Louise Blanchard Bethune (July 21, 1856 – December 18, 1913)[1] was the first American woman known to have worked as a professional architect.

The Blanchard family moved to Buffalo, New York when she was a child, which is near Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the women's suffrage movement in the United States.

In 1881, after five years in Waite's office, she opened an independent office partnering with her husband, Robert Bethune, in Buffalo,[7] earning herself the title of the nation's first professional woman architect, which she announced at the Ninth Congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women.

[11] The Bethune firm also designed the Denton, Cottier & Daniels music store, one of the first buildings in the United States to utilize a steel frame and poured concrete slabs.

Three other Bethune buildings are still standing today: the Iroquois Door Plant Company warehouse; the large Chandler Street Complex for the Buffalo Weaving Company; and the Witkop and Holmes Headquarters (1901), which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.

[12] She was involved of the design of one hundred fifty buildings in the Buffalo and New England areas during her career.

The firm paid special attention to segregating children by their ages, indoor plumbing, and including egress stairs for fire safety.

[13] In the early 1900s, Bethune got the opportunity to design the Lafayette Hotel, located in downtown Buffalo.

The hotel also features hot and cold water in every bathroom, and includes a telephone in every room.

[17] Bethune only saw herself as doing the work of a proper architect, and believed her gender shouldn't define her accomplishments.

Although she didn't define herself as a feminist, she did lean into it with her optimistic views that more women will become architects in time.

[16] Her career and advocacy for women in architecture helped pave the way for generations of women architects including Lois Lilley Howe, Josephine Wright Chapman, Sophia Hayden, Mary Nevan Gannon, Alice Hands, Julia Morgan, and Beverly Greene.

By the time Bethune died in December 1915, nearly 200 women were practicing architecture in the United States.