Overview

Precarious Professionals uncovers the inequalities and insecurities which lay at the heart of professional life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. The book challenges conventional categories in the history of work, exploring instead the everyday labour of maintaining a professional identity on the margins of the traditional professions. Situating new historical perspectives on gender at the forefront of their research, the contributors explore how professional cultures could not only define themselves against, but often flourished outside of, the confines of patriarchal codes and structures. Putting the lives of precarious professionals in dialogue with master narratives in modern British history, the chapters in this volume re-evaluate the relationship between professional identity and social change. The collection offers twelve fascinating studies of women and men who held positions in art and science, high culture and popular journalism, private enterprise and public service between the 1840s and the 1960s. From pioneering women lawyers and scientists to ballet dancers, secretaries, historians, humanitarian relief workers, social researchers, and Cold War diplomats, the book reveals that precarity was a thread woven throughout the very fabric of modern professional life, with far-reaching implications for the study of power, privilege, and expertise. Together, these essays enrich our understanding of the histories and mysteries of professional identity and help us to reimagine the future of work in precarious times.

Full Product Details

Author:   Heidi Egginton ,  Zoë Thomas
Publisher:   University of London
Imprint:   University of London Press
ISBN:  

9781912702596

ISBN 10:   1912702592
Pages:   368
Publication Date:   15 October 2021
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Heidi Egginton and Zoë Thomas 1. Anna Jameson and the Claims of Art Criticism in Nineteenth Century England Benjamin Dabby 2. Women, Science and Professional Identity, c.1860-1914 Claire G. Jones 3. Brother barristers: Masculinity and the Culture of the Victorian Bar Ren Pepitone 4. Legal Paperwork and Public Policy: Eliza Orme’s Professional Expertise in Late-Victorian Britain Leslie Howsam 5. Marriage and Metalwork: Gender and Professional Status in Edith and Nelson Dawson’s Arts and Crafts Partnership Zoë Thomas 6 ‘Giggling Adolescents’ to Refugees, Bullets, and Wolves: Francesca Wilson Finds a Profession Ellen Ross 7. Women at Work in the League Secretariat Susan Pedersen 8. Ninette de Valois and the Transformation of Early-Twentieth Century British Ballet Laura Quinton 9. Archives, Autobiography, and the Professional Woman: The Personal Papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton Heidi Egginton 10. Women Historians in the Twentieth Century Laura Carter 11. Feminism, Selfhood, and Social Research: Professional Women’s Organisations in 1960s Britain Helen McCarthy 12. The ‘Spotting a Homosexual Checklist’: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and the British Foreign Office, 1965-1970 James Southern Afterword Christina de Bellaigue

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Author Information

Heidi Egginton is a curator of political collections at the National Library of Scotland. She has published articles in the Journal of Victorian Culture and Twentieth-Century British History. Zoë Thomas is assistant professor of nineteenth-century Britain and the wider world at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement and coeditor of Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics, and Enterprise with Miranda Garrett.

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