History: Women in Electrical Engineering

[This article originally appeared in “Scanning the Past” in the January 1996 issue »/Proceedings of the IEEE.] In 1941, Edith Clarke and Seldon B. Crary presented a joint paper on stability problems in power engineering at a meeting of the America Institute of Electrical Engineering (AIEE) in Philadelphia. At the time, Clarke and Crary were both employed as engineers by the General Electric Company (GE), and their paper received a prize as the best paper published that year. Clarke had overcome many difficulties on her way to becoming a highly respected member of the electrical engineering profession. She specialized in the analysis of electric power systems and devoted her career to the simplification and mechanization of problem solving in that field.