Women engineers in the 1920s

January 1920. And the pages of The Engineer were ablaze with an ill-tempered debate on female engineers which illustrates dramatically how much industry - and The Engineer itself - has changed over the last century.

You can read the full exchange here but It all begins with a short article in the January 9th issue of The Engineer entitled ‘The Woman Engineer’

‘If [women] are better than men,’ pronounces the columnist (who we can probably assume is male), ‘they will get work, and if they are not they won’t, and that…is all there is to it.’

‘Nature has not fitted women for engineering,’ he continues, warming to his theme. ‘And though here and there one may break away from the normal, just as we may find now and then a great woman novelist or a tolerable women artist, so a few times in a century women may reach eminence in engineering.’

‘If women desire to remain in the craft of engineering,’ he concludes, ‘they must be content to call themselves women-mechanics.’