Dorothée Aurélie Marianne Pullinger, MBE (13 January 1894 – 28 January 1986) was a pioneering automobile engineer and businesswoman.
In 1910, she began work as a draftsperson at the Paisley works of Scottish automobile firm of Arrol-Johnston, the oldest and largest Scottish car manufacturer, where she trained under her father, a well-known car designer and Managing Director.
Pullinger stayed at Arrol-Johnston until WW1 when production changed from cars to airplanes. Pullinger was then appointed female supervisor in charge of 7000 female war workers of the very large munitions facility operated by Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness, where women were employed in the manufacture of high explosive shells where she set up their apprenticeship scheme.
After the war, she returned to Scotland where the munitions facility was converted back to the manufacture of automobiles and renamed Galloway Motors Ltd, where she was a director and
manager.
It remained in production in a variety of versions until 1925, and then as a 'badge-engineered' Arrol-Johnston from 1926 to 1929. The company employed a largely female work force under Pullinger's direction and produced automobiles until 1923 when production was transferred to Arrol-Johnson's Heathhall works.
Married in 1924, she relocated to England with her husband and two children, and worked as sales represesentative for the Galloway. Around the time Arrol-Johnston ceased production of cars, she and her husband set up a large, technically innovative steam laundry in Croydon, with imported American machinery and its own power station and arterial well. In WW2 she set up the women's industrial war work programme for Lord Nuffield and ran 13 factories. She was the only woman on a post-war government committee formed to recruit women into factories.
Pullinger was the first person, and certainly the first woman car designer, to see both the need for a different design of car for women drivers and also the design and engineering solutions to bring that about commercially. She remains to this day the only person to design and take into production a car specifically designed with women drivers in mind.
She achieved this, and more, at a time when men dominated engineering and industry, and working women were often regarded as "stealing a man's job". A woman of remarkable resilience and talent, a leader in recruiting women into engineering during wartime, an MBE at the age of 26, a founder of the Women's Engineering Society in 1919, an accomplished engineer in her own right, and a pioneer and inspiration for women in engineering.
Source - "Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame". engineeringhalloffame.org. 14 June 2016
http://www.engineeringhalloffame.org/profile-pullinger.html