women in engineering. Because engineering in America was, until the 1970s, almost exclusively a male profession, the now-conspicuous and perhaps distracting male pronoun is appropriately used in many of the references to those prior times and in many of the older quotations that appear in this book. That is not to say that women were completely excluded from the engineering profession. In 1876, Elizabeth Bragg Cumming (1859–1929) became the first woman in America to earn a degree in engineering when she received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

The first woman to become a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers was Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883–1971), who was admitted to the grade of Junior in 1906. In the previous year, she had become the first woman to receive a civil engineering degree from Cornell University, which she did cum laude. When in 1916 Nora Blatch applied to the ASCE for advancement to the next membership grade, her application was denied, and she was subsequently dropped from membership for failing to advance to Associate Member in the required time. The first woman to reach corporate member status in the ASCE was Elsie Eaves (1898–1983), a 1920 civil engineering graduate of the University of Colorado who advanced to Associate Member in the society in 1927. See Engineering News-Record, March 17, 1927, p. 463.