Introduction

Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas

Even when the path is nominally open – when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant – there are many phantoms and obstacles, as I believe, looming in her way. To discuss and define them is I think of great value and importance; for thus only can the labour be shared, the difficulties be solved.¹

At 8 pm on Wednesday 21 January 1931, around 200 young professionals crowded into a hall on Marsham Street, Westminster, to hear Virginia Woolf speak. The meeting was hosted by the London and National Society for Women’s Service, a suffrage organization which had dedicated itself to promoting women’s employment and equal economic opportunities following the granting of the vote to some women in 1918. Woolf’s talk, later published as ‘Professions for women’, was addressed to those who had perhaps already won the rewards she had famously argued were key to a woman’s independence – a room of one’s own and a steady income. This ‘freedom’, she declared, ‘is only a beginning – the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared.’² In an earlier draft of her speech, Woolf had considered the manifold professional careers in which she expected the women of her audience had already begun this task:

meteorologists, dental surgeons, librarians, solicitors’ clerks, agricultural workers, analytical chemists, investigators of industrial psychology, barristers at law, makers of scientific models, accountants, hospital dieticians, political organisers, store keepers, artists, horticultural instructors, publicity managers, architects, insurance representatives, dealers in antiques, bankers, actuaries, managers of house property, court dress makers, aero engineers, history instructors, company directors, organisers of peace crusades, newspaper representatives, technical officers in the royal airships works – and so on.³

Woolf, the self-described ‘daughter of an educated man’, had a complex relationship with professional work in her own life as a writer and publisher.⁴ The themes of her speech would reverberate in her fiction and non-fiction over the next seven years, culminating in Three Guineas (1938), in which she considered how women might use their new economic and social privileges to help prevent war. Throughout this period she asked working women not only to ‘perpetually question and examine’ their emerging status as professionals, but also to remember and to make creative use of their precarious position as outsiders in patriarchal professions. This position was part of the indelible inheritance they had received from their mothers and grandmothers.⁵ Many ‘phantoms and obstacles’ would continue to haunt the aspiring woman professional, Woolf believed, but the most pressing and urgent task ahead of those who heard her speak in 1931 was the fight to remake the professional society in their own image.

This edited collection takes Woolf’s assertion of the potential of professional women as its starting point. The range of examples she offered will perhaps surprise readers of this book, as many of them do not fit within traditional narratives of ‘the professions’. As editors, we embarked upon this project with the intention of exploring how professional selfhood was defined and experienced by a wider range of those who entered the workforce. Our own research into women in creative fields had uncovered countless examples of individuals carrying out professional work beyond the boundaries of prevailing masculinist rules and assumptions. We wanted to know if these creative women were anomalies, or if historians of professional identity had overlooked something fundamental about the way professions operated: that the routes to acquiring professional expertise could be more fluid than the focus on the model of a handful of established careers, such as medicine and law, had ever supposed. Perhaps what was so distinctive about the history of professional identity was not the fact that professions only occasionally admitted outsiders into their ranks, but rather that they depended on the undervalued contributions of women and some men who only ever established a tenuous foothold within them, and that many individuals flourished as part of professional work cultures outside the confines of the professions’ elitist structures. Perhaps these gendered histories of success, but also of insecurity, were woven into the very fabric of what had come to be known as ‘professional society’.

Precarious Professionals therefore brings together studies of women and men who worked on the margins of their fields in art and science, high culture and popular journalism, private enterprise and public service, in both their local and international contexts. The contributors to this book foreground questions about the relationship between gender and forms of precarity in the past to illuminate how professional recognition could be claimed, adapted and denied by historical subjects at different moments. We ask: what imprint did experiences of working precariously on the margins of a profession leave on an individual, and what was the role of gender in determining how their expertise would be valued? How did subjective understandings of professional status and selfhood relate to formal categories and patriarchal processes of professionalization? Did precarious professionals manage to forge their own distinctive ideals, networks and practices, despite the contingent and unstable nature of their working lives, and did gender help or hinder their attempts to do so? Did the gendered experience of precariousness ever provide a foundation for practical innovations, political action or forms of cultural authority which may have been sidelined in later histories?

In using gender and marginality as analytical tools to investigate the politics of professionalism, the following chapters reshape understanding of power and expertise in public life before the late twentieth century. We have deliberately included essays by scholars working on the lives of more established professionals, alongside more overtly ‘precarious’ roles, in order to provoke reflection on the different ways that insecurity could lie at the heart of what it meant to become a professional woman or man during this period. The contributors to this volume have focused on the 1840s to the 1960s, the period which saw the rise of a society driven by competition to enter increasingly specialized career hierarchies, governed by the ideals and expert opinions of a handful of select professions. This supposedly linear process of professional ‘progress’ underpinned many of the master narratives in modern British history. Professionals – from traditional Victorian men of science and members of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ to social science experts and planners – have often played a central role in observing, narrating and directing historical change. The peculiar dynamics of professionalization loom large in historians’ explanations for trends in the evolution of modern British capitalism; state formation and the shaping of social and public policy; family life and parent–child relations; the development and impact of education; patterns in intellectual and cultural production; as well as the nature and meaning of modernity and individualism.

Women were allocated a minimal supporting part in classic surveys of this period, such as social historian Harold Perkin’s The Rise of Professional Society (1989).⁶ Since the 1970s, however, some historians, economists and sociologists have been refocusing attention on the gendered nature and experience of work and with it women’s place in a wide range of different professions. Following recent explorations of the relationship between middle-class femininity and professional identities in a variety of different fields, there is now an emerging recognition of the urgent need to interrogate conventional categories in the history of professional and white-collar employment through the lens of gender and its intersections with other identity markers such as class, race and ethnicity, religious belief, sexuality, disability, generation and geographic location.⁷ Making space for biographies of pioneering individual women professionals within institutions and within the historical record more broadly has been given renewed impetus by the centenaries of the legislation granting some women the right to vote and to enter Parliament and the higher professions.⁸ When the working lives of precarious professionals are placed in dialogue with master narratives in the history of the professions, it becomes obvious that the landscape of ‘professional society’ has changed irrevocably since the terrain was mapped out prior to the rise of women’s and gender history.

The literature on professional identity is now vast and varied, so it is instructive to revisit some of its major landmarks and underlying assumptions. This introduction firstly interrogates and refines classic chronologies of the rise of professional society and approaches to defining professional work in Britain. It then considers the development of women’s history as a field, the emergence of gender as a category of analysis, and trends in the recent scholarship on women in different professions, including in an international context. It shows how bringing these strands of historiography together advances the study of gender and professional identity. Finally, it explores how the contributors to this volume redefine our conceptions of professional cultures and expertise. At a moment when changes in the labour market mean that the contemporary experience of precarity and the position of marginalized groups in the professions in Britain is under intense scrutiny – and when the professions continue to be riven with gendered, racialized and classed hierarchies – it has never been more important to critically re-examine professional society from a historical perspective and to reflect upon the gendered politics of the production of history itself.

Defining the modern British professional

After the eighteenth century, ‘profession’ was transformed from a general term used to describe a source of employment to a word denoting a category of occupations guarding access to a body of expert knowledge and demanding specialist training and authentication.⁹ Traditionally, the archetypal professions have been those connected with the triumvirate of law, the clergy and medicine, and these fields continue to play a starring role in histories of the making of professional society. Yet over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the professions gradually began to encompass occupational roles, along with ancillary and supporting staff posts, in the military, science, engineering, architecture, banking, education, creative and cultural industries, management and planning, and posts in local and central government. These elite ‘white-collar’ and ‘white-blouse’ jobs, in contrast to skilled or manual labour, have typically been understood to have depended on intellectual rather than physical exertion and, at the higher grades, gave individuals a greater degree of independence and autonomy in the workplace. Beyond this, however, overarching definitions of ‘professionalism’ or ‘professionalization’ tend to tell us as much about the professional positions of their authors and the status of particular fields as they do about common threads linking work in the professional society as a whole. When we examine the existing definitions more closely alongside a wider array of contemporary voices such as Woolf’s, what we find is that the boundaries to the professional society were more porous and contested than has previously been acknowledged.

Professionals now make up just over a fifth of the UK workforce and account for over a third of all trade union members. The rise of new forms of precarity in the rest of the labour market means that they are still seen to be among the most secure, well-paid and influential workers in British society.¹⁰ Twenty-first-century notions of a professional ‘career’ – defined by elements such as the expectation of progressive promotion and incremental rewards, an income awarded on a sliding scale, holiday entitlements, sickness pay and an occupational pension, as opposed to the structural insecurities of traditional working-class employment – have their origins in the mid nineteenth century.¹¹ In Perkin’s account, the increasingly complex and interdependent fabric of English social structure came, by the late nineteenth century, to consist of a warp of vertical hierarchies based on professional careers, which overlaid and interacted in various ways with the weft of older, horizontal hierarchies based on class and status.¹² Recognized processes of professionalization which constructed these vertical hierarchies within different occupations include the establishment of formal systems of instruction and qualification derived from theoretical or practical expertise; the development of official codes of practice; and the formation of exclusive professional networks and associations, including specialist unions – all of which enable professions to construct their own forms of regulation and governance.

If a key characteristic of the modern profession or professional body can be said to be its self-governing exclusivity, then another distinctive quality of professional life in Britain is the lack of uniformity as to what constitutes a ‘professional’ across different fields. Attributes that characterize professionalism and professional ethics in one occupation are often absent in another. Consequently, the fluid nature of the group of occupations considered under the umbrella category of ‘the professions’ has been an important feature of social descriptions and economic measurements since they became an object of formal sociological enquiry in the 1930s. Early sociologists emphasized the importance of a small number of occupations which had attained professional status through what Max Weber termed ‘social closure’.¹³ One of the first comprehensive academic studies of the professions in Britain added so-called ‘semi-professions’, ‘would-be professions’ and ‘marginal professions’ such as social work, librarianship and complementary therapies to the ‘old-established professions’ like medicine and law and ‘new professions’ such as science.¹⁴ The hierarchy of these classifications solidified during the subsequent few decades, in the context of the expansion and growing importance of the welfare and warfare states. Conventional wisdom tended to suggest that the emergence of the modern career in the mid nineteenth century, followed by the ‘exclusion of the unqualified’ from the old, established and new professions, resulted in women’s withdrawal from the formal labour market, at least until the late twentieth century.¹⁵ Marginal professions are often assumed to have tried to follow the same processes of professionalization and social closure as the elite professions, despite the huge variety in different fields of work and expertise.

When we step back from academic sociological texts and consider popular career guides and handbooks for aspiring professionals, however, the picture begins to look very different. In 1895, for example, the Cambridge journalist Margaret Bateson published Professional Women upon Their Professions in an attempt ‘to show by the evidence of trusty witnesses what possibilities for happy labour women may expect to find in certain of the professions and avocations that are now open to them’. It was not until 1919 that the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act formally enabled women to enter public life and become magistrates, solicitors, barristers, accountants or veterinary surgeons and to enter the civil service. In an era in which the expression ‘woman professional’ still registered as a contradiction in terms, Bateson’s collection of interviews reveals that women who did not have access to formal training, accreditation or institutional affiliation were nevertheless capably assuming the identity of a ‘professional’ across fields as diverse as dentistry, illustration, vestry work, ballet dancing, indexing and stockbroking.¹⁶ From Bateson’s perspective, like Woolf’s some years later, these women had all become fully fledged members of professional society. Though the optimism of advice writers should by no means be taken for granted, their keen eye for practical solutions hints at a growing culture of women’s industry and professionalism. Alongside women who had attained ‘acknowledged professional distinction’ in their fields by the early 1890s, Bateson included conversations with ‘young, or at least youthful-minded’ members of each field in her guide for aspiring professionals, aiming to remedy her readers’ assumption that ‘the choice for a young woman of good education and belongings lies between complete domestic obscurity on the one hand and the very highest distinctions that art or letters can offer on the other’.¹⁷ A range of similar advice guides for aspiring ‘professional’ women was published throughout the period covered in this volume. A number were compiled by dedicated organizations like the London and National Society for Women’s Service, which disseminated information on job openings for women and helped them to navigate gendered labour markets and career hierarchies.¹⁸ It is not a coincidence that early-twentieth-century academic sociologists’ so-called would-be professions were those in which women had made the deepest inroads by the 1930s. Conventional accounts often continue to see professionalization through the lens of the archetypal, male-dominated ring of ‘closed’ professions and the modern civil service, yet as the chapters in this volume will show, there are diverse models of professionalism which need to be historicized and accounted for.

Professional citizenship and the ‘professional mystique’

Another component of the traditional history of the professional society was a distinctive philosophy of professional citizenship, which has been portrayed as maintaining its cultural purchase in British public life until at least the 1960s. This was rooted in a belief in liberal pluralism and the ethics of service, and driven by the moral concern to use professional expertise impartially and for the common good.¹⁹ In Harold Perkin’s survey, the conflict between a professional ‘ideal’ (always, in his account, singular and, we can assume, masculine) and entrepreneurial free market ideals was one of the main forces shaping English culture during the long twentieth century.²⁰ After the 1960s, he went on to argue in a comparative study, England’s professionals became absorbed into ‘global professional society’.²¹ The post-war era saw the gradual disintegration of the social democratic model of professional citizenship and its displenishment under a rapacious, unregulated form of Anglo-American capitalism Perkin termed ‘corporate neo-feudalism’. This he ascribed to the growth of a new form of global elite professional expertise lacking in professional ethics.²² Feminist scholarship has explored the dissolution of the post-war settlement and its impact on women’s professional lives in Britain from different angles. Recently, Eve Worth has argued that feminized roles in public-sector employment underwent a process of ‘de-professionalization’ after the late 1980s, a process that is as important as deindustrialization in terms of understanding the history of work in Britain.²³ This edited collection has taken as its end point the 1960s, by which time many of the processes we now recognize as key to professionalization had been firmly established but the economic and cultural value of most women’s work had yet to be fully accepted in law or the wider society. The effects of the unravelling of professional structures and ideals of citizenship in different fields and institutions during the last third of the twentieth century deserves further investigation.²⁴ As the final chapter in this volume, by James Southern, indicates, changing definitions of sexuality also began to place a new strain on establishment codes of professional conduct after the late 1960s.

Professional citizenship interacted in different ways with competing forms of public authority throughout the period covered in this book. While intellectuals and scientific experts may have set themselves at a critical distance from the managerial and commercial classes, they actively cultivated professional hierarchies, institutions and customs in order to maintain their place in British public life.²⁵ Penelope Corfield pointedly incorporated in her study of power and the professions in Britain before the rise of the modern ‘career’ unsalaried and unqualified groups which depended upon patronage and consequently toiled ‘on the fringes of professional status’, such as actors, artists, musicians and writers. As she notes, they not only evidently shared a ‘precarious’ level of income, but also similar ethics of professional service with those in the conventional professions.²⁶ On this basis we, too, argue that creative work must be included in enquiries into professional society. Service often brought with it the need to communicate with wider publics, and several of the chapters in this volume look at their subjects’ ambivalent relationships to the popular literary market for professional expertise or advice. Ideals of professionalism are still highly influential in popular culture today: professionals are over-represented in the recent popular publishing trend for life-writing, their memoirs regularly becoming bestsellers.²⁷

In looking more closely at the relationship between identity formation and structural processes of professionalization in a wide range of professions, it becomes clear that membership of a professional society itself was often connected to what we have termed the ‘professional mystique’. The acquisition of the specialist expertise that might enable one to move across and up traditional hierarchies based on class and property ownership was never simply connected to official, disinterested forms of accreditation and public service. Rather, the internal cogs in the machine of professional society were greased by symbolic forms of trust and affirmation, as well as association with like-minded individuals within specially designated professional networks and spaces. Even Perkin’s salaried male professionals, enjoying all the ‘psychic rewards’ of stable employment, lived by ‘persuasion and propaganda, by claiming that their particular service [was] indispensable to the client or employer and to society and the state’.²⁸ ‘Looking and acting the part’, Corfield mused, could be crucial to the formation of professionalism.²⁹ Beth Jenkins’s recent work on early-twentieth-century women’s occupational cultures has shown that ‘physicality, height, voice, accent, clothing, and deportment’ were ‘intimately connected’ to the shaping of professional authority in modern British working lives.³⁰ Several of the chapters in this volume put these embodied elements of style in professionalism, and the impact of homosocial professional spaces, under greater scrutiny.

The symbolic and psychological aspects of professional identity, then, were important aspects of professionals’ assimilation into modern British public life. After all, even when we use conventional definitions that focus on the regulation of admission into the professions, the transformation of a working life into a professional career depended upon the careful preservation of state support, public recognition or consumer confidence, not to mention stable family or kinship networks and domestic and working conditions conducive to long periods spent in the process of training and qualification. These are not issues which can easily be separated from the intimate histories of private lives. Indeed, the increasing sophistication of bureaucratic and administrative systems and the spread of new professions based on increasingly complex and esoteric forms of expertise proved to be fruitful subjects for modernist writers, who identified paranoia and self-doubt as one of the chief side-effects of the experience of meritocratic society in the early twentieth century.³¹ Living up to professional ideals always required the emotional work of managing one’s feelings and anxiety in response to the demands of employers and the public.³² Historians have tended to assume these burdens increased at the lower ends of professional hierarchies, but several of the essays in this volume highlight the importance of attending to gendered forms of insecurity in the affective lives of those at the top of their fields. It is striking that so many of the bestselling memoirs of early-twenty-first-century celebrity professionals are written in confessional mode, drawing their apparent authenticity from their elucidation of the ‘secrets’ of their intensely demanding and highly skilled jobs.³³

Becoming a member of ‘professional society’

Never simply closed circles of insiders, modern British professional cultures can best be characterized by their dynamic mechanisms for both inclusion and exclusion, the emphasis of which changed over time and across different settings. Historians and social scientists now agree that, in order to meet the standards of professional citizenship, many different occupations saw processes of professionalization involving social closure, which resulted in increasing specialization, the restriction of access to accredited training and the intricate implementation of regulatory standards. While these changes all effectively worked to downgrade the achievements and contributions of non-elite individuals, often with deleterious effects for the success of certain fields, it is important to remember that they were occurring at different rates and moments. Nor were marginalized individuals necessarily unaffected by developments within professions from which they had theoretically been excluded. In Perkin’s now-classic view, no social group remained untouched by the rise of professional society and its ideals: the value of professionalism and the professional service ethic ‘permeate[d] society from top to bottom’ before the last third of the twentieth century.³⁴ While Perkin’s materialist conception of a single, monolithic ‘professional society’ may now seem outdated, his formulation still has a number of important implications for locating definitions of professional identity arising from specialist studies into particular fields within unequal social systems. Insofar as professional ideals, ethics and authority emanating from the core of the traditional, patriarchal professions became structuring threads within Britain’s social hierarchies and entangled within everyday life, so too did forms of ‘would-be’ professionalism on the periphery of the established professions. As the chapters in this volume have found, it was the labour of precarious individuals that often made conventional professional working life possible.

Moreover, the selvedge to this social fabric was undeniably becoming more complex during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rise of new administrative, technical and commercial professions went hand in hand with political reform, the proliferation of self-help and mutual improvement societies, the growth of trade unionism, the increasing access to public libraries and museums, the creation and formalization of new academic disciplines, and the expansion of secondary and higher education.³⁵ Consequently, there were increasing opportunities for a larger proportion of the population to acquire a professional education and qualifications than ever before, meaning that professional cultures could start to define themselves against, and thrive outside, patriarchal structures.³⁶ These social changes made the cultural and social boundaries of the professions particularly fragile during the period discussed in this book. Neither the state nor the market ever had a monopoly on professional expertise in Britain and processes of professionalization can be found in commerce, trade and private industry.³⁷ Recent research into the spatial practices and material culture of professionalism has also demonstrated that modern professional identities were by no means always forged outside the home.³⁸ The chapters in this volume confirm that professionalism could be inherent in, and expressed through, self-employment, entrepreneurship and voluntary forms of work. In theory, these developments were meant to establish new forms of ‘professional capital’, along with systems of selection based on competitive merit as opposed to inherited wealth.³⁹ Yet social status and connections, as Perkin pointed out at the end of the 1980s, continued to remain a priceless (if not uncontentious) commodity.⁴⁰ While his model professional was a ‘self-made man [sic]’, he argued, revealingly, that controlling access to professional prestige and rewards was most vital in fields ‘whose subject matter is most accessible to the laity’.⁴¹ Defensiveness was, in some ways, central to modern professional lives and status.

The boundaries and hierarchies of professional society, therefore, were by their very nature permeable: the degree to which professions were open or closed became politicized at different moments. This was precisely because professionalism demanded ethical engagement with wider society but was also key to a form of social status that needed to be carefully policed and defended from outsiders. To avoid tautological definitions it is always necessary to scrutinize rhetorical and sociological conceptions of professional identity and their particular histories in more depth.⁴² This book asks what happens when we look beyond traditional measurements and meanings of professional life and, following writers like Margaret Bateson or Virginia Woolf, instead investigate the everyday labour of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the professions. By listening more closely to the terms in which professionals described their own work, it becomes possible to interrogate the masculinist assumptions found in classic surveys and to better understand the unequal processes which made ‘professional society’ in modern Britain.

Women’s history and the politics of professional identity

The uneven development of professionalization in the academy during the twentieth century is intimately connected to the early development of academic women’s history.⁴³ It shaped both the evolution of professionalization as the subject of various fields of historical enquiry and the contemporary experience of early women’s historians who were themselves initially writing from the margins of their professions, with impacts for the lives of women and minorities that reverberate to this day.⁴⁴ The findings of early historians of women’s work in Britain confirmed that more egalitarian and democratic professional aspirations were held in constant tension with forces of reaction and tradition. Not only was much professional work off limits to women, these scholars argued, but male-dominated professions actively exploited women’s labour in order to more effectively exclude them. This section looks more closely at key turning points in the histories of women’s engagements with ‘professional society’, situating them in the context of the patterns of inclusion and exclusion which characterized women’s working lives in and outside the academy during the twentieth century. It shows how engaging with precarious professionals can advance our understanding of the history of women’s work.

Ivy Pinchbeck and Alice Clark, two early female practitioners in the academic historical discipline in Britain in the early twentieth century, produced detailed histories of women’s work during industrialization. They showed that professional organizations had deliberately poached domestic skills, including teaching and healing, to meet the needs of an expanding commercial economy at the same time as erecting barriers that restricted women’s access to formal scientific or technical training.⁴⁵ Shaped by the context in which they themselves were living and working, Clark was as much concerned with social policy reforms and women’s suffrage as social history, while Pinchbeck was among a number of early women economic historians at the London School of Economics whose research arose out of a deep commitment to women’s issues.⁴⁶ For many women throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries professional ambitions offered a tangible way to directly challenge the social and political inequalities facing women, although that is not to say that professional aspirations and ‘feminism’, or the ideals of the women’s movement more generally, were always in harmony.⁴⁷ Revisiting their historical analyses can prove instructive in plotting the trajectories of women’s participation in public life. While effectively excluded from climbing and controlling professional hierarchies, Clark argued, women nonetheless continued to perform a useful, if unacknowledged, service to them. It would be an error, she cautioned, to imagine that even the highest professions could function ‘independent’ of women’s informal contributions.⁴⁸ Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, indeed, legions of professional men relied upon the secretarial assistance and intellectual sustenance provided by their female employees, ‘incorporated wives’ and domestic servants (routinely female), often at the expense of these women’s own careers and aspirations.⁴⁹ Though they were never a topic of discussion in Perkin’s surveys, one imagines these notions would not have been completely foreign to him. In 1989 The Rise of Professional Society was dedicated to his wife – and fellow social historian – Joan Perkin, his ‘helpmate for over fifty years’, who published her first academic monograph, a feminist history of nineteenth-century married women, the same year.⁵⁰

Across the mid twentieth century, individuals such as the sociologist Olive Banks continued to grapple with questions relating to women, work and precarity in historical and contemporary contexts. Although Banks felt she could not fully focus on such topics until she left the academic profession aged fifty-nine in 1982, her experiences as a working-class student and of what she later called ‘the prejudice against women in employment’ as an early career scholar in a sociology department in the 1940s and 1950s shaped her thinking on the gendering of the labour market before this phenomenon entered mainstream academic research.⁵¹ Furthermore, recent histories of women sociologists have shown how their enquiries into women and issues surrounding employment shaped public conceptions of women’s role and status before the 1960s, and how attitudes towards women workers in Britain became a source of tension as more women entered public life before, during and after the Second World War.⁵² From the 1960s and 1970s onwards a new generation of women’s historians in adult and higher education became increasingly focused on rescuing the labour of women which had been hidden from history by the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’.⁵³ Influenced by Marxism, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the development of new forms of social history and cultural studies, these provocative studies highlighted female oppression and empowerment in the workplace and challenged conventional forms of historical periodization and canonization.⁵⁴ Some tended to offer a rather essentialized account of women’s oppression under patriarchal capitalism, viewing working- and lower-middle-class women’s labour histories as representative of women’s working lives more generally.⁵⁵

Ever present in discussions about women’s professional identity, both in and outside the academy, has been the debate around the ideological legacy of the doctrine of ‘separate spheres’ and its impact in terms of the sexual division of labour, both in and outside the home. One of the most important early investigations into the intersection between gender relations and middle-class society, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes (1987), brought to light a whole host of archival evidence from Birmingham and Suffolk families confirming that women had played a significant role in capitalist enterprises during the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet Davidoff and Hall concluded that women had at best been silent partners – ‘hidden investments’ – in professional and commercial concerns, especially at the higher end of the social spectrum, where there appeared to be a ‘deeper commitment’ to patriarchal domestic ideologies.⁵⁶ Family Fortunes left its mark on a generation of scholars: the assumption that structural processes of professionalization diminished most women’s workforce participation took root, even as the very concept of separate spheres attracted criticism from different quarters.⁵⁷

The work of Martha Vicinus provides a useful example of the shift in emphasis as women’s history developed; it increasingly sought to account for the wider range of ways women worked within and beyond restrictive social systems and cultural codes. In contrast to her more pessimistic views, expressed in the aptly named collection Suffer and be Still in 1972, her later work more sensitively examined the experiences of middle-class women who consciously strove to live outside the confines of Victorian cultural mores.⁵⁸ Exploring love, sexualities, life and work in single-sex residential institutions, including boarding schools, convents, hospitals and women’s university colleges, her 1985 monograph, Independent Women, investigated the strategies by which, during the nineteenth century, two significant generations of single women in Britain began to demand lives defined by meaningful work as a ‘revolt against redundancy’. Paid employment outside the home afforded women both private dignity and a public platform to question their place in society: ‘[i]t was the means out of the garden, out of idleness, out of ignorance, and into wisdom, service, and adventure’.⁵⁹ Furthermore, Vicinus alerted scholars to the pervasive impact of professional aspirations on late-nineteenth-century women’s decisions as to whether to marry or remain single, alongside the rich emotional and sexual lives of women who lived with female partners.⁶⁰ The dawn of the twentieth century was identified as the moment at which ‘the idea that girls ought to have an occupation of their own’ became more accepted: from then on women who entered the workforce became a common site of myriad concerns about industrial modernity.⁶¹

As the value and status of a wider range of women’s professional work became even more culturally acceptable in British society towards the end of the twentieth century, feminist historians began to uncover a much wider range of working women’s experiences in the past. By the late 1980s and 1990s, women’s historians had begun to investigate in greater depth the working lives of married women, mothers and widows as well as ‘spinsters’, revealing an array of women’s professional contributions and complicating their relationship to family, home and class after the mid nineteenth century. This scholarship provided a wealth of convincing evidence that many different women used professional work and related practices, such as investing and managing property, as a means of gaining financial independence, cultivating spaces for feminist political activism and acquiring cultural capital.⁶² Moreover, it suggested that their professionalism as women could, at times, be made compatible with mainstream and conservative bourgeois social codes. More recent work has brought into focus the importance of the interplay between women of different classes and their cultural practices, and the importance of accounting for the movement of women within and between classes during the course of their lives, in understanding processes of professionalization. Research by Laura Schwartz, for example, has uncovered the drive to professionalize domestic service during the period under consideration in this volume.⁶³ In a pair of edited collections, Krista Cowman and Louise Jackson have argued that, for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘middle-class’ woman, ‘the professional’ should be seen as a multi-faceted identity incorporating a kaleidoscopic combination of sliding categories, including ‘the vocational, the intellectual, the amateur … the entrepreneurial, and (even) the proletarian’.⁶⁴

It cannot be denied that the development of opportunities for some professional women over this period played a role in reinforcing social inequalities. In practice, possibilities for women to use their foothold in professional society to bring about meaningful change were unequally distributed. Even among the most privileged, securing a degree of independence as a professional woman could also mean making profound material and emotional sacrifices. Gill Sutherland has emphasized the continuing significance of ‘respectability’ to a generation of conservative women university graduates during the heyday of the ‘New Woman’ around the turn of the twentieth century: as a consequence, when these women entered professional work they ‘had some enhanced scope for action but always with boundaries and limitations; no choices were without costs’.⁶⁵ Penelope Corfield and others have noted that in theory ‘there is no reason to suggest that women were or are harmed by the professional virtues of service, commitment, expertise and vocational dedication’, suggesting that it might be possible to excavate a parallel tradition of feminized professional citizenship alongside that of established male professionalism.⁶⁶ In practice, service was a double-edged sword for women. It could and did provide an entry point into public life before women were formally admitted into the professions, and through that gained the possibility of obtaining education and training as well as of participating in local and national politics, though Sutherland has pointed out ‘how powerful and durable assumptions about social class remained, how seductive and enduring the image of the Lady Bountiful proved’ for women entering medicine and social work during the late nineteenth century.⁶⁷ Historians of twentieth-century Britain have traced the echoes of these ‘Victorian values’ into the 1950s and 1960s, suggesting that inherited ideas of feminine moral authority could be a particularly useful resource for married, uneducated or older women who felt left behind by new technocratic professions.⁶⁸ Vestiges of these attitudes and ideas about women’s and men’s supposedly innate and oppositional traits continue to shape the structure of many professional fields today.

One of the most significant developments of the last three decades has been the multitude of discrete studies looking at women’s activities in a wide variety of professional settings. Moving away from a focus on women’s conventional roles in health care or social work, feminist scholars and women historians have invested their energies in productively mapping out histories of women’s professional activities in a range of disparate fields.⁶⁹ They include the feminist activist strategies of teachers;⁷⁰ the pen names and publications of women authors, art historians, historians and journalists;⁷¹ the global careers of the earliest women diplomats and League of Nations Commissioners;⁷² the struggles of women lawyers, politicians, scientists, entrepreneurs and musicians to gain recognition or specialist training on the same footing as their male counterparts;⁷³ the demands placed upon women clerical workers, factory inspectors and social workers;⁷⁴ the salaries and private lives of early women broadcasters and producers;⁷⁵ the working hours of women museum curators, archivists and undercover detectives;⁷⁶ the studio spaces and living arrangements of women artists, architects and designers;⁷⁷ and the impact of motherhood on professional aspirations,⁷⁸ among other subjects in different regional and national contexts.⁷⁹ This innovative work has employed a range of historical approaches and methodologies in order not only to explore a wider variety of professional experiences, but also to alter the way we conceptualize the development of professional identity within different fields – for women and men alike.⁸⁰

Gender and processes of professionalization

Histories of women’s work have been further shaped by critical theoretical approaches to gender history in Anglo-American academia in the late twentieth century. This development had important implications for the study of power relations and the professions, including subjecting the history of masculinities to greater scrutiny. Re-evaluating her own scholarly training in the history of labour relations in industrial France, Joan Scott argued in a path-breaking 1983 article that feminine and masculine roles and relationships should be analysed in relation to ‘gender’, a term more commonly applied to language.⁸¹ Identity, from this perspective, which conceptualized power in Foucauldian terms as ‘dispersed constellations of unequal relationships’, was ‘contested terrain’.⁸² This intellectual turn went on to open up a variety of original avenues of enquiry. Of particular relevance was the shift away from a focus on women’s oppression under patriarchal capitalism towards analyses of gendered practices and strategies of negotiation.⁸³ It is interesting to note, as Susan Pedersen has pointed out, that as women’s history and gender history entered the mainstream, historians working on gender and power have increasingly tended to position past hierarchies and boundaries as blurred and negotiable, perhaps shaped in their conceptions of past power dynamics by their own opportunities in the present.⁸⁴

Paying close attention to power relations in specific historical contexts nevertheless still has important implications for understanding and confronting gender stereotypes with long histories, such as the pigeonholing of women into ‘caring’ roles or the portrayal of women who performed commanding and authoritative professional work as ‘unsexed’ or ‘unfeminine’. Furthermore, since the rise of gender history, researchers have become increasingly invested in exploring the intricacies of lived practices, which rarely mapped neatly on to prescribed norms. There has been increasing attention to the gendered politics of qualitative sources such as autobiographies, novels and advice literature, which tend to elucidate prescriptive theories of how idealized women should behave but can nevertheless be read against the grain to help explore the intricacies of how individuals lived and worked in practice. Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin and Abigail Wills have convincingly argued that it makes little sense to set up ‘separate spheres’ as ‘a theory whose only utility lies in the insights we can develop by disproving it’. They instead encourage assessment of how ‘the rhetoric of domesticity operated and was made meaningful in particular contexts, how contemporaries used it to make sense of their experiences, how it shaped the actions of particular individuals or groups, and how it changed over time’.⁸⁵

Gender analysis can also help us to unpick how the record-keeping produced by the rise of professional society itself was distinguished by its ‘careless disregard of women’s contributions’ to economic activity. ‘Politicians, public administrators, civil servants and statisticians, lawyers and even private businessmen ignored working women, overlooked their activities, and attributed their production to the nearest male’, financial historians have reminded us.⁸⁶ Barbara Caine has drawn attention to the gendered assumptions within the very ‘model of biography’, especially that focused on so-called ‘pioneers’ within professions, suggesting it can have the paradoxical effect of both ‘mak[ing] women marginal’ and reinforcing the notion that only public recognition was significant.⁸⁷ The most recent studies of professional women in particular fields across this period have consciously drawn upon an accumulation of many different types of source materials in order to capture the fragmentary archival traces left by individuals and to more fully contextualize cultural ideals alongside everyday practices, an approach taken by the contributors to this volume.

Gender analysis also reframed contemporary sociological studies of professionalization, which had tended to focus on the legal, political or cultural mechanisms used to dissuade, and formally bar, women and minorities from entering a limited range of male-dominated professions and industries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁸⁸ Blanket categories such as ‘pseudo-professional’, ‘semi-professional’ or ‘para-professional’ are still commonly used to describe any group deemed by their contemporary investigator to have fallen victim to ‘strategies of closure’ and to thus have been trapped either outside professional cultures or in purely supportive roles.⁸⁹ From the 1990s, feminist sociologists applying gender theory to studies of contemporary professional identities sought to replace Weberian paradigms of professionalization, which were effectively defined by the careers of successful white, male academic sociologists in their own image, with more nuanced models of women’s agency. Most notably, Anne Witz’s work showed how female professionals working in health care in Britain during the 1980s constructed ‘professional projects’ to actively resist patriarchal management structures by enacting their own strategies of ‘occupational closure’.⁹⁰

Gendered strategies of negotiation within the workplace were particularly important during the period covered in this book, when many occupations were becoming professions for the first time and new fields of work were opening up without the burden of long-established hierarchies. Feminist and women’s historians have long been attentive to the ways in which men tend to dominate managerial posts in feminized professions, and how, more generally, greater equality is often followed by renewed obstacles to women’s progress. The passing of the legislation that widened employment opportunities for women in 1919 was quickly and effectively curtailed for some professionals in practice over the next two decades through measures such as the marriage bar, for instance. Recent studies of working married women and mothers have added nuance to this picture, highlighting the range of occupations into which professional women’s labour could be diverted.⁹¹ Thirsk’s Law, conceived by the economic and social historian Joan Thirsk at the end of the 1980s, is a useful tool for understanding how these processes occurred within particular fields and the implications for how we think about women’s professional capabilities and expertise. Thirsk posited that in any new occupation the establishment of professional enterprises and associations proceeded on a basis of equality until ‘the venture has been satisfactorily and firmly established, when it has been institutionalised, formalised, and organised. Then, when the formal structure hardens, the direction, and the style as well, always fall under the control of men.’⁹² Recent research into the history of gender-segregated labour markets has revealed – contrary to older assumptions about the primacy of efficiency in employers’ decision-making – that a complex mixture of cultural, political and economic factors determined how and when women’s skilled work was downgraded in value and status in relation to that of their male colleagues. In a powerful example of Thirsk’s Law in action, Mar Hicks’s recent study of the changing place of women in the post-war British computing industry demonstrated that, despite the range of women’s technical competencies and experiences, ‘biases that had nothing to do with the bottom line shaped managerial conduct’ and increasingly led to the underutilization of their skills as the century progressed.⁹³

Since the 1990s, scholars have become increasingly invested in challenging notions of masculinity as historically static and ahistorical. Patriarchy is now understood as a work in progress and historians have identified unstable, vulnerable and contested as well as confident and performative masculinities.⁹⁴ Scholars such as Mrinalini Sinha have emphasized the intersections between masculinity, class and racialized hierarchies that continued to structure British society; for instance, problematic stereotypes of the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ persistently served to legitimate colonial rule in late-nineteenth-century India.⁹⁵ Yet despite the wealth of scholarship on historical masculinities, there has been little direct interrogation of how men sought to construct professional roles, how dominant masculine norms and expectations shaped these activities, and how this varied between different professional fields and occupational cultures.⁹⁶ This is surprising, as the concept of work and debates about ‘manly labour’ have received notable interest, albeit focused on the working and lower middle classes.⁹⁷ This relative silence on the question of masculinity and the construction of professional status has led to a tendency to position ‘the project of professionalization’ as ‘a simple route to the acquisition of status for men’, a notion this edited collection seeks emphatically to problematize.⁹⁸

Gender is thus a potent tool enabling scholars to interrogate the ways in which changes in masculine and feminine occupational identities are ‘complementary and interdependent’, resulting in new insights into the processes by which certain types of employment were transformed from ‘men’s work’ to ‘women’s work’ and vice versa.⁹⁹ The influence professionals wielded in society and culture throughout the period under discussion in this book means that ignoring the rich, messy, complex realities of gender relations in and on the margins of the professions has grave consequences for the interpretation of modern British history as a whole. As David Edgerton points out in his 2018 history of the British nation state, ‘histories reflect visibility in the public sphere’. But it is surely naive to declare of the historiography in the same breath that ‘[m]any men operated in the public sphere while most women were confined to a separate private world’.¹⁰⁰ Such an example is a sobering reminder that there is still an urgent need to repeatedly evidence and assert women’s historic – and contemporary – professional contributions to society in the face of scholarship which continues to efface them. Throughout the period under discussion in this volume, most women may have been denied the opportunity of securing a stable professional career, according to conventional estimations, but the vast body of research into women’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over the past fifty years confirms that many women led remarkable professional lives and even more conducted professional work without full recognition or remuneration. Far from being neatly confined to a ‘separate private world’, moreover, women’s labour (in all its guises) underpinned many men’s operations and achievements as professionals, as the earliest feminist historians of work in Britain understood.¹⁰¹ Attending to gender and its intersections with other social categories in the study of power and expertise therefore provides a much richer means of exploring British public life in this period.

Gender, race and professional identity in a national and an international context

A particularly productive area of scholarship over the last twenty years has focused on the impact that international mobility had in enabling certain British citizens to assert their professional statuses, although there is far more work to be done. Many men, such as those in military and colonial administration, were required to travel and live overseas to build their professional reputations.¹⁰² By leaving Britain and strategically travelling to areas which had less restrictive professional practices, some women claimed new opportunities to make a name for themselves. Nineteenth-century British women artists seeking professional status sought to gain new experiences in European cities such as Paris and Rome. While they segregated students by sex, private art schools in Paris, for instance, allowed women to participate in the same topics of study as men and to paint nude models.¹⁰³ Nursing, education and missionary work, furthermore, offered white middle-class women an opportunity to be valorized as agents of feminine ‘civilization’ in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁰⁴

Mobility could therefore function as a crucial underpinning of the crafting of professional identities, but the circumstances of such mobility and its effects varied along fault lines shaped by hierarchies of gender, class, race and British imperial strategies. Antoinette Burton has offered revealing glimpses of Cornelia Sorabji’s experiences of colonial power as a Parsi from a middle-class Christian family in the Bombay Presidency who travelled to England to study at the University of Oxford, becoming the first woman to study law there.¹⁰⁵ By contrast, certain groups were often barred – formally and informally – from gaining access to international ‘professional society’. This was particularly the case for women deemed lower-middle or working class, or ethnically or racially ‘inferior’, or whose identities cut across these categories, whether they were seeking to emigrate to Britain for work, to leave or to move between different global geographies. Many were encouraged into a tightly circumscribed range of roles as domestic servants and ‘lady’s helps’ for white middle-class women, although, as Olivia Robinson has argued in her recent work tracing the global networks of travelling ayahs, such individuals could still transform ‘spaces designed to contain … into spaces of gain’.¹⁰⁶

Furthermore, scholars are increasingly emphasizing the necessity of accounting for and contextualizing the breadth of experiences different men and women of colour faced at work or while training in modern Britain.¹⁰⁷ In recent years there have been a number of insightful pieces, in particular documenting the experiences of black women in the workplace. Cultural geographer Caroline Bressey has used census and parish records, photographs and newly digitized newspapers to glean insights into the work that working-class black women sought access to in late-nineteenth-century Britain, arguing that, despite the brevity of such documentation, ‘they are important moments, creating a space in the archives where black women become temporarily visible and present themselves in their own words’.¹⁰⁸ In the post-war context, research by Clair Wills has highlighted the unusual professional opportunities opened up to Afro-Caribbean women nurses who might otherwise have been sidelined to below their professional level by the uneven early development of the National Health Service.¹⁰⁹ Similarly, Jessica P. Clark has argued that, in noticeable contrast to the domination by men of hairdressing in nineteenth-century Britain, the late twentieth century ‘gave rise to a small but significant cohort of black female beauty entrepreneurs’. They were ‘afforded not only economic opportunity but also the conditions of possibility for forging commercial spaces – and communities – for black clientele, while defying the racist policies of the day’.¹¹⁰

This innovative research is still in its relative infancy and there is a dearth of scholarship focused on addressing race and the making of professional society in modern Britain more generally. As it stands, historians are indebted to pioneering research taking place in other disciplines. Alongside Bressey’s scholarship in the fields of cultural geography and critical archive studies, ethnographer Linda McDowell has evidenced the racist discrimination some black nurses faced in post-war Britain, with white patients and staff members often understanding professional expertise as shaped by the skin colour of those treating them.¹¹¹ Literary scholar Anna Snaith, meanwhile, has stressed the centrality of anticolonialism and feminism to the writings of women such as Jamaican writer and broadcaster Una Marson, among other pioneering women who travelled to London from India, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa between the 1890s and the 1940s.¹¹² This scholarship has demonstrated that scrutiny of gender, race, ethnicity and class is not simply a profitable supplement to histories of professional identity and social change but is inextricable from and fundamental to their analysis.

New historical perspectives

The chapters in Precarious Professionals redress the balance of research into professional society, which has hitherto dealt to a much greater degree with forms of social control, sexist discrimination and class-based exclusion than with the related processes of inclusion and diversification which maintained the relevance and status of professional identity in everyday life. We contend that historians need to draw on the rich body of scholarship on the history of women and gender in and outside the archetypal professions in order to re-evaluate the relationship between professional selfhood and society. Making the construction of barriers between professional careers and quasi-professional work the starting point for any study of professional life more broadly has meant that scholars have often neglected the extent to which processes of professionalization have historically been elastic, fragile and threatened by the presence of ‘outsiders’. Exploring historical instances of inclusion of marginalized groups or individuals in professional work – whether through ‘professional projects’, ‘silent partnerships’ or simply in re-examining the importance of the expertise of those in supporting and service roles – can serve to challenge received wisdom about gender roles and relations and point to new ways in which professional identity might be re-imagined in the future.

This is not to say that historians of professional identity should abandon the excavation of inequalities, discrimination and oppression in the professions – quite the opposite. Shifting the balance towards inclusion does not mean denying the historical importance of social closure to the operation of professions in modern British society and culture. To the contrary, it illuminates how inclusion is contested in specific political conditions and often leads to unequal outcomes. The chapters in this book show that defining what it meant to be a professional or to live up to professional ideals, however, was never as straightforward as the powerful might have hoped. Thinking more deliberately about the various forms of labour involved in maintaining an individual or institutional identity within particular professions, and about a wider range of the life histories and experiences of individuals associated with them, opens up new ways of conceptualizing the gendered impact and injustices of different processes of professionalization and their reverberations in contemporary society and culture.

Across the twelve chapters that follow we will learn about the lives of lawyers and scientists, ballet dancers and secretaries, historians and humanitarian relief workers, social researchers and Cold War diplomats, among many others. A major contribution this book makes is its move beyond the ongoing scholarly emphasis on analysing discrete fields within narrow periods to more effectively consider points of convergence and contention across a wide range of different occupations over the long term. The chapters are organized chronologically to enable readers to reflect on the shifting social context but also to encourage the breaking down of a narrow, linear narrative of professional ‘progress’ and to raise awareness of the different models of professionalization taking place within these respective fields. When considered together, many of the chapters offer useful new points of comparison and continuity which do much to refine and develop understanding of key moments, issues and themes.

Benjamin Dabby’s and Claire Jones’s chapters direct our attention to the ways women reshaped the boundaries between amateurism and professionalism in two very different fields and emphasize the pervasiveness with which mainstream ideas about amateurism and professionalism were shaped by gender. Jones’s contribution highlights the difficulties expert women in science faced when their work became associated with the ‘popular’. She examines three women of successive generations – Eleanor Ormerod (1828–1901), Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923) and Marie Stopes (1880–1958) – who established strong professional identities in their respective disciplines as the landscape of science moved from ‘amateur’ and domestic to institutional settings over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Utilizing memoirs as well as contemporary correspondence to consider working lives in private and academic laboratories and learned societies, alongside newly experimental forms of research, Jones’s chapter ultimately argues that the professionalization of science was bound up with highly gendered understandings of an individual’s capability of becoming a scientific practitioner.

By contrast, Dabby’s chapter focuses on two women who played a pre-eminent role in shaping the discipline of art criticism during the mid nineteenth century, Anna Jameson (1794–1860) and Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–93). His chapter shows that the writings of these women, far from being marginal to contemporary discourses on fine art on account of their gender, were central to the way this intellectual field developed and was professionalized. In fact, it was Jameson’s liminal position as an educated popularizer who consciously defined the femininity of her work against professional art institutions and the dilettantism of elite male collectors which ‘redefined connoisseurship’ from the outside. Through a careful excavation of print culture, Dabby’s chapter demonstrates that there was considerable demand for an alternative to conventional patriarchal modes of art appreciation; Jameson’s accessible style and Eastlake’s claims for the power of historical female figures in Christian art appealed to a growing audience of periodical readers and museum visitors.

The chapter’s focus on women’s activities in the arts – fields often ignored in traditional accounts of the history of the professions – is a topic picked up in several other chapters, most notably in Laura Quinton’s and Zoë Thomas’s contributions. Quinton’s chapter assesses the gendered dynamics in the world of ballet, a field which underwent a dramatic transformation from ‘a feminized, low-ranking occupation’ into a national art form by the Second World War. In particular, this chapter studies the central role played by Ninette de Valois (1898–2001) in changing the reputation of British ballet as a ‘professional project’. Alongside charting her successes as a choreographer, teacher, writer and founding director of the Royal Ballet, it shows that de Valois consciously appealed to prevalent masculine and feminine notions of respectability in order to help build public esteem for precarious ballet practitioners and contest her field’s historic associations with male homosexuality. As de Valois embraced male artists and opened up new spaces for their work within the field, she gradually eschewed her earlier experimentalism and female networks and strategically created an unassailable professional persona for herself. Quinton’s chapter asks us to consider how women and men in a once-marginalized profession became imbricated in patriarchal and heteronormative processes of professionalization and the gendered impact this had on those continuing to work on the margins of their field.

Thomas’s chapter moves beyond the formal and institutional spaces of creative professionalism by exploring the marriage and artistic collaboration of Edith Brearey Dawson (1862–1928) and Nelson Dawson (1859–1941). Although they had both initially worked as painters, Edith and Nelson turned to work in metalwork together after marriage – largely due to their financial status – and quickly became a prominent artistic force within the English Arts and Crafts movement. This chapter makes use of a hitherto unknown family archive of diaries, love letters, business correspondence, photographs and artworks to better contextualize the impact of pervasive gender hierarchies on the Dawsons’ artistic and marital collaboration but also to emphasize the ways they themselves sought to define and carve out new ways of living and working collaboratively. Thomas’s chapter throws into greater relief the role of archival acquisition histories in shaping the legacy of professional couples, suggesting that women inhabited a precarious space within professional society even after their deaths.

This chapter also brings to the fore a discussion of how men have historically used masculinity to assert professional status; Nelson Dawson sought to align himself with dominant masculine modes of artistic self-fashioning through the use of portraiture and by joining male-only ‘brotherhoods’, for instance. This focus on masculinity is developed further in two more chapters in this collection which together seek to ignite interest in future histories of masculinity and professional society. James Southern’s chapter extends this book’s analysis of precarity, professionalism and masculinity to consider how these markers of identity intersected with the history of sexuality. It focuses on cultural attitudes and policies towards homosexuality in the British Foreign Office after the partial decriminalization of same-sex relationships between men in 1967. Using correspondence and policy documents, his chapter demonstrates that, during a period in which Britain’s international status looked increasingly precarious, diplomats ‘had to envisage and create a specifically Foreign Office version of homosexuality in order to keep gay men and lesbians out of the diplomatic service’. For the gay diplomats who worked in the Foreign Office before the bar was finally lifted in 1991, then, professional boundaries can be shown to have been drawn up ‘within, rather than between, individuals’. The subtle analysis of the ‘discursive processes’ and lived experiences which informed ideas of sexual and professional deviance at the heart of the British state in this chapter provides ample evidence of the enduring role that elite institutions have played in shaping histories of class, race and gender during the second half of the twentieth century.

Ren Pepitone’s chapter also takes us into the higher echelons of elite masculine professional society, but here the focus is the masculine preserve of the Inns of Court during the late nineteenth century. Through a close examination of the everyday lives of male barristers in the decades prior to the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, the chapter explains how and why the English and imperial legal profession was to remain ‘a preserve of elite white men long after the formal barriers to women and minorities had been cleared away’. Pepitone argues that, in tandem with their role as the training ground for future generations of imperial lawyers, the late-Victorian Inns of Court served to inculcate men into embodied rituals of affective same-sex bonding and elaborate English heritage-inspired ‘performances of gentlemanly professionalism’. Pairing close analysis of homosociality with an in-depth study of material culture and the built environment, this chapter offers a new, cultural-historical methodology for unpacking the logics of resistance to change within white, patriarchal professions. Here, precarity is not simply registered as an outsider status but as an intimate, institutionalized reaction to the forces of metropolitan and cosmopolitan modernity.

Pepitone’s chapter opens up fascinating comparisons with Leslie Howsam’s contribution, which offers a close study of Eliza Orme (1848–1937), the first woman to obtain a law degree from the University of London. Howsam’s chapter reveals that, once they had gained access to education in the law, certain women were able to access ‘a lucrative and prestigious career’ which ‘challenged the very culture of expertise’ in the legal profession. Unable to enter the hallowed halls of the Inns of Court, Orme and a group of women colleagues established chambers nearby on Chancery Lane and quietly engaged in ‘legal paperwork’ for male barristers; precarious but innovative and prosperous, they were professional in all but name. Few of Orme’s personal papers survive, and this chapter pieces together her career over three decades, using census records, commercial directories and contemporary journalism, though it speculates that Orme must have built ‘an extensive and powerful network of connections’ which went ‘almost completely undocumented’.¹¹³ Bringing a wider culture of professional precarity and gendered exploitation into sharper focus, Howsam’s chapter nevertheless shows that Orme managed to strategically leverage her role on the margins of the gentlemanly culture explored in Pepitone’s chapter in order to advocate publicly for liberal feminist causes.

A key contribution of Howsam’s chapter is its reminder of the intellectual pay-off of such a close, considered study, painting in rich detail the ways specific individuals navigated through professional society, often with surprising results. Several other chapters have also deliberately used this close lens of analysis. Heidi Egginton’s, for instance, examines the problem of professional selfhood in later life in the Second World War diaries of Mary Agnes Hamilton (1882–1966), which recently came to light in the archive of one of Hamilton’s male contemporaries. Hamilton’s career spanned two world wars and defied easy categorization, moving in and out of the fields of journalism, politics, literature and the civil service. Drawing on her unpublished personal papers and two memoirs, the chapter assesses the strategies Hamilton used, as a writer, to traverse the masculine arenas of professional recruitment, parliamentary politics and post-war planning, as well as everyday life in wartime London. Egginton’s chapter problematizes the relationship between professional identities and conventional forms of autobiography by considering the gendered forms of evidence and cultural production available to women who devoted themselves to public service. Her chapter highlights the need for historians of professional society to analyse the gendered politics of collecting personal papers during the late twentieth century.

One of the most striking points about Hamilton’s career was her construction of a variety of professional roles, often in the ongoing absence of institutional stability and support. This is a persistent theme in many of the chapters in Precarious Professionals and offers a refreshing alternative to the dominance of studies which use institutional cultures as the key lens through which to assess professional society. Laura Carter’s chapter picks up on this, turning from scrutiny of one individual to survey the lives of over 200 twentieth-century women historians. It looks beyond the confines of university institutions and academic models of professional development to incorporate a wide spectrum of writers, activists, civil servants, curators and educators, delineating for the first time three distinct cohorts of women history makers. In the process, the chapter challenges existing notions of periodization in narratives of the development of the historical profession in Britain, demonstrating, for example, the involvement of women historians in transatlantic political discourses on race and nation as well as on class and gender. Revealing the technological mastery and literary invention cultivated by popular women historians within liminal spaces such as museum exhibitions, archive cataloguers’ offices and BBC wireless broadcasts as well as in lecture theatres, Carter’s chapter shows that the discipline of history was enriched and enlivened by precarious professionals before, during and after its ‘professionalization’.

A particularly welcome element of Carter’s chapter is the way it illuminates the activities of lesser-known, at times conservative, women who engaged in ‘history-making’ in the mid twentieth century, expanding our knowledge of an era often neglected in favour of the tendency to prioritize locating women’s working lives within the context of women’s suffrage advocacy or Women’s Liberation Movement activism. Helen McCarthy’s chapter builds on this point, considering the wider meaning of the discursive encounters between sociologists, professional women’s organizations and working women in the 1960s. It examines discourses around women and professional work in the social surveys and public advocacy of researchers, including Viola Klein (1908–1973) and Pearl Jephcott (1900–1980), who have previously played only a marginal role in the historiography of post-war social science. In tackling the problem of women’s subjective feelings about paid work, family and professional identity, these women made important contributions towards public understandings of modernity and social change. At the same time as they displaced earlier prejudices towards women professionals, the chapter notes, they also articulated a privileged, individualist ‘feminist politics rooted in the value of personal achievement, commitment and self-knowledge’, an attitude that obscured issues of wider significance for working women across the class spectrum such as childcare. Read together, the chapters by Carter and McCarthy complicate and enhance understanding of the genealogies of women’s contributions to intellectual life in Britain.

Another major contribution several of the chapters make is to move the framework of analysis beyond Britain. In particular, Susan Pedersen’s and Ellen Ross’s chapters position women’s working lives in the context of the growing opportunities provided by international humanitarian and diplomatic organizations after the First World War. Both expand on the uneven development of the relationship between women’s educational qualifications and skills and their status as professionals, even in fields and institutions which appeared to offer new opportunities for women to gain an equal footing with their male counterparts. Taking as its subject the professional happiness of the ‘worker-educator’ Francesca Wilson (1888–1981), Ross’s chapter uses a biographical approach to vividly reconstruct the emotional and psychological texture of her engagement with refugee relief work during the interwar period. It explores the tension between women’s class backgrounds, cultural expectations of employment for women university graduates and Wilson’s own desire for ‘foreign travel, adventure and challenges’ in her life and career. Traditional, gendered assumptions about the suitability of Quaker women for care work and Wilson’s own early experiences as a teacher indelibly shaped her contributions towards international aid, yet this chapter strongly argues that Wilson conceived of her experiences not simply as service but as professional work.

Pedersen’s chapter examines the cohort of British women secretaries, translators, précis writers, press analysts and stenographers who became paid members of the League of Nations Secretariat during the 1920s and 1930s. Using an untapped seam of personnel files to excavate, the work culture and gendered assumptions that structured the League’s everyday life, her chapter illustrates the importance of setting women’s biographies in the context of the underlying patterns of inclusion and exclusion that shaped an individual’s path through an institution. If women always remained ‘a minority presence’ at the League, the chapter argues, their visibility outside its more formal bodies as efficient administrators and experts amounted to ‘a sea-change in the practice of international politics that could never quite be undone’. Indeed, it was the ‘adjunct and advisory roles’ to which overqualified and under-remunerated women often found themselves relegated at the League that gave them not only a seat on committees packed with male political appointees but access to valuable resources, back-room networks and like-minded female collaborators. While they may ultimately have been dedicated to an ethos of anonymous public service rather than feminist activism, Pedersen’s chapter makes it clear that it is impossible to fully understand the League’s impact on international politics without noticing the women who staffed its Secretariat.

This book, therefore, argues that the experience and representation of precariousness – an insecure or marginal economic, social, cultural or psychological position – is vital to understanding the histories and mysteries of professional identity in modern Britain. In Harold Perkin’s classic account, social transformation could ultimately be triggered only by those who had a strong position in professional hierarchies. ‘[I]ndependence, security of tenure, a firm base from which to criticize without fear of the consequences’, as well as ‘moral self-confidence and self-respect’: it was this combination that gave the professional ‘a secure position of leverage from which to move society, or his [sic] own particular corner of it, in the direction of change and reform’.¹¹⁴ In bringing into focus those professionals who had a less secure grip upon the levers of power, this edited collection will radically revise assumptions concerning the agency of precarious individuals and the development of professional cultures. If we are to fully understand the ongoing purchase of professionalism in modern Britain, we must see that gender hierarchies and precariousness have been woven into the very fabric of professional society.

Figure 1.1. Anna Brownell Jameson (née Murphy), by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, carbon print, 1843–7 © National Portrait Gallery, London.