Ensimmäiset naiset insinöörien ja arkkitehtien yhdistyksissä

Authors

• Petri Paju

Abstract

The first women in the societies of engineers and architectsFrom the late 1880s onwards, women entered higher technical education in Finland as students for a degree in architecture. At this time, architects and engineers had started and were founding professional associations that exerted significant influence especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This article asks who became the first women members of engineering societies in Finland, and how did they participate in the lives of those professional bodies. Based on digitized journals of the engineering societies and archive records, the first two women were welcomed to the so-called local technical clubs. The first female member was architect Bertha Enwald in technical society of Viipuri (Vyborg) in 1898. In 1902, doctor of medicine Karolina Eskelin joined a similar society in Tampere. The next year also the national, mostly Swedish-language engineering society, Tekniska Föreningen i Finland, accepted a female member, an architect. Many of the first women did not become very active in their society partly because they remained members only for a limited time. Nevertheless, a few of them for instance published an article in a professional journal. As more women graduated as architects and engineers, the number of female members in these societies started to grow albeit modestly in the 1940s.