Gender, Professions and Discourse: Early Twentieth-Century Women's Autobiography. By Christine Etherington-Wright.

Abstract

In her classic 1985 study, Independent Women, Martha Vicinus identified the ‘passion for meaningful work’ as an animating force in the lives of single, middle-class women in Victorian and Edwardian England. To break out of forced redundancy and find uses for their talents was the ‘sacred center’ of these women's hopes and dreams: ‘It was a means out of the garden, out of idleness, out of ignorance, and into wisdom, service, and adventure’ (p. 1). Since the publication of Vicinus's pioneering work, the struggles of middle-class women to lead active, useful lives outside the domestic sphere have engaged the attention of numerous historians. We now know a great deal about the battle to secure access to higher education and the professions, about the efforts of nurses and midwives to reform and raise the status of their respective occupations, about the campaigns to win equal pay for women teachers, and about the obstacles and opportunities confronting female servants of the central and local state. Borrowing from feminist sociology, many scholars have been concerned to lay bare the gendered foundations of professional identity, to show how the ostensibly neutral principles of disinterested service and impartial expertise were, in reality, infused with beliefs about sexual difference, and how perceptions of professional knowledge and skill were frequently shaped by the gender of the individual demonstrating them. Their work reveals how prevailing ideologies identifying femininity with religiosity, philanthropy and, most crucially, motherhood, served to structure professional identity differently for women.