Understanding the long history of women in engineering
The Electrifying Women team, Emily Rees, Elizabeth Bruton and Graeme Gooday, reflect on what the project has learned over the last year from engaging with different audiences about the history of women in engineering.
This second blog post by Dr Emily Rees on Victorian naval engineer Henrietta Vansittart uses archival material to tell us more about her colourful and unconventional life.
In this blog, Graeme Gooday explores the international counterparts to the UK’s Women’s Engineering Society (WES) and highlights some of WES’s international members, from the USA, Germany and further afield.
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?
This guest blog by Catherine Best tells the story of the ‘radium girls’ employed in factories in World War One in the USA – their horrendous illness as a result of radium poisoning and their struggle for justice.
This blog post focuses on the life and work of Henrietta Vansittart (1833-1883) who held the patent for the Lowe-Vansittart propeller. This propeller was widely used in the Royal Navy’s ships and was awarded a first class diploma at the Kensington exhibition in 1871. A model of the propeller is held by the Science Museum Group. So why don’t we know more about her fascinating life?
How did one of Germany’s very first female engineers end up working in Britain during World War 2? The little-known story of Ira Rischowski is certainly not one of espionage. Hers is instead a drama of escape from Nazi persecution and narrowing opportunities until she was able to join the UK’s Women’s Engineering Society (WES).
Tracing the history of women in engineering can be challenging; often women’s work is undocumented or disguised. This blog focuses on a small, but incredible revealing, source from the IET archives: the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) Register of Women Engineers, published in the Autumn of 1935. Find out more about what it can tell us about the lives of women in engineering.
For anyone looking into the history of women in British engineering, the archive of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) from its foundation is an essential resource. This blog will offer an introduction to the holdings of the archive and how they can help us research the history of women in engineering.
The Women’s Engineering Society (WES) is currently marking a major anniversary, founded on June 23rd 1919. Since then it has supported women working independently as engineers for 100 years, both in Britain and around the world. But what was it that brought the Society together in the first place?