenance women doing live figure drawing, on the grounds that it would expose them to the male body.