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(1883-1971), civil engineer, architect, and
suffragist
Born in
Basingstoke, Hampshire, England, on September 30, 1883, Nora Stanton Blatch was the daughter of Harriot Stanton Blatch
and the granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, both of whom were leaders of
the
women's rights movement in the United States. After her family
relocated
to
New York City, Blatch studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York,
where in 1905 she became the first woman in the United States to obtain
a
degree in civil engineering; the same year, she became the first woman
to be
admitted as a member (with junior status) of the American Society of
Civil
Engineers (ASCE). She worked for the American Bridge Company in
1905-06 and for the New York City Board of Water Supply. She also
took
courses in electricity and mathematics at Columbia University so that
she
could work as a laboratory assistant to Lee De Forest, inventor of the
radio
vacuum tube, whom she married in 1908. Blatch worked for her
husband's
company in New Jersey until 1909, when they were separated (they
divorced in 1912).
After
returning to New York City, Blatch worked as an assistant engineer and chief draftsman at the Radley Steel Construction Company
(1909-12)
and for several years as an assistant engineer for the New York Public
Service Commission (from 1912). She began working part-time in 1914
as
an architect and developer on Long Island. In 1916 she gained
notoriety
when she filed a lawsuit against the ASCE, who had terminated Blatch's
membership when her age passed the limit for junior status; she failed
to win
reinstatement through the court.
In addition to her work in civil
engineering, Blatch devoted her time
to
the woman suffrage movement. While studying at
Cornell she had founded a
suffrage club, and from 1909 to 1917 she campaigned heavily for the
cause
in New York. She became the president of the Women's Political Union in
1915, succeeding her mother, and edited the organization's Women's
Political World. She subsequently participated in the efforts of the
National
Woman's Party for a federal Equal Rights Amendment.
In 1919 she married Morgan Barney, a
marine architect. They moved to Greenwich,
Connecticut, in 1923, and Nora worked as a real estate developer. Barney remained politically active in her
later years,
writing
such pamphlets as Women as Human Beings
(1946). She died in Greenwich, Connecticut,
on January 18, 1971.
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