Afterword

Christina de Bellaigue

Since the early nineteenth century, the idea of ‘the profession’ has been constantly defined and redefined. The question of which occupations might be accorded the status of profession, who might or might not join a given profession, and what having a profession might signify was a subject of serious preoccupation to contemporary observers and to professional workers themselves. Professional status was understood to confer a certain standing, authority and respectability. By the twentieth century, Harold Perkin argues, British society as a whole might itself best have been understood as a professional society in a dual sense: as a society in which the number of occupations defining themselves as professions with vertical career hierarchies cutting across the structures of class had substantially increased; and as a society in which an ideal of professional service and merit was culturally dominant.¹ In the second half of the twentieth century, Mike Savage demonstrates that the permeation of professional aspiration and structures extended further and professionalism was redefined to incorporate technical and applied expertise, moving away from the gentlemanly model of the by then ‘traditional’ professions.² By the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Eve Worth argues, many occupations, particularly those associated with the welfare state and hitherto dominated by women, have experienced a process of ‘de-professionalization’.³ Today, the term ‘professional’ still signifies status and carries some of the weighty connotations of the nineteenth century, as implied by the hierarchies implicit in the official categories used to analyse social structure, which rest on those devised in 1911.⁴ Alongside this, however, the idea of the professional has been emptied of meaning to the extent that it has become letting-agency code for a desirable tenant.

Since the 1820s, then, the category of ‘profession’ has fluctuated and has embraced and excluded a range of occupations. At the same time, there has been some continuity throughout the period in the way ‘profession’ has connoted security of status and income, respectability, reliability, the prospect of an enduring career and upward social mobility. Yet by setting out to think critically about the idea of professional status, the chapters gathered in this wide-ranging and important collection pose two significant challenges to any tendency to accept such connotations on their own terms. First, they demonstrate that professional security and stability was often fragile. It rested on processes of exclusion and certification developed as a bulwark against precarity, and on the strenuous performance of a particular style of life. Both these processes and performances were often gendered. Second, by taking those who articulated or embodied professional selfhood and aspiration on their own terms, rather than adjudicating professional standing on the basis of traditional sociological models, these chapters uncover the elasticity of the idea of the profession. This reveals the breadth of claims to professional selfhood across a much wider range of occupations than has been considered in the existing scholarship.

A further challenge to some of the presumptions of existing scholarship on professionalization emerges from the volume when it is considered as a whole. The effect of the critical perspective and its emphasis on elasticity and precarity, combined with the form of the collection – gathering together as it does multiple and variegated accounts of the professional career – raises new questions about how meaningful professional solidarities were, about the extent to which ‘the professions’ were a collective project, and about the relationship between class and professional standing. In these three ways, then, Precarious Professionals challenges the teleological and self-congratulatory stories often told by the professions of themselves.

By thinking critically about what might be termed the classical definition of the profession (which emphasizes meritocratic recruitment; coherent, self-governing associations; autonomy; an ethic of service; and social closure), the chapters in this collection draw our attention to the extent to which these features might often arise defensively. As is clear from the history of the medical profession, which became a model for many occupations, the introduction of registration in 1858, the management of medical training and the guarding of expertise, were intended to secure the status of medical men who faced competition from ‘medical entrepreneurs’ and sought to distance themselves from lower-status practitioners such as apothecaries and barber-surgeons.⁵ Several chapters demonstrate how similar mechanisms operated to exclude all but those from particular privileged social groups from full access to other occupations. These defences were designed to protect the stability and standing of the profession. Claire Jones highlights how scientific ideas asserting women’s unsuitability for inclusion operated to limit access to scientific societies and resources, with such exclusions intensifying as scientific disciplines became more sharply defined and institutionalized. Ellen Ross demonstrates how formal mechanisms of exclusion, intended to protect men’s work from female competition after the Great War, narrowed the range of professional occupations available to women. Marriage bars, controlling access to training and limiting membership of professional associations were defensive mechanisms that sought to shore up against precarity the standing of those whose social position was not underwritten by wealth or heredity.

Yet Precarious Professionals reveals that just as important as these formal defensive mechanisms were more informal and less tangible bulwarks which determined access to professional standing on the basis of the production and performance of a certain kind of self and style of life. Ren Pepitone demonstrates how access to the bar was dependent on participation in a particular form of white gentlemanly professional sociability and bodily performance, staged in the self-referentially historical architecture of the Inns of Court. Zoe Thomas uncovers the way Nelson Dawson articulated his claims to professional standing by associating himself with particular signs of masculine authority in his photographs, particularly crucial at a time when his situation was financially precarious. James Southern reveals how entry to the British Foreign Office might depend on the performance of heterosexual masculinity, while Claire Jones highlights how, in contrast, Hertha Ayrton’s embodiment as a married woman rendered her invisible and inconceivable as a professional scientist. Their chapters highlight the theoretical maleness and whiteness of the professional norm. At the same time, they point to the precarity of that masculinity, evident in the way it constantly needed to be shored up.

The collection also demonstrates that despite the establishment of formal mechanisms of professionalization, because they accorded status on the basis of the relatively intangible qualities of education, expertise, character and an ethic of service – qualities which might be acquired and claimed across gender, class and race boundaries – the professions might have porous boundaries. This porosity provided openings for women and others who did not conform to the norm. From this vantage point, marginalized as they might have been in some ways, women such as Anna Jameson, whose work is examined by Benjamin Dabby, or the historians studied by Laura Carter, or the social scientists who are examined by Helen McCarthy, were fundamental to the development of their professions. Dabby shows how central Jameson was to the evolution of art history as a discipline, precisely because her distance from elite male critical circles positioned her as an educator and popularizer who used her professional expertise to construct a new approach to criticism. Carter shows how, partly because of their partial or full exclusion from academic history, the generation of women historians writing in the mid twentieth century elaborated new approaches to historical research that uncovered the history of everyday life, pioneered medieval economic history, developed what would now be understood as the Atlantic history of slavery and empire and addressed new audiences. McCarthy highlights how women’s professional organizations in the post-war period developed extensive innovative social survey research on women’s working lives in order to support their members. In these examples, women were able to extend the reach of their respective professions in part as a result of their peripheral status and precarity.

While acknowledging this precarity and its consequences, however, we must also recognize its limits. For Perkin, the professions were ‘the forgotten middle class’, and it is clear that the precarious professionals of this collection might all be understood as middle class, and even – perhaps especially in the case of the ‘ladies’ of the League of Nations examined by Susan Pedersen – upper class. Jones’s chapter on women in science demonstrates clearly how class might inflect the experience of professional life: Eleanor Ormerod was able to pursue the entomological activities which eventually led to her holding fellowships at a number of scientific societies in part because, having inherited a substantial sum, she was able to finance her own research and publications. Others whose professional lives are examined, like Francesca Wilson, studied by Ellen Ross, might have a more pressing need to find work and to make their professional occupations pay. However, for the most part, the precarity these professionals faced was relative and did not threaten outright destitution. They had access to material and social resources which both protected them from fundamental want and facilitated the kinds of relationships needed to build up a professional career. Such resources also made it possible for them to persist with precarious occupations rather than having to find more prosaic and reliable sources of income, echoing the findings of studies examining the situation of those in creative and cultural occupations today.⁶ Day to day, having such resources meant that they could devote time to their professional and artistic work. As Zoë Thomas demonstrates, the Dawsons’ pursuit of their profession depended on being at least partially protected from the demands of domestic life by the hidden labour of working-class men and women.

By accepting the self-declared claims to professional standing of contemporaries, Precarious Professionals also calls into question the classification of occupations according to distinctions between professions, semi-professions and proto-professions. Such classifications have often enshrined a pyramidal hierarchy descending from the male archetype to female-dominated occupations whose standing as professions is permanently in question. The move away from rigid classifications enables the recognition of a much wider range of professional occupations and reveals the role of women in extending and expanding these areas of activity. In so doing, Precarious Professionals builds on Perkin’s original analysis of the cultural dominance of professional ideals to explore how these ideals were aspired to and experienced across many different occupations, from art to ballet, to humanitarian work, to conveyancing. In the process, it uncovers different understandings of what professional life might look like.

Thomas’s chapter on the Dawsons highlights how it is possible to read an artistic career as professional but also prompts us to think about how the professional project might be collective, at least on the small scale of the couple or family. Jones’s work on the Ormerods also uncovers the possibility of professional partnership, noting the significant contribution made by Eleanor Ormerod’s sister Georgiana to Ormerod’s career through her illustrations; the author referred to her sister as her ‘assistant’ or ‘collaborator’. Other partnerships, like that of the Ayrtons, were more asymmetric. Quinton’s chapter on Ninette de Valois explores the construction of ballet as a profession, again pointing out how important partnerships and collaborations might be to the development of a professional career. The same themes emerge from Leslie Howsam’s chapter on Eliza Orme’s career on the edges of the legal profession. At the core of her work stood her partnerships with Mary Richardson and Reina Lawrence, but that work also underpinned the careers of the many male barristers with whom she collaborated. These studies demonstrate that the boundaries of professional society might be more fluid and elastic than the traditional analyses suggest, both in terms of the range of occupations included and the number of people and relationships underpinning a professional career.

Like other contributions to the collection, Howsam’s chapter underlines how the historical and archival process has shaped understanding of the professions. The tangential and auxiliary character of Orme’s legal conveyancing partnership has meant that her career cannot be tracked through a coherent archive repository in the way the papers of a prominent barrister might be. The reconstruction of Orme’s career rests on the magpie collection and piecing together of fragments from a range of sources. This theme of archival serendipity in retracing the history of the precarious professions also emerges from Thomas’s chapter, which reveals that the asymmetric process of preserving their papers had concealed the extent of the professional partnership between Edith and Nelson Dawson. Heidi Egginton’s chapter on Mary Agnes Hamilton pursues the theme from the other end of the spectrum. It explores how Hamilton’s private and public writing and her effort to record events were at the core of her attempt to constitute a coherent professional self in the context of her ‘distressingly diversified career’. In her diary and other writing Hamilton both articulated her professional self and generated a putative, scattered archive of a particular kind of professional career. This aspiration to document a professional itinerary resembles the efforts of Professor Merze Tate, the first African American woman to attend Oxford, a pioneer of diplomatic history and international relations, who self-consciously curated her own archive to affirm her professional identity and to create a trail for the black women professionals she hoped would come after her.⁷ Tate recognized that practices of record-keeping shaped what would be understood as professional. Through her archival practice, she was quietly but radically destabilizing the white male norm.

Part of Hamilton’s difficulty in constructing a professional identity was the diversity of her working life. Like Merze Tate, she sought to construct a linear narrative of career that belied the often precarious and interrupted trajectories of her working life. These variegated patterns emerge from several of the chapters in the collection and draw attention to another theme of the precarious professional experience presented in this volume. Rather than the orderly linear career progression implied by the sociological model of the profession, the chapters gathered here indicate the non-linearity both of individual careers and of processes of professionalization and development. In doing so, they suggest that Andrew Miles’s argument that over the course of the nineteenth century the ‘bureaucratic career’ structure became a dominant feature of white-collar work needs to be nuanced with respect to gender and across occupations.⁸ The itineraries of the women examined here resemble more the ‘fractured trajectories’ and ‘shapeless careers’ Miles identifies as having become less common since the mid nineteenth century. They also prefigure the late-twentieth-century phenomenon identified by Magne Flemmen and Mike Savage whereby socially mobile subjects experienced careers that followed ‘a series of jagged lines’ rather than running along smooth tracks, a pattern that had a marked gendered dimension, with women’s itineraries being particularly interrupted.⁹ Yet, as Egginton’s chapter reveals, along with Ellen Ross’s on Francesca Wilson, these interruptions and fragmentations might not have been experienced as such. The cultivation of a professional self could provide a logic that wove such ‘jagged lines’ into a coherent and personally satisfying narrative. Precarious Professionals underlines the limitations of an understanding of professional careers that is insufficiently attentive to the ways individuals drew on ideas of profession and adapted them to their own purposes and circumstances.

Recognizing the diversity and breadth of professional careers and the way the construction of a professional self might give meaning to variegated careers also raises the question of how far professionalization was a collective project. As noted above, the chapters on Eliza Orme and the Dawsons uncover how a professional career might rest on significant collaborations or on the hidden labour of family members and servants. They reveal that it is important to look beyond the individual to understand how professional lives were made possible. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the collectivity was central to professional experience, despite the fact that associations have been seen as a key element of professionalization. The precarious professionals discussed here seem for the most part to have encountered such associations as mechanisms of exclusion, rather than of collective solidarity.

Instead, Precarious Professionals reveals a central preoccupation with ideas of professional selfhood as the common feature of the lives examined in the volume. This is not to say that women professionals such as Eliza Orme, who made significant contributions to the women’s movement, or Eleanor Ormerod, who sought to improve opportunities for women’s scientific training, did not seek to work on behalf of others or understand the need for collective action. But their campaigning activities, while facilitated by their standing as professional women, were incidental to their working lives and professional identities, rather than central to them. At the same time, when associations did seek to draw on the strength of professional solidarities, rather than seeking wider social change or collective advance, as Helen McCarthy shows, their feminist politics were ‘rooted in the values of personal achievement, commitment and self-knowledge’. From a different perspective, Ellen Ross qualifies the emphasis placed on a professional ethic of service by revealing Francesca Wilson’s frank commitment to pursuing work for her own fulfilment, rather than for the sake of those she supported through her humanitarian work. What seems to be emerging here is the notion of ‘profession’ as centred on the self, the personal, and on individualized patterns of progression. When this is combined with the recognition of the elasticity of the concept of ‘profession’ that this collection underlines, it seems that perhaps the central and defining characteristic of the notion in the British context was less a self-professed commitment to education, training, certification, professional association and social closure and more a focus on the production, performance and cultivation of a satisfying professional selfhood. If this hypothesis is sustained by further research, it might provide new ways to understand the apparent weakness of horizontal class solidarities in professional society. Taking precarity as a lens through which to examine the professions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain thus challenges us to see through the mythologies of the professional ideal; it offers us a less heroic but a much richer and more nuanced history of the professions.