Opposing the erasure of women from the history of engineering
During my second year at Berkeley I ran across Harry Harrison’s novel Tunnel Through the Deeps; I decided after reading it that it would be cooler to be an engineer than to do something with my journalism major and Russian minor. So I finished my BA, immediately enrolled in an engineering course, and subsequently became a civil engineer.
Since then I've worked mostly in transport and infrastructure, but I've also worked with an architecture firm helping clients determine what they wanted, taught architecture and engineering at a further education college, advised on urban design, universal design and zoning, and worked as a summer fellow for the Historic American Engineering Record. This last assignment sparked my interest in the history of engineering, and I'm now doing PhD research on how the first mainline railways fit into the existing transport network in England between 1830 and the 1850s.
I'm by no means a cutting edge scientist or engineer like most of the women who post here, but I wanted to write a little about the erasure of women from science and engineering. Years ago I acquired a small diary called 'The Medieval Woman'; each week has an image from a book of days, illuminated manuscript, or border of a painting or document. They show women doing tasks such as spinning, baking, cleaning, farming, and others we now find surprising - fighting, writing, mining, blacksmithing, working in construction. What is most remarkable about these images is how unremarkable they were to the people who created them—the artists were reproducing scenes from everyday life, which included both men and women going about their business.
Women have always been involved in the world's business, but in more recent times have been written out of the history of anything arbitrarily labeled 'masculine', such as science and engineering.
Over the years I have found evidence, often indirect, about 
several women engineers before the 20th century—Sarah Guppy, Alice Tredwell, Elinor Coade, Sara Losh, to name a few. I'm certain that these are only representative of the countless women who have done what we would call engineering throughout history but whose contributions have never been acknowledged and have now been lost. (Please let me know about your favourite Victorian (or earlier) woman engineer, so that we can stop imagining that women only started doing science and engineering (ignored as they were, and still are) in the 20th century.)
Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing describes the erasure of women from literary history. Dale Spender’s book Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them describes the erasure of women from intellectual history. As far as I know there’s no equivalent book (yet!) describing women’s erasure from the history of science and technology, though there are many fine biographies of women who have been influential in these fields (a notable non 20th century example is Katie Whitaker’s biography of Margaret Duchess of Newcastle) and a few eye-opening compendia of women explorers and inventors.
What interests me is not necessarily highlighting the lives and achievements of individual women, though of course this is a worthy endeavour, but rather combating the resistance to the idea that women, as people, are legitimate actors on the world’s stage—not just a few praiseworthy exceptions, but all of us. This has always been true, but for some reason it is forgotten and rediscovered every generation; think how much we would know and understand about the work of women throughout history if we didn’t have to keep covering the same ground every 30 years.
Comments
Liz:
Brilliant! The most interesting thing I've read in a while! I've worked in IT for nearly 30 years and the idea this is not a legitimate career choice for a woman is very strong at the moment. I suppose it's the Credit Crunch, it was the same in the 80's. Men wanting to protect "their" jobs at our expense. But there is also a denial of what went before, many younger IT women have never heard of Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, to name but a few.
We know this idea of a "lady" sitting on a cushion and sewing a fine seam is largely a Victorian construct. Many of us can see from our own family history the lie that it is. The trouble is, why do we let ourselves believe it?
Becky:
Hi, This is such a great article! I feel really strongly about the rasure of working women in general from history. There is a myth that women are historically home-makers, but this has never been financially viable for working class women. When my cousin researched our family tree, we found that the women of the family had always been seamstresses, nurses, farmers' wives, pub landladies and market stall holders for as far back as records show! And at every step of the way they had to make and repair things (like the farm's Morris Marina, or enough chairs to seat 10 children!) around the house.
I get really sick of people acting surprised when I tell them I'm an engineer, when we all know how much us girls love our fast cars and planes! I actually wrote some blog entries a while back at http://guerrillabeauty.com/2010/02/science-for-girls/ and http://guerrillabeauty.com/women-we-love/ The latter lists some of my favourite female scientists and engineers, including the wonderful "sporting motoriste" Dorothy Levitt
and fellow Hull girl Amy Johnson.
As for Victorian or earlier female engineers, I only know of Katherine Wright (The Wright brothers' sister). However, I do know that women (and, sadly, children) worked in the mines in the UK up until Victorian times. It was made illegal for women to work underground in a mine because the Victorians did not consider it decent. When I was researching university degrees in the 1990s, I was advised against mining engineering because this law still stands in much of the former British Empire.
Ruth Wilson:
Hi Carolyn,
This is fascinating - good to hear from Liz and Becky as well. Wonderful to hear of women who broke the mould and paved the way for later engineers.
We recently ran a survey to ask people if they could name a famous engineer. First we said, name any engineer, male or female, living or dead. Brunel won hands down. Like Einstein, he seems to provide an abiding male iconic image of what it means to be an Engineer (Scientist in Einstein's case). Ada Lovelace was mentioned occasionally.
Then we asked people if they could name a female engineer (not necessarily famous) and Jean Venables came tops. You can read about it here: http://www.theukrc.org/news/2011/03/survey-finds-that-people-struggle-to-name-women-engineers
What do you think can be done to make people more aware of these early women? An opera perhaps?! A set of postage stamps! Jeremy Clarkson making a programme about them... Do you have a website by any chance where they are all assembled?
Carolyn Dougherty:
Hi Liz--I'm so pleased you found this post worthwhile! And yes, the IT world has been full of women ever since its inception, both women like the ones you mentioned who contributed substantially to the field and women who did the work, at Bletchley Park and other places (I occasionally remind people that the word 'computer' originally meant 'a woman who worked with computing machines'). I guess as the occupation acquired status and prestige men pushed women out of it, in the same way women were pushed out of medicine...and then all evidence of their participation was erased. Why DO we let ourselves forget all this history? I wish I knew!
Carolyn Dougherty:
Oh and I forgot to say to both Liz and Becky--very interesting point about family history. It's not something I myself am into, but thank you for bringing to my attention the fact that probably the vast majority of people have female ancestors that did all sorts of 'masculine' work, which is clear evidence that it happened.
Carolyn Dougherty:
Hi Becky--thanks for these links. I didn't even know the Wright brothers had a sister! (And I didn't know Amy Johnson was from Hull.) The 'women we love' page could just go on and on...here's one to add to the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Shilling
Beatrice Shilling's biographer tells the story that she refused to marry any man who hadn't earned a Brooklands Gold Star (for doing a 100mph lap around the track) to match hers (yes her man finally managed the feat and she got engaged to him). I actually have a few books by and about pioneering women motorcyclists in the early 20th century (I'm interested in the subject as you can tell from the photo)--let me know if you're interested and I'll post the names and titles.
That is quite freaky that the law still prohibits women miners in some places. One of the photos I included in the set for Ruth to pick out when designing this post was of one of the Wigan pit women whose photographs in the 1840s started all the uproar.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pit-Brow-Women-Wigan-Coalfield/dp/075243912X
Carolyn Dougherty:
Hi Ruth--I have to admit I didn't recognise the name Jean Venables...though I guess I knew who she was since I think I was at an ICE event that she spoke at. I guess the thing I find so frustrating is that we can keep publicising both the names and accomplishments of individual women and the simple fact that there WERE women in these fields, and it just doesn't seem to 'stick'. I wish I had a better idea why (I'm hoping maybe some commenters here might have some ideas).
A while ago WES asked me to help put together a page or pages of women engineers, like Becky's excellent page (which I will start pointing people to when they ask); after thinking about it I decided it would be more useful to launch a campaign to get women engineers into Wikipedia, and to get them listed as engineers. Here's the result so far:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_engineers
I think we're making a little progress here! :) I hope anyone reading this will pitch in and add any women we haven't yet made articles about, then link the articles to the women engineers page.
Cycleboy:
Actually, I believed the term 'computer' to be the person who did complex mathematical calculations, such as those required by astronomers and such like.
And, they were usually women.
Carolyn Dougherty:
Yes, you're right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer
Estelle Rowe:
Another early woman engineer was Verena Holmes
1889 – 1964 BSc(Eng) MMechE AMIMarE AMILocoE. She ran a woman only ammunitions factory (would be illegal now), invented the paper guillotine and also later on in her career became very interted in the education of engineers and was the first person to come up with the idea of the sandwich course, a degree incorporating an industrial placement. She was also a founder member of WES and one of its Presidents. I became familiar with her due to her legacy to set up the Verena Holmes Lecture Fund. I was Trustee and then Chair for this annual series of presentations about engineering to school children. Some of the other Trustees were also amazing women engineers, in their 70's and 80's when I met them and of course, all single - because at that time if you married you left your profession!
Carolyn Dougherty:
Hi Estelle--thanks for commenting. I've also run into Verena Holmes through WES. It seems as if World War I and its aftermath opened all sorts of possibilities for women in engineering; it's no coincidence that WES was founded in 1919; that generation produced a lot of public-spirited women engineers. I've heard people say that was a one-shot event, though, and we're unlikely to ever see such a coherent and committed group of women engineers in the future.
Tom @TPITweets:
This thread is both brilliant and fascinating.
Thanks Ruth (who comments above)for bringing it to my attention. We maintain a weekly blog that reports on the week in engineering history and are frustrated at how difficult it is to find women to include in this, so the source material in this post and comments thread is much appreciated.
Carolyn, would you be interested in writing a guest blog for us?
Tom
Ruth Wilson:
Thanks Tom - I'll get in touch with Carolyn.
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