Books & Digital Picks
This month’s family history inspiration
The Pioneering Adventures Of The First Professional Women JANE ROBINSON
Doubleday, 368 pages, £20
Until relatively recently, being a woman was a handicap to entering most professions. Family opposition and a lack of available training contributed to the intentional barriers and prejudices existing in traditionally male spheres. In this book Jane Robinson describes the struggle of pioneering women, and outlines some of the difficulties your female ancestors would have to overcome to practise in a career of their choice.
Women had been making attempts at breaking into the professions for decades, most notably Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was the first to
gain a licence from the Society of Apothecaries in 1865 which qualified her to work as a doctor; and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first British-born woman to be registered by the General Medical Council as a medical practitioner. The Lancet of 1873 summed up the general opposition: “Women’s sphere of usefulness in the healing art should certainly be limited to the carrying out of the desires and implicitly obeying the dictates of… medical men.”
Robinson admirably uncovers many of the lesser-known women who were ‘first’ in their field, such as Rachel Mary Parsons, who read engineering at Cambridge;
and Helena Normanton, who was the first woman to be admitted to the Inns of Court.
With the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act on 23 December 1919, women might have thought that they could now compete in the job market on a level playing field. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case; after the First World War women were forced back into domestic roles while returning servicemen were prioritised. These pioneer women were attacked for being too manly, too girly, too clever, too stupid or simply too womanly, while also being accused of “posing moral dangers”.
A helpful chronology at the back of the book is supported by thumbnail biographies of the women mentioned.
Julie Peakman is a historian and the author of Licentious Worlds: Sex and Exploitation in Global Empires (Reaktion Books, 2019)
‘Women were forced back into domestic roles’