CURTISS WRIGHT ENGINEERING CADETTES: 21ST CENTURY QUESTIONS AND ISSUES

15th International Conference for Women Engineers and Scientists, Adelaide (Austrialia)

July 20, 2011 Anne Perusek, Society of Women Engineers

Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Iowa State University

INTRODUCTION

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“You as the Curtiss-Wright Cadette will be a co-worker with the Soldier, the Sailor, and the Marine, and will share with them the responsibility of the war effort.

This is your opportunity to add your name to the role of individual service, to give our valiant men the weapons to save America!”

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Curtiss Wright Corporation

1940-1944:

13,738 P-40 Hawks

142,840 aircraft engines

146,468 electric propellors

29, 269 planes

RECRUITMENT AND COURSES

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Academic ability

Attitude

Interest

Qualifications:

2 years of college

1 year of math

18 years old

Better than average record

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“They gave us all of the physics of mechanics, how things worked, how motors worked. They gave us all of aeronautical information, and they crammed about 2 ½ years of aeronautical engineering, in a normal course, into 10 months.”

Betty Goettsch

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Cornell University

Iowa State College

Penn State

Purdue University

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

University of Minnesota

University of Texas

Click icon to add picture

CURTISS WRIGHT WORK EXPERIENCE

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“I was working on some rather complicated, not corrections, but re-dos, change orders…At one point I thought, why don’t they scratch this whole thing and start from scratch, it gets too complicated to change orders on top of change orders on top of change orders. But it was modifying propeller design, and starting with what was there and reworking the drawings. Just propellers…”

Eunice Bray

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In Arlene Hanley’s words: “I think we saw this as one way to break into a man’s world.”

But, she continued:

“I think all of us knew that it wouldn’t last…. I think most of us realized with the end of the war and with jets coming in we would have to learn a new technology.”

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“I saw myself as an engineer in training…I don’t think the men felt that we were, but we felt that we were. Actually, we were probably better trained than some of the men in the department.”

-Jeanette Tremlin Wickes

CONCLUSIONS

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While there is little evidence that the Cadettes directly set the stage for women to enter engineering in the post-war period but the experience was significant in other ways. It is clear that the Curtiss-Wright experience had a positive, and in some cases profound, effect on the individual women.

A Cadette remembers:“How sharp they were. How well they had chosen women that could be successful in whatever they wanted to do. They were just brain trusts. Each one of them outstanding in some individual way. But just really sharp, just sharp. And no sissies among us.” Mary Ellen Goettsch

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But, in many ways, the Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadette Program represented something new and unique in American academia, and the doors would never again be shut quite so tightly against women engineers.

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Contact us:

Anne Perusek, Society of Women Engineersanne.perusek@swe.org

Tanya Zanish-Belcher, Archives of Women in Science and Engineering (Iowa State University)tzanish@iastate.edu

Original C-W plane model, Iowa State University

RESOURCES Bix, Amy Sue. "Engineering National Defense: Technical Education at

Land-Grant Institutions during World War II," in Engineering in a Land-Grant Context: The Past, Present, and Future of an Idea. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005.

Cole, C. Wilson, Final Assessment Report, Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadette Records, RS 13/16/1, University Archives, Iowa State University Library.

Curtiss-Wright Engineering Cadettes Records, RS 13/16/1, University Archives, Iowa State University Library.

McIntire, Natalie Marie. “Curtiss Wright-Cadettes: A Case Study of the Effect of the World War II Labor Shortage on Women in Engineering.” MA Thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993.

Meiksins, Peter. Oral History Interviews, 1996, Cleveland State University.

Rossiter, Margaret. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940-1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.