Sharing a birthday with the Women’s Engineering Society: Verena Holmes, an outstanding professional mechanical engineer

This guest blog, written by Helen Close et al., looks at the remarkable career of mechanical engineer Verena Holmes, through newly uncovered archive material, including personal letters and diaries.

NEWS: The entire performance of SHE is now free to watch online

From the 21-23 November 2019, students from the University of Leeds department of Performance and Cultural Industries performed the play SHE at Stage@Leeds. Based on the lives of women in engineering, the students devised the play themselves, while working with the Electrifying Women project team. You can read more about the production and the different women whose lives were dramatised here.

Education packs for KS3 and KS4 students relating to the performance are available in the Educational Source Packs.

The Electrical Handbook for Women – a transformative 20th century text

Graeme Gooday writes about the Electrical Association for Women’s handbook, first produced in 1934, of which nothing of the sort had previously been published in Britain for technically-minded women. It was so popular that 33,000 copies were sold in its first year alone, and it remained in print until the 1980s. What was it that made this book so popular? But then why was its final edition Essential Electricity: A User’s Guide not written specifically for women at all?