Women's Work by Chris Crisman

Author:Chris Crisman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

DAMYANTI GUPTA

was the first female engineer employed by Ford Motor Company

My name is Damyanti Gupta. I was born in 1942 in a very small village of Sindh, British India. When I was five years old, India gained independence. This didn’t happen easily. The country was divided into India and Pakistan in the bloodiest partition in the world’s history. The part where my family lived became Pakistan. There were riots and unrest everywhere. My family had to flee in the middle of the night to the coastal town of Karachi. Then we were loaded onto cargo ships bound for Bombay. When we reached Bombay, we were called refugees. We had lost everything and we couldn’t communicate with anyone, because they spoke different languages. My family wandered around from city to city looking for work. We finally settled in Baroda, Gujarat.

There I was admitted in the refugee school. In first grade, I had to learn three languages; one was a right-to-left language, and the other two were left to right. At the age of five, I became a translator for my parents and grandparents. My mother, who had only a fourth-grade education, looked at me and said I was going to get something that no one can take away from me: a good education. She said she would help me, but I’d have to do my part. Be a good student, she reminded me every day. When I was thirteen years old, we heard that our prime minister, Pandit Nehru, had decided to visit our city. I was very excited. I wanted to see him and listen to his message. That morning I started from my home very early in the morning, reached there, and found a seat on the ground near the podium. In his speech, he said after two hundred years of British rule, India has no industry. We needed industry, we needed engineers. He looked at us and said, “I am not talking to only the boys, I am also urging the little girls to consider this profession.” This was the first time I even heard the word engineer. I went home and told my mother that I wanted to become an engineer. She fully supported me. I graduated from high school with very good grades and was able to pursue mechanical engineering.

This didn’t happen without challenges. It was difficult enough to be the only female student in a male-dominated college—there was not even a ladies’ restroom. I had to ride my bike one and a half miles each way to use a restroom. When the dean realized that I was there to stay, they built a beautiful ladies’ room just for me.

When I was nineteen, I remember coming across a biography of Henry Ford. In this book he showed how he was able to make a car affordable for the average family through assembly-line invention. I started dreaming about working for that company one day. I started working very hard and was able to get admission in universities over in America.

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