“Am I a Lady or an Engineer”? The Origins of the Women’s Engineering Society in Britain, 1918–1940

Abstract

“Am I a Lady or an Engineer?” The Origins of the Women’s Engineering Society in Britain, 1918—1940 CARROLL PURSELL Early in 1919 a group of educated and ambitious British women, recently engaged in munitions work, founded the Women’s Engineer­ ing Society (WES) to protect their interests against attempts to force them out of the engineering trades. The society was immediately confronted with deep and abiding problems of liminality. They had, first of all, to establish a new professional organization. A new generation of professional technical women had to rely on, but also resist the domination of, older and wealthier women, characterized by a fading style of moral authority and class deference. Carving out an identity somewhere between the leisured gentry and their workingclass sisters, they sought to claim a ground for professional expertise. Caught also between a powerful and patriarchal union ofengineering workers and an equally patriarchal male engineering profession, they sought to regender both. And finally, they necessarily sought a proper balance between femininity and professionalism, between the gen­ dered roles of woman and engineer. Their struggle with these issues helped shape the continuing, but problematic, social role of the woman engineer in Britain during the 20th century. The carnage that began in August 1914 used up men and munitions at an unprecedented rate, and the need for more of both at the front created a dilemma at home. By early 1915 the situation was critical. David Lloyd George, minister of munitions for Great Britain, was quoted as saying, “This is an engineer’s war, and it will be won or lost owing to the efforts or shortcomings of engineers. We need men, but we need arms more than men.”1 The solution proved to be the attraction of Dr. Pursell is Adeline Barry Davee Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University. He thanks especially his colleague Dr. Angela Woollacott for a thorough and critical reading of the manuscript and for help in understanding the role of gender in shaping the history of women. 'Lewis R. Freeman, “Lloyd George: Minister of ‘What-Most-Needs-Doing,’ ” Review ofReviews 52 (November 1915): 569.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3401-0001$01.00 78 The Origins of the Women’s Engineering Society in Britain 79 women into the munitions plants to take the place of men needed for combat. Tommy’s sister made it possible for him to go to war. The war began during a growing feminist agitation in Britain for women’s rights, especially the vote. Suffragettes split over the wisdom and morality of the war. Some, like Sylvia Pankhurst, opposed the war. Her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel, however, ardently sup­ ported the war effort and postponed the fight for the franchise in the face of this larger crisis. Still others, like Millicent Garrett Fawcett, were highly ambivalent, not supporting a war in which women had so little voice but not wishing, either, to oppose the government at such a critical time. The end of the war saw the granting of the vote to women thirty years of age and over (1918) and in 1919 the passage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, which removed barriers to female participation in the professions, particularly the law. Whatever prewar expectations or wartime allegiances, the activities of British women from 1914—18 created powerful new expectations as well as new opportunities. At the end of the war, the Women’s Industrial League circularized 5,000 British firms, asking about the wartime employment of women. The 1,400 companies that responded reported that before the war they had used 43,200 women and that during the war they had averaged a total employment of 245,300. The responding general engineering firms had expanded at even a greater rate, going from 14,100 women before to 134,600 during the war. By the end of the war probably 90 percent of munition workers were women.2 In all, an estimated 800,000 women came into munitions work during the war, working in shipyards, aircraft factories, foundries, machine shops, shell-packing plants, explosive factories, and in a host of other sites...