LADIES CAN’T CLIMB LADDERS
THE PIONEERING ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL WOMEN
JANE ROBINSON
Doubleday, 368pp, £20
Following her books on bluestockings and suffragettes, social historian Jane Robinson has turned to pioneering female professionals. In the Daily
Mail, Helen Brown found the book fascinating: ‘I was gobsmacked by how little I knew of the first female lawyers, doctors, architects, academics, engineers, civil servants, churchwomen and politicians who flourished in the face of Establishment prejudice.’
Frances Wilson in the Telegraph was also gripped by a ‘crackingly good read’: ‘It is 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which allowed women to train as doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, academics and clergy. It was this, says Robinson, rather than the First World War that changed the shape of women’s lives. But instead of causing an immediate social revolution, with women everywhere exchanging aprons for white coats, dog collars and judicial wigs, the combination of prohibitive training costs and continued prejudice means that gender equality in the professions has been a tap-drippingly slow affair.’
Reviewers were shocked by the misogyny the women had to face. In the Financial Times, Isabel Berwick noted: ‘In the most shocking quote of the book, the civil service commissioner wrote in 1918: “Do you think that merely because a woman is equal to a man in competitive exams, therefore she is his equal or vice versa? . . . It is like comparing Chinamen with Englishmen or Hindus with Englishmen, or Hindus with Chinamen.”’
And in the Times Melanie Reid observed that ‘Modern professional women will read it with a slow burn of anger and a heightened respect for those whose actions, such a relatively brief time ago, made today possible.’