"Engineeresses" invade campus: four decades of debate over technical coeducation

Engineering education in the United States has a gendered history, one that reveals an ongoing debate over women´s place in the predominantly male engineering profession. Historically, women in engineering programs, even more than in science, have stood out due to their rarity. Their very presence thus led university communities to confront questions about what it means to be a man or a woman in a modern technological society, what it means to be an engineer. The article concentrates on four technically-centered schools that had, due to implicit or explicit policies, remained completely or virtually all-male up to WWII or beyond. These case studies demonstrate that in the debate about whether to become coeducational, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni came to confront a difficult set of issues concerning gender and technology, traditions which tied technical knowledge to masculinity. The very process of rethinking admission and education policies led these colleges to discuss whether or not women had a place studying engineering and if so, on what terms they should be admitted. The author´s work examines the period from the 1940s through the 1970s, asking questions about when, why, and how four schools (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), moved toward coeducation.