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Ruth Spivey is an IEEE Life Member who has a nearly 65-year engineering career to reflect upon.
She was born in Ripley, Oklahoma and was fascinated by math and science. She attended Oklahoma State University, then it was Oklahoma A&M College, as an electrical engineering student during World War II. She was a member of Sigma Delta, a group at the school that encouraged women’s scholastic achievements and served as a support and comradery group.
In 1945, she was the first woman to earn an electrical engineering degree from OSU.
Her career got started when she got a job at General Electric in Schenectady, New York. There, she met her husband James who joined the company when he was discharged from the Army. They both worked as test engineers in the company’s training program for recent graduates. This role was mostly checking items for quality and accuracy.
Source: Maggie Armstrong, The Institute
In 1946, they both transferred to GE’s new manufacturing site in Syracuse, New York. She tested radar transmitters for ships. In this role, she worked as much overtime as she could, she said in an interview with IEEE’s The Institute. After a few weeks of that, her supervisor came to her and said there was trouble. He had let her work too many overtime hours than what was allowed for women at the time, she said.
The same year, she and James got married and she became pregnant with their first child. She had to stop working due to a labor law at the time that prevented pregnant women from working. The family had to also move to Vallejo, California because James was transferred to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
She stayed home with her child but one day, James came home at lunch and told her to dress for an interview and come back to work with him for an interview with the shipyard’s radar design department head.
“He had been telling people at work that I was an engineer,” she told The Institute. She was hired as civil service employee for the Navy. She helped equip the U.S.S. Estes with microwave technology that conducted and recorded tests on a thermonuclear device.
After that project was completed, they moved back to Syracuse. Over the years, the family moved several times for various job transfers. In the 1960s, she worked for a naval architectural firm. Her main project was the checkout system for the UGM-27 Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile. She also worked on the first solid rocket fuel and test cell for United Technologies. On that project, she supervised six male employees.
In 1966, she was hired as an electromechanical designer for a Lynchburg, Virginia-based pip and foundry company. She was their first female engineer and women weren’t allowed at the manufacturing site. She had to convince her boss that she couldn’t work on equipment she couldn’t see.
Over the next years, she continued work at various jobs and continued her education with courses in various mechanical engineering subjects. In 1975, her family made their final move to Texas when her husband took a job with Motorola. Ruth continued working, designing HVAC systems for various companies. She then became a civilian employee with the Air Force at the Randolph Air Force Base. She rose through the ranks and managed several projects over the next 20 years. She retired from the Air Force at 70 at one of the highest ranking positions for a civilian. She worked as a consultant after retirement and officially stopped working at 86.
She’s now in her nineties and lives at a retirement home in New Braunfels, Texas.
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