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 Sophia Hayden Bennett was born in Santiago, Chile in 1868. Her father was an American from New England and her mother was South American. When Hayden was six years old, she was sent to Boston, Massachusetts to live with her paternal grandparents. She became interested in architecture in high school and was determined to pursue it as a career. She entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1886 and graduated with honors in 1890, as the first American woman to receive an architecture degree.
After completing her studies, Sophia Hayden Bennett could not find employment as an architect because she was a woman so she accepted a position teaching drawing at a Boston high school. The following year she entered and won a design competition for the Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She was just 21. Hayden won the competition with a three story, white building in Italian Renaissance style with arches and columned terraces. She received $1,000 at the time for the design, when male architects earned ten times as much.
There is a striking resemblance between Bennett's thesis project for A Fine Arts Museum and  the Woman's Building; both feature an Italian Renaissance detailing, straight-forward massing, and both make use of projecting pavilions and skylights. Hayden's building received an award "for delicacy of style, artistic taste, and geniality and elegance of the interior hall." Critics, however, insisted it looked too feminine. One said, "graceful timidity or gentleness, combined however with evident technical knowledge, at once differentiates it from its colossal neighbors and reveals the sex of its author." The Women's Building was torn down after the Exposition ended and Hayden, frustrated with the way she had been treated, retired from architecture.
Eight years later, Hayden married William Blackstone Bennett, an artist. She lived a quiet life in Massachusetts until February 3, 1953 when she died in Winthrop, Massachusetts
Resources:
http://web.mit.edu/museum/chicago/bennett.html
http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/hayden-s.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_Hayden_Bennett
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