‘If We Exist Through the Formative Years …’

The Society of Women Engineers’ founders accomplished many things by the end of the Society’s founding meeting held May 27-28, 1950. They joined independent student and professional groups in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington, D.C., into a unified organization. The group elected Beatrice Hicks as its first president. They established committees to move the Society forward and left The Cooper Union’s Green Engineering Camp with excitement and hope for the future. 

But their work had just begun.

During SWE’s first year, the founding members developed policies, procedures, and workflows for the Society’s business. They established a working fund, opened a bank account, and approved an emblem. They published the first issue of the Journal of the Society of Women Engineers in the spring of 1951. They also welcomed 112 participants to the Society’s first national convention in March and ended the first fiscal year with 111 members.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. 

The Society’s founding occurred during a tumultuous political time amid ongoing investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities attempting to ferret out allegedly subversive people in government. Board members spent the first year considering how to assure the U.S. government and prospective members that SWE was a professional organization, not a subversive one. They drafted a clause for their bylaws and incorporation documents establishing SWE’s political disinterest. However, their efforts to incorporate in New York were further hampered when they learned in June 1951 that they could only use “engineers” in the society’s name if members were required to be licensed professional engineers.

As the Society entered its second year, weak points in its procedures and workflows and the difficulties of conducting business via mail became apparent. New membership applications could not be processed until the admissions committee chairman returned from her monthslong vacation in the fall. 

The second issue of the supposedly quarterly journal was delayed until February 1952, as geographical distance and miscommunication created friction between the volunteer editorial staff and the public relations committee. Members of the awards committee, already a year behind schedule, either annoyed or offended committee chairman Grace Murray Hopper to the extent that she resigned at the end of February, requiring President Beatrice Hicks to mediate. 

As she considered earlier independent groups of women engineers that came before, and the work that lay before the new Society, bylaws committee chairman Miriam “Mickey” Gerla lamented in a Jan. 3, 1952, letter to New York Section President Mary Stokes: “It is only if we exist through the formative years of the Organization that we will have done better than the previous groups who failed.”

Determined to succeed, members filed the Society of Women Engineers incorporation paperwork in Washington, D.C., in February 1952. With Hopper back at the helm, the awards committee presented its first “Award for Meritorious Contribution of Engineering” — now the Achievement Award — a month later to solar energy pioneer Maria Telkes. A sign of the Society’s growing stature, the New York Society of Professional Engineers invited Hicks to participate in a convention panel about the national shortage of technical employees. Additionally, SWE received a formal invitation to the Centennial of Engineering later that year. 

When Hicks passed her presidential gavel to Lillian G. Murad in July 1952, the Society had roughly 220 members (admissions procedures and membership records were still a problem). SWE welcomed new sections in Chicago and Detroit and had groups forming in Houston, Los Angeles, and Denver. Significant challenges lay ahead, but the Society would survive its formative years.