Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in a panel of papers on ‘Gender and the Professionalization of “Culture”, c.1880–1960’ which we presented with Laura Carter at the North American Conference on British Studies in November 2015 in Little Rock, Arkansas, when we were PhD students. We are grateful to those who asked thought-provoking questions and to the organizers, the Royal Historical Society, and the Fran Trust at Foundation Scotland who enabled us to participate by giving us the crucial funds necessary to attend. Laura has lived with Precarious Professionals as long as we have, through our many discussions and late-night messages about gender and professional identity (in history as well as our everyday lives), and this project would never have happened without her generosity and friendship. We extend our sincere thanks to Leslie Howsam, who kindly wrote a commentary on our panel and continued to provide us with insights and encouragement throughout the process of arranging this collection. Peter Mandler was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the project from start to finish, chairing our panel, helping us to put the histories of creative women professionals in their wider context and offering reading suggestions at just the right moments, and our special thanks are due to him.
We would like to thank Penny Summerfield, who commissioned this book for the Royal Historical Society and was a great source of scholarly advice and feminist wisdom before we submitted the manuscript, and Charlotte Alston, Philip Carter and Jane Winters for their support. We appreciated the guidance, patience and professionalism of everyone who works on the ‘New Historical Perspectives’ series at the Institute of Historical Research and University of London Press, especially Emily Morrell, Kerry Whitson, Julie Spraggon and Lauren De’ath, and Robert Davies and Sarah Day for their editorial work.
The National Portrait Gallery and Royal Collection Trust; Sue Field and Susan Wallington; Robert V. Adamson and the Churchill Archives Centre; the Institute of Historical Research Wohl Library and Walter L. Arnstein; and the University of Reading Special Collections kindly extended their permission to reproduce the images in the chapters. Every attempt has been made to trace the copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, and we apologise for any inadvertent omission. We are grateful to Luci Gosling for her assistance with the cover image for this book, and to the Mary Evans Picture Library for their permission to use it.
A number of friends and colleagues took the time to make detailed comments on the Introduction, and we are indebted to Matt Houlbrook, Leslie Howsam, Lyndsey Jenkins, Peter Mandler, Mo Moulton, Ellen Ross, Penny Summerfield, Gill Sutherland and Chika Tonooka for their perceptive and constructive critiques, as well as to Christina de Bellaigue for her Afterword. The arguments we put forward owe much to conversations with Sophie Bridges, Barbara Egginton, Simon Thomas Parsons and all our wonderful contributors. Heidi would like to thank Kenneth Dunn, Alison Metcalfe, Robin Smith and Chris Taylor at the National Library of Scotland for creating the conditions which made it possible for her to continue working on this book, and for valuing historical research as part of curatorial practice. Her thanks also to Elaine Ward for providing a beautiful space in which to begin work on this project in Cambridge. Zoë’s thinking and writing has been influenced by all those involved in the Centre for Modern British Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her special thanks to Sarah Kenny and Chris Moores for pub, picket line and train station chats. Thanks also to Ben Mechen for making 2016–17 a lot more fun and for his paper at the 2017 Modern British Studies Conference on ‘Doing history within precarity’ which has shaped her thinking ever since.
This edited collection took shape during several tumultuous years in British politics and rounds of university strikes, and was completed in the early stages of a global pandemic in 2020, by which time the nature and experience of precarity had taken on meanings we could never have foreseen. It would clearly be absurd to compare the precarity of the professionals who feature in these pages to that experienced by today’s ‘precariat’, particularly those in the Global South, who face casualization, exploitation and the continuing disruption of political, social, economic, environmental and public health crises on an unprecedented scale. One of the main subjects of this book has been precisely the wide range of forms which precarity has taken in different historical contexts in modern Britain, and the often insidious ways insecurity has interacted with forms of privilege to reproduce inequality over time. If professionals tended to enjoy the comfort of family support and other financial resources, a high level of mobility, and relative job security in comparison with the contingent workforces of the early twenty-first century, they faced the impact of marginality in other ways, whether on account of their gender, race, age or sexuality. Their experiences, moreover, highlight how precariousness has been a feature of the so-called professional society from its conception. Nevertheless, it could provide a platform for social change, as our contributors have shown, and the quietly radical progress that women, ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ professionals made against the odds has inspired us throughout the process of drawing together this collection. We hope, therefore, that our book acts as a provocation and a timely reminder, as professions and institutions in Britain come under ever greater scrutiny for who they include and exclude, of how work can be reimagined in precarious times.
Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas