Technikatörténeti szemle 23. (1997-98)

TANULMÁNYOK - Vámos Éva Katalin: Women’s Opportunities of Studying and Practising Engineering in Hungary from 1895 to 1968 (On the example of Budapest Technical University and its women students)

workshop to be assembled on the spot. She led the work of the assembly of two similar workshops in Diósgyőr, too. Johanna Wolf was, all her life, keen on solving difficult and unusual problems. Thus she and her colleagues managed to build the Power Station Inota by a till then unheardof technology with power plants, i.e. construction from prefabricated parts. They assumed great responsibility, but the power plant was built and performs its task till today. The same enthusiasm induced her to assume the post of chief engineer for the State Construction Trust No. 26, which came into being on August 1, 1951, and comprised 5 companies. She was renowned for being exigent and strict in professional matters but she was a fairminded leader. As a private person she had one great hobby: driving. She was driving her own car from the age of 18 to that of 80. Her first car is now property of a collector, who has restored it.

21 In the 1930s freshly graduated people found it even more difficult to get employment owing to the historical situation outlined above and to the great economic crisis. That was why the Royal Hungarian József Technical University was sent a secret order by the Ministry to make women's admission more difficult even to the non-engineering faculties: "I am herewith notifying the honourable Council that - in order to make job-finding easier to the freshly graduated students -1 find it necessary to restrict the admission of women to university". Therefore I rule as follows: within the number of first-year students admissible in the academic year 1934-1935 women be admitted to the Department of Economics and Commerce only up to 30 (thirty) % of the total. - Budapest, 22 August, 1934. (Signed: Hóman, Minister of Religious Affairs and Education).

22 At the true engineering departments, however, trends contrary to the above could be observed, too. On August 30,1935 Judith Pogány's application for admittance to studying chemistry at the Faculty of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering was forwarded to the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education by the Royal Hungarian József Technical University. In a letter bearing the date of September 2,1935, the undersecretary of state Dr. Kálmán Szily (himself a scientist and professor at the Royal Hungarian József Technical University) allows that "to the first academic year of the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Faculty of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering women be admissible up to 5% within the closed number established."

23 (Judit Pogány's father, physicist Béla Pogány was professor at the Royal Hungarian József Technical University from 1923 to 1943).

24 This case definitely made it possible to women to study chemical engineering up to the 5% mentioned. The request for admission of the next applicant, Piroska Lengyel was returned by the Ministry for Religious Affairs and Education with the remark that thereafter it would be up to the university to admit women up to 5% without requiring any special permission of the ministry.