Queens of the Board
Louisa Thomas’s piece on the chess champion Hou Yifan highlights the unending comparison between female and male intelligence (“Queenside,” August 2nd). From my perspective as a therapist in training, it seems that the obstacles that female chess players confront have much to do with the weight of a psychological phenomenon called “stereotype threat”—a situational predicament in which people feel themselves to be at risk of conforming to negative stereotypes of their social group. Studies have shown that stereotype-threat conditions, such as a standardized test of one’s intellectual ability, can result in measurable deficits in performance. In the presence of the limiting notions—expressed by both female chess players and their male competitors—about women’s “physical endurance” and their “nature,” it is not surprising that female players may begin to feel doubt and anxiety, or that, as Thomas mentions, “many girls drop away from the more competitive tracks of the game when they reach high school.” I applaud women like Hou who beat on against the current, but I also support the players who choose to explore other avenues for their talents.
Gabriella Hiatt
Warren, Conn.
Designing With Nature
Eric Klinenberg’s article about the landscape architect Kate Orff characterizes her as being “at the forefront of an emerging approach to climate resilience that argues we should be building with nature, not just in nature” (“Manufacturing Nature,” August 9th). The roots of this approach stretch back decades, and its lineage can be said to include Frank Lloyd Wright’s commitment to “organic architecture.” As an architecture student in the nineteen-seventies, I was introduced to “Design with Nature,” by Ian McHarg, which was published in 1969. McHarg’s work helped set the standard for how humanity should design with and relate to the environment. To quote from the book’s introduction: “McHarg’s emphasis is not on either design or nature by itself, but upon the preposition with, which implies human cooperation and biological partnership.” As Orff’s admirable work demonstrates, we are still learning how to make this connection today.
Len Zegarski
Professor of Architecture (retired)
NewSchool of Architecture and Design
San Diego, Calif.
Through Another Lens
In his thoughtful review of “The New Woman Behind the Camera,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Peter Schjeldahl speaks to the exhibition’s “effect of heterogeneous images in flashing sequence” (The Art World, August 2nd). For all the diversity of the images and styles on display at the show, I was intrigued by the fact that practically every photographer’s preferred subject was either people or outdoor scenes; animals do not seem to have been popular subjects during the early to mid-twentieth century. The only photographs featuring animals are Dora Maar’s “Untitled [Boy with a Cat]” and “Cat + I,” by Wanda Wulz, which, by blending a cat’s face with Wulz’s own, focusses on the playfully surreal possibilities of manipulation rather than on the animal. There is one photographer, a “New Woman” par excellence, who could have filled the niche of presenting animals as subjects: Ylla, born Camilla Koffler. Working in the same period as the other photographers, and acclaimed for her sensitive images of animals, Ylla foreshadowed a trend in more recent photography in which depictions of animals being themselves are fairly commonplace.
Tina Frühauf
New York City
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