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

Abstract

Early in 1919 a group of educated and ambitious British women, recently engaged in munitions work, founded the Women's Engineering 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 of engineering 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 gendered 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.' The solution proved to be the attraction of