Decoding the silence: Women engineers and male culture in the U.S., 1878–1951*

Abstract

The article takes women's own voices as its point of departure to decode women's struggles and strategies in entering engineering in the USA. Despite their pioneering effort, women engineers identified with male middle‐class values rather than with feminist ideals: their reluctance to articulate themselves and their reliance on a “borrowed identity” should be understood as part of their class identity. Looking at the institutional forces that shaped women's entry into engineering schools from the 1870s until the time they organized collectively into the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) in 1951, the author describes three pathways into engineering: patrimonial patronage, matrimonial sponsorship and corporate apprenticeship. Despite women's free access to primary and secondary education, American women engineers faced similar obstructions as did their European counterparts because academic skills did not guarantee employment on the shopfloor or in the field where male codes of hands‐on experience and managerial control defined women as non‐engineers. Taking a gendered perspective, the author challenges current historiography on engineering professionalism and on the contrast between shopfloor and school culture.