While the practice of American architecture was becoming professionalized during the Progressive era of the late nineteenth century, its ranks remained overwhelmingly racialized and gendered—in other words, white and male. Nonetheless, the first white female graduate from an accredited American school of architecture was Mary Louisa Page at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign in 1878, with Margaret Hicks of Cornell University following her the next year, graduating from the Cornell University School of Architecture in 1879. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the oldest school of American architecture founded in 1865, was able to claim its first white female graduate, Sophia Hayden, in 1890, and its first African American graduate, Robert R. Taylor (who would become the first accredited African American architect), in 1892. Almost fifty years would pass before Beverly Greene, believed to be the first female African American architect, received a bachelor's degree in architectural engineering in 1946 from, once again, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Architectural production in the United States in the decades immediately before and after the Civil War was premodern, eclectic, and produced out of commercial offices and ateliers. Neoclassicism had run its course by the 1840s and, according to the American academic canon, was quickly succeeded by versions of the Gothic Revival, the High Victorian Gothic, the Second Empire, and, by the 1880s, the Richardsonian Romanesque. Proponents of the English Gothic, such as John Ruskin, had gone so far as to reject on principle the notion of further classical production. Even those American architects trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and inculcated in neoclassicism returned to the United States to produce an eclectic architecture customized for American needs. Architectural historian Richard Longstreth suggests that this period can be described as academic eclecticism “fostering the art of design through a scholarly knowledge of the past.” During the “style wars” of the later nineteenth century, Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to attend the Ecole, returned to the United States in 1855, where he opened his influential architectural practice in New York City. His production, along with that of a steady stream of Beaux-Arts–trained and influenced architects, helped contribute to the professionalization of American architectural practice and the dominance of the Beaux-Arts.