ABSTRACT
Whenever women have entered the engineering profession they have crossed cultural and social boundaries. This book is about when and why they crossed boundaries, what passports they needed to do so, and what strategies women employed to demand their passage into the male world. Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges presents studies from the US, East Germany, Czarist Russia, and several European countries. The articles offer a panoramic view of the experiences of women engineers from nine different political and economic situations. Each nation underwent industrialization at a different moment, but all needed engineers to staff and supervise the process. Cross-cultural comparison shows that women engineers were not a rare species, but always part of history: they were important economic and political actors within the process of industrialization. Women engineers have occupied their places in the world of engineering long before the 1960s and as early as the nineteenth century. Bringing these diverse histories together in one volume allows us to see how varied were the passports they needed and the means by which women sought to cross the borders. Women faced male engineering institutions associated with the military throughout the nineteenth century, yet sometimes women were allowed to enter the male bastion with special visas when the engineering elite saw the need for women’s labor. Allowing women to study or work in engineering was often part of expanding the engineering agenda to meet new industrial needs. Competition among different parts of the male elite also created small windows of opportunity for women. Singly and collectively they worked with reform-minded men to enter the profession in any way they could. War economies, hot and cold, offered other opportunities, but women were often shut out after peace was restored. In many countries, the presence of a women’s movement and the mobilization of a feminist intellectual legacy helped women enter engineering, but success depended partly on how women engineers and feminist groups were able to build bridges between them or other reform movements. All of these things-the industries and circumstances of war, competition and social ties among male engineers, and women’s collective organization-helped to shape the barriers women encountered and the means by which they forced their way through.
