Interwar period

A.J. Robertson, The British aircraft industry and the state in the interwar period a comment . Economic History Review, 28 (1975), 648-57. 

Murray, Williamson, and Alan R. Millett (eds.). Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Cambridge University Press, 1996. 

Other patents of the interwar period include several that specified addition of substances rich in carbon, e.g. of powdered hydrocellulose, to obtain flashless charges. In the U.S.S.R. nitroglycerine powder was used in which a part of the nitroglycerine was replaced by aromatic nitro compounds. During World War II the most widely used flashless powder contained nitroguanidine (in Germany called Gudol powder). 

Eventually, the problem of using wood cellulose as a nitration material was solved successfully during the interwar period, and during World War n, wood pulp cellulose was commonly used for nitrocellulose manufacture. 

We give an overview of the different employment avenues for women chemists in the interwar period and choose exemplars for each. The chapter concludes with examples of women chemists who used the opportunities of the Second World War to develop career directions, though the effect of that war on women chemists seems to have been less momentous than that of the 1914-1918 conflict. The late 1940s seem to be an appropriate place to end the book, for as Evelyn Fox Keller has observed, the mid-20th century represented the nadir of the history of women in science. 11... 

The interwar period. .. meant that the feminist organizations were functioning at just tick-over.90... 

Analytical chemistry was an area favoured by some women chemists during the interwar period. In fact, a remarkable number of women chemists who graduated from UL chose this direction. We have chosen three individuals to exemplify this Dorothy Baylis, Muriel Roberts, and Gertrude Andrew. 

In earlier chapters, we identified particular niches in which a select few women chemists could find employment academic appointments in women s colleges (see Chaps. 4 and 6), domestic chemistry (see Chap. 3), biochemistry (see Chap. 8), crystallography (see Chap. 9), and pharmacy (see Chap. 10). But what of the many hundreds of women chemists who graduated during the interwar period Obviously, we cannot cover each individual nevertheless, there were some specific career directions, and we will discuss them in this chapter together with biographies of women chemists who followed each of these paths. 

Despite the hostility by some men, women s place at university was assured the clock could not be turned back. The academic women of the interwar period lived in a completely different world to that of their mothers and grandmothers. Margaret Tuke, Principal of Bedford, articulated the difference, looking back from the vantage of 1928 at the bygone era ... 

There was a second reason that women became teachers from Dyhouse s statistics, about 30% of the women attending university in the interwar period were only able to afford to do so on grants for teacher training. This commitment was spelled out very clearly at some institutions, as Kathleen Uzzell recalled ... 

Nevertheless, despite the gloomy forecasts, Horrocks has shown that during the interwar period many women chemists did find employment in industry, particularly the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, textiles, and photographic industries.37 We will conclude this section with one case study, the life of Kathleen Culhane. For so many of the forgotten women chemists, scanty information remains on their life and work but for Culhane, we have a rich narrative that epitomises the struggle of women seeking an industrial chemistry career during the interwar period. 

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