Caroline Haslett

Caroline Haslett (1895–1957) was a pioneer in the field of electrical engineering, and one of several high-powered women who did much to further the cause of women’s employment from the 1920s to the 1950s. She was founder and first director of the Electrical Association for Women. She promoted the use of electricity in the home to liberate women from household drudgery. She became president of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women. She was the first secretary of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1919, and became president in 1941, but she had a dramatic falling out with Katharine Parsons in the mid-1920s.

Caroline Haslett was Adviser on Women’s Training to the Ministry of Labour in the Second World War. During the war she was sent on several government missions abroad, to the USA and Canada, to Sweden and Finland, and to the British Forces in the Middle East. After the war she took a leading part in conferences of women organized by the British and American authorities in Germany. She was the first woman vice-president of the Royal Society of Arts and a long-standing member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Royal Institution. She was made a CBE in 1931 and a DBE in 1947.