Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders? Opening the Professions to Women after 1919

© Women’s Engineering Society and the IET Archives

On 20 February 2019, the Bedford Centre will be hosting a panel discussion on the history of women in engineering and we are delighted to be welcoming Jane Robinson as one of our speakers. Jane is the author of the forthcoming ‘Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders’ and, as a taster, she tells us about the book and what inspired her to write it. 

Embarking on a new book is terrifying. The one I’m working on now is about the first women in the traditional professions, including engineering, following the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act (the SDRA) in 1919. I wanted to write it because of two books I’ve written before: Bluestockings, about the first women to access a university education – which of course features Royal Holloway and Bedford Colleges – and Hearts and Minds, about the campaign for the vote.

Both are populated not by celebrities but ordinary women fighting for the right to live life on their own terms – and both beg questions. What did educated women do with their new-found education? And what did those seasoned by the suffrage campaign tackle next? Hence Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders, due for publication next year.

I should explain the title: when debating the admission of women to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), members came up with a definitive argument. Ladies can’t possibly be architects: they can’t climb ladders. Job done. (Some would argue women still can’t climb ladders, in terms of their careers.)

The SDRA should have been one of the most significant pieces of legislation in modern British history. Its wording was encouraging: ‘a person shall not be disqualified by sex or marriage from the exercise of any public function, or from being appointed to or holding any civil or judicial office or post, or from entering or assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation…’ It signalled at once a political watershed and a social revolution; the point at which women were technically recognised as competent as men.

But that ’technically’ is important; it was an enabling act rather than an empowering one. It enabled establishments like the Bar, like the Royal Colleges of medicine and surgery, architecture and engineering bodies to admit women. However, there was no requirement to admit them, no penalty for not doing so, especially if they were rash enough to marry which in many cases meant instant dismissal.

I said new books were scary: this is why. My fear is always that there’s not enough interesting material available. In the case of Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders there was one light-bulb moment when the fear was dispelled: I opened the digital archive of The Woman Engineer, the journal of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES). Running from 1919 to today it’s packed with fascinating information, illustrations, and personalities who burst from the page with good humour and high spirits. These people would be remarkable in any age; that they achieved so much in the face of the sort of prejudice you will hear about at the ‘Magnificent Women’ event, is inspirational.

© Women’s Engineering Society and the IET Archives

There was still prejudice, despite the SDRA. This was in many ways the worst time for women to think of entering the professions. Though they had won temporary respect and valuable experience by metaphorically donning bowler-hats and pinstripes or overalls and grease-guns during the First World War, priority was now given to returning servicemen while their womenfolk were expected to unfold their aprons and retreat to the parlour.

The economic climate of the mid-1920s hit everyone hard. Trained or educated women felt guilty for occupying positions which in the good old days before the war belonged exclusively to men. It took moral courage for male employers and female employees to stand up for the rights of a woman architect, civil engineer, solicitor, university lecturer or doctor.

And it’s a myth that either of the World Wars liberated women in the long term. Expediency meant that they were given the taste of an independent career, but socio-economic pressures ensured that in peacetime, the old order was reluctant to change. Lip-service was paid in the form of the SDRA, but the professional world was still hide-bound by precedent and, quite frankly, scared of competition.

After the passing of the SDRA the implication was that now there were no barriers left for women. Admittedly, only those aged 30 or above could currently vote, but optimists in the WES were sure that would change soon. Besides, having the vote was all very well; as one suffrage campaigner said, it’s what it led to that mattered. And yes, it was going to take a while for reactionary men to get used to working with women at the highest level, but that, too, would only be a matter of time. Wouldn’t it?

© Women’s Engineering Society and the IET Archives

Jane Robinson is a social historian, the author of 10 (and a half!) books including Bluestockings: the Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education, currently in development as a TV drama series, and Hearts and Minds: the Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote which is just out in paperback.

To find out more about the history of women in engineering and the current work WES is undertaking to promote gender diversity and inclusivity, please join us in the Shilling Auditorium at 6:30 on 20 February 2019.  Please register for free tickets here.

Magnificent Women and their Revolutionary Machines: Women Engineers after 1919

Eleanor Shelley-Rolls (1872–1961), a founding member of WES

On 20 February 2019, the Bedford Centre will be hosting a panel discussion on the history of women in engineering and we are delighted to be welcoming Henrietta Heald as one of our speakers. Henrietta is the author of the forthcoming Magnificent Women and their Revolutionary Machines which tells the story of the foundation the Women’s Engineering Society in 1919. To mark the society’s centenary in 2019, copies of the book will be available in print from September. As a taster, here Henrietta tells us about the book and what inspired her to write it. 

This book began as the story of one intriguing, enigmatic and inspirational character: Rachel Parsons—daughter of Sir Charles Parsons, an inventive genius, and granddaughter of William Parsons, an Irish earl who in the 1840s built the largest telescope ever seen.  Rachel and her mother, Katharine, were the pioneering founders of the Women’s Engineering Society, of which Rachel became the first president.  During her presidency, Rachel met Caroline Haslett, an equally extraordinary woman of a very different kind. From a strict Victorian lower-middle-class background, Caroline went on to become the pre-eminent female professional of her age and mistress of the great new power of the 20^th century: electricity.

Rachel Parsons (1885-1956)

The idea of exploring the parallel lives of these two largely forgotten women was irresistible. What I hadn’t anticipated was the number of other amazing individuals who would clamour to get into the book because, as I found, the Women’s Engineering Society was a magnet for many ambitious and intellectual women in the 1920s and 1930s who sought to express themselves and earn a living outside writing or the arts.

At the same time, as well as securing the vote and the right to stand for Parliament, women were making progress in law, medicine and other areas.  However, those with technical, mathematical or scientific interests probably had a steeper uphill struggle. The Women’s Engineering Society and, later, the Electrical Association for Women, drew them together in a common purpose, opened new opportunities, and encouraged them to make alliances across boundaries of wealth, politics and class.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, of course. In a forerunner of today’s familiar assassination by social media, women who stepped outside the boundaries of ‘normal’ female behaviour were often subjected to ridicule and suspicion.  They reacted by ignoring such treatment or asserting their independence in diverse ways, with many remaining single or having same-sex relationships.

Caroline Haslett (1895-1957), IET Archives

As now, engineering covered a broad range of disciplines but in 1919 it brought together those women who had contributed to industrial production and related activities during the war and felt angry and disappointed at being, as some put it, ‘thrown on the scrapheap’ afterwards. Some were trained in particular areas, others absorbed skills along the way, but all had had their eyes opened to the advantages of social and economic liberation.

Equal pay was a crucial goal and in the wartime munitions factories the positive effects of supporting female workers in all aspects of life had become clear. Special provisions were made for pregnant women and mothers of young children, including subsidised childcare schemes. Training and education for women had been implemented on an unprecedented scale, and they had shown that they could excel in many areas. Taken together, these elements might have been seen to prefigure a feminist utopia—until the war ended, when it all started to go badly wrong.

The magnificent women in my book called themselves engineers, but their revolutionary machines were more than mechanical objects such as cars and boats and planes. Through their achievements at work and their campaigns to promote women’s rights, they prepared the ground for a social revolution that would put fair and equal treatment of the sexes firmly on the political agenda. It amounted to a vibrant ‘wave’ of feminism that, until now, has largely eluded the attention of historians.

Henrietta Heald is the author of William Armstrong, Magician of the North, a book about the great Victorian industrialist who built Cragside in Northumberland, the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity. The book was shortlisted for two literary prizes.  To get a 10% discount on your pre-ordered copy of her new book, Magnificent Women and their Revolutionary Machines, please visit www.unbound.com/books/magnificent-women and use the code WIE10.

To find out more about the history of women in engineering and the current work WES is undertaking to promote gender diversity and inclusivity, please join us in the Shilling Auditorium at 6:30 on 20 February 2019.  Please register for free tickets here.

 

 

Magnificent Women

A Panel Discussion on the First Female Engineers

Wednesday 20 February 2019, 6.00-7.30pm, Shilling Auditorium, Royal Holloway

After being side-lined after undertaking crucial engineering and technical
roles during the First World War, in 1919 a group of pioneering women
engineers banded together to found the Women’s Engineering Society
(WES). The society continues today to promote gender diversity and
inclusivity in engineering.

To celebrate the centenary of WES and 100 years of women engineers, the
Bedford Centre for the History of Women and Gender is delighted to present a
panel of commentators looking back at the historic roles of female
engineers, and to welcome Henrietta Heald, author of the forthcoming
Magnificent Women and their Revolutionary Machines on the founders of the
Women’s Engineering Society; Nina Baker, engineering historian on the first
female electrical engineers; Jane Robinson, historian and author of Hearts
and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won
the Vote and a forthcoming title on the opening of the traditional professions
to women in 1919 with the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act;
and Elizabeth Donnelly, the CEO of the Women’s Engineering Society.

David Howard, Founding Head of Royal Holloway’s Electronic Engineering
Department, will introduce the pioneering work of Beatrice Shilling in the
new Shilling Building named after her. There will be time for networking
over refreshments and a chance to sign up to WES so do please join us for
what promises to be an engaging discussion of how the past can help shape
the future of women in engineering.

To register for free tickets please visit: www.magnificentwomen.eventbrite.co.uk

For more information email Katie Broomfield: katie.broomfield@rhul.ac.uk

Social Scientist or Philanthropist? The Bedford Centre’s time-travelling interviewer meets Louisa Twining in 1859

Louisa Twining c. 1906

From the perspective of our time Louisa Twining (1820-1912) is a dull subject – a pious philanthropist, worthy but no longer relevant, and not a scientist of any kind.  There are probably a number of reasons for this. Neither of her memoirs, the first published in 1880 and the second in 1893, reflect the passionate concern and outrage on behalf of individuals which colour her early writings. Most scholarly references to her life and work are based on these. The name of the organisation which she founded – the Workhouse Visiting Society – does not convey today her revolutionary vision. She was a Christian Socialist, for some reason today not given similar credit to the atheist or agnostic varieties. The few visual images we have of her show a severe, unsmiling lady growing stout in retirement – enough said!

However, the issues she addressed so incisively in the 1850’s are still with us today in the social care scandals of the last twenty years. Let’s travel back 159 years, and meet the women in question:

Aged thirty-nine, Louisa is a woman on fire.  Over the last five years she has published a series of pamphlets containing searing critiques of our  approach to housing and feeding those who cannot earn enough to live outside the workhouse – the frail, disabled or demented old, the disabled, unskilled or unsocial younger people, and their children.  Last year she established the Workhouse Visiting Society to act as a national network for people engaged in improving the lives of workhouse residents, and has now become a recognised part of a national debate.

When we meet in Bradford she had just delivered her second speech to the recently-formed National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. Miss Twining’s comprehensive and incisive grasp of her subject was based, at the beginning of her career, on listening to workhouse residents, particularly women with age-related infirmities and unable to earn their living any longer and now (reluctantly) spending their final years in the infirm wards. She tells me that she was most struck by three aspects of the workhouse regime which together acted to demoralise and reduce the individual.

Firstly, if there is no-one in whom residents can confide, petty abuses of power on the part of the staff can quite quickly become regular and serious abuses.  She tells me of one lady who brought with her just one possession – a teapot – but was immediately told by the admissions officer no personal possessions were allowed, and he subsequently destroyed her beloved teapot.  Secondly, she says, imagine how people lose their faculties when there is no-one who calls them by their name, or recalls with them the events and celebrations of life outside the workhouse walls.  Both of these ills could be ameliorated by even the most amateur and approachable (female) visitor.

Lastly, boredom and lack of purposeful employment demoralise people – women as well as men – who have worked their whole lives in a trade which has kept them, and often a family too, in respectable lodgings. Why is it not possible, she asks, for people to be allowed to work at a bench, with their tools, even if they are no longer able to work sufficiently fast or accurately to earn a living? Or, I suggest, to be useful in some other way such as teaching the workhouse children a useful skill?  But such facilities are not provided and the management segregates residents by age, gender and class of resident.

Miss Twining’s ideas concerning workhouse visitors have taken a truly revolutionary turn:  visitors, she suggests, should be female because, yes, middle-class women can afford to undertake such activities at no financial cost to the taxpayer. They therefore have time to listen, to befriend and to encourage.  But they should be trained, and work in a co-ordinated manner, sharing information amongst themselves about the operation of the institution and its staff. Ideally they should work in partnership with a responsible management, to introduce small changes to the regime which will deter abusive staff and residents, and provide a more humane refuge. When I ask whether such a partnership might be in operation somewhere she says no, nor is she hopeful it will be in her working lifetime.  I tell her not in my lifetime either. We agree that the obstacles such as mistrusting reformists, defensiveness, dislike of hearing a woman analyse an issue and reluctance to adjust systems to suit individuals cannot be underestimated.

Once the Workhouse Visiting Society was launched, however, Miss Twining began to hear of the experience and initiatives of other ‘social workers’, mostly women, in her field and has turned her attention from this vision.  Her lecture today focused on the work needed to educate and protect children in the workhouse, and to prepare them for working life on the outside. She tells me of predatory employers prospecting the workhouses for female workers who are just about to leave for life outside. The girls, aged between eleven and thirteen, who are especially sought are those who have no friends or family to “give any trouble”.  Since the girls have no practical skills or experience of work, they are both vulnerable and liable to fail in these jobs. In a few years they are back in the workhouse, on the adult wards, and at risk. We can do better, she says, and one senses that this is where her energies will be spent in the next few years.

Louisa Twining’s earliest campaigning pamphlets from 1855 and 1857, published anonymously, have now been identified and accredited.  Pamphlets by other women are still unattributed, to which Twining referred to in her 1859 speech to the NAPSS.        

Johanna Holmes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Royal Holloway.  She has a previous career advising government and the voluntary sector on social housing and youth homelessness.

Commemorating Sarah Parker Remond: Pioneering abolitionist and anti-racism campaigner

by Nicola Raimes and Nicola Phillips

Commemorative plaque to Sarah Parker Remond in Rome [Image: Marilyn Richardson, Sarah Parker Remond: a Daughter of Salem]

Last month Royal Holloway launched the Women Inspire campaign and one of our most inspiring alumna from Bedford College (the first Higher Education College for women which opened in 1849) was Sarah Parker Remond (1824-1894). She was an African-American anti-slavery campaigner with a passion for education and equality who spoke to huge crowds all over Britain and practiced medicine in Italy. Remond is frequently commemorated online in America and a plaque has been erected in Rome where she died. In 1861 The English Woman’s Journal included an autobiographical article in their ‘Lives of Distinguished Women’ feature but as yet there is nothing material to commemorate her achievements here in the UK where she became a naturalized citizen in 1865.

Sarah Parker Remond [Image: WikiCommons]

Remond grew up a free Black woman in Salem, Massachusetts, where her brother Charles Lennox Remond was also a prominent slavery abolitionist. By 1857 Remond had been appointed as a travelling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. An impassioned and accomplished speaker – she was just sixteen when she made her first anti-slavery speech – Remond came to Britain to spread the abolitionist message in January 1859.

As well as wanting to serve the anti-slavery cause here, Remond also sought freedom from discrimination in racially segregated America. She was equally determined to pursue the further education denied to her in America as a Black woman. Over the next two years she combined an extensive lecture tour of the British Isles with her studies at Bedford College because:

“My strongest desire through life has been to be educated. I found the most exquisite pleasure in reading and as we had no library, I read every book which came in my way, and I longed for more. Again and again mother would endeavor to have us placed in some private school, but being colored we were refused.”
‘A Colored Lady Lecturer’, The English Woman’s Journal (June 1861)

A number of Black American abolitionists came to Britain in the 1850s and 1860s, but Remond’s contribution stands apart for several reasons. Most notably, she was the first woman in her own right to address the question of slavery before mass audiences here. In contrast to the fugitive slave Ellen Craft who appeared before audiences but did not speak, Remond challenged the prevailing notion of Black women as helpless victims. Here was a free Black woman whose calm, forceful delivery belied the often emotive appeals she made to white women on behalf of suffering female slaves, and was able to cut across the partisan divisions that plagued the British anti-slavery movement at that time.

Women were integral to the development of a transatlantic anti-slavery movement from the late 1830s and it was through this network that Sarah Parker Remond met Elizabeth Jesser Reid, philanthropist, founder of Bedford College and keen opponent of slavery. In October 1859 Remond enrolled at Bedford College and boarded with Jesser Reid at her home in nearby Grenville Street.

Thought to have been the first Black student at the College, Remond studied a range of subjects, including arithmetic, ancient history and Latin. However, by the third term she had enrolled in far fewer classes and an addendum to Remond’s College records hints at the challenges she might have been facing both as a mature student and as a touring anti-slavery speaker:

“These classes were found to be quite unsuitable owing to the peculiar circumstances and age of the student.”

Register of Student Courses BC AR/202/1/1

Entry for Sarah Parker Remond in Bedford College Student Register, (1849-1870). Ref: BCAR 201/1/1
[Image: Nicola Raimes]

During 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War, Remond urged Britain to oppose the Confederacy and to use cotton from India, rather than slave-produced imports from America. She supported the American antislavery press and was active in the Ladies’ London Emancipation Society founded by her friend and women’s rights activist Clementia Taylor.

In the aftermath of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion Remond wrote to the London Daily News expressing her outrage at the treatment of Black Jamaicans by British troops, and citing a change for the worse in British attitudes towards Black people. It has been suggested that Remond was so disappointed by this change that she left Britain to make a new life in Italy. However, Remond’s application for British naturalization offers an alternative explanation. These documents demonstrate both her wish to settle permanently in Britain and her intention to visit Italy temporarily.

We can only speculate about Remond’s subsequent decision to settle permanently in Italy, rather than in Britain. She already had contacts there through her friendship with the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and her support for the unification movement. Perhaps the opportunity to study medicine was a factor. Remond qualified as a doctor in Florence in 1868.

Following her death in 1894, Remond was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome where a plaque in her memory was installed in 2013. Remond stayed with Clementia Taylor at Aubrey House, London, where a plaque naming Taylor and other radicals who associated there has been erected but Remond is not listed among them. We are currently discussing ideas about how best to commemorate Remond’s remarkable contribution to anti-slavery and anti-racism in Great Britain, and her lifelong battle to gain an education. If you have any suggestions please do contact us.

Nicola Raimes is an MA Public History graduate from Royal Holloway and producer of a series of podcasts about women and slavery for Historic England. She was interviewed for the article in The Independent, ‘Slavery: How Women’s Key Role in Abolition has yet to receive the attention it deserves’.

Nicola Phillips is the lead editor for this Blog and Co-Directs the MA in Public History and The Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway.