by Helen E. H. Smith
History / Women’'s Studies, Lakehead University
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Mary Kinnear, In Subordination: Professional Women 1870-1970, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. pp. 245. ISBN 0-7735-1279-9.
Mary Kinnear, professor of history at the University of Manitoba, begins her book with a quote from the 1970 Royal Commission Report stating that “almost all working women were ‘handicapped by discrimination in policy and in practice.’” (3) The purpose of Kinnear’s work is to demonstrate that from 1870 to 1970, “[p]rofessional women were among the most favoured women in the paid labour force, yet individually they were almost all in subordination to men.” (3) Kinnear describes here work as a “pioneer in the area” (28) which merely begins to fill a gap in the history of Canadian women’s employment.
She argues that while “there is a considerable body of scholarship on women’s paid labour in the industrial sector, in domestic service and in office work,” less attention has been paid to women in the professions. (3) Kinnear considers her collection and use of oral histories to be both the greatest strength and the most controversial aspect of her work. By studying how work experience was historically gendered for women in Manitoba in five professional occupations—university teachers, physicians, lawyers, nurses, and primary/secondary school teachers—Kinnear presents her book as contributing “to an understanding of the dimensions of discrimination.” (3)
Kinnear arranges her material in the following order. The opening chapter, entitled “Professions, Evidence, and Gender in General,” provides the theoretical, historical, and methodological context for the next five chapters, each dedicated to one of her five chosen professions. Her concluding chapter is followed by two appendices, the first containing 26 tables of statistical information on women and paid work, and the second listing the names of the women respondents who worked in one of the five professions in Manitoba. The bibliography reveals her substantial use of primary source documents—archival materials, census publications, newspapers and journals—and also her impressive list of secondary sources.
In her opening chapter, Kinnear provides a number of contexts in which to understand the hundred-year span of women’s experiences within the professions. She begins by pointing out that in Manitoba, as in the rest of Canada, Britain, and the United States, “a connection between feminism and the professions was forged by the end of the nineteenth century” demanding women’s right to earn their own living and to have access to professional jobs. (16) Next, Kinnear discusses the class and gender implications embedded within the term “profession” itself. Having provided the historical and social complexities involved in defining what is meant by ‘professional,’ she describes why the five jobs she selected for her study were considered to fit this definition with gender as “a central organizing principle of the professions.” (9) A key issue of the book as a whole is the extent to which women’s place in the professions “both challenged and reinforced” the broader social ideology of the separate spheres. (“Man’s sphere was the public world of work and government; woman’s was the home and family.” (15)
An important factor to keep in mind is Kinnear’s own analysis of her work “as a pioneer in the area, to be confirmed or modified by later study.” (28) Given the enormous historical, theoretical and methodological territories she is covering in 167 pages of actual text, the book is primarily a chronological survey of key events in the lives of women entering the five professions over a hundred-year period in Manitoba. A number of fascinating historical episodes are provided which future studies could certainly expand upon both in historical detail and theoretical analysis. In her opening chapter, Kinnear emphasizes the importance of connecting gender analysis with racial and class constructions to avoid the dangers of assuming that one woman’s experience can necessarily speak for others. “Reminded by late-twentieth-century social historians that we must pay more careful attention to the varieties of human experience and locate a voice within class, region, religion, race, and gender, it is important to be mindful of the difficulties of generalizing from any small data base, archival or oral, written or spoken.” (24) However, in the subsequent chapters, she tends to focus primarily upon gender ideology alone, rather than exploring its links with both class and racial ideologies; nor does she actually provide a working definition for the term ‘gender.’
The author carefully demonstrates that each profession was gendered differently. She argues that the jobs of university teachers, physicians and lawyers “were and still are male-dominated,” while the jobs of schoolteaching and nursing “were and are dominated numerically by women.” (98) In the first three jobs, women were up against stereotypical images which assumed women by nature had neither the intellectual capacity nor the emotional resilience to succeed as either students or practitioners. Even if she did manage to fulfill the university training needed to function legally as a university teacher, doctor or lawyer, marriage and especially pregnancy and child rearing demanded her return to her ‘natural’ duties in the domestic sphere. Schoolteaching and nursing were defined as women’s work because of “a stereotype of a nurturing woman who traditionally cared for the sick and the young.” (98) As such, while women were fighting to be included in the ‘masculine’ professions, school teachers and nurses were fighting to have their ‘feminine’ jobs categorized as professional, with the accompanying economic and social status.
To clarify the interplay between gender, class and racial constructions operating within this historical context, a more detailed look might have been made of what was meant by ‘respectability’ in Manitoba during the post-1867 period of Canadian nation building and the social purity movement. How did the gender, class and racial constructions embedded within the understanding of ‘respectability’ fluctuate between 1870 and 1970? What were the similarities between how the ‘professional’ and the middle-class woman were expected to maintain the signifiers of genteel respectability? To what extent did the women need to demonstrate that their middle-class professional labour did not threaten their responsibility in maintaining their own moral respectability and, in turn, the moral respectability of the family, the community and the nation?
There are many tantalizing accounts throughout the chapters that certainly could be further developed in later studies. An example will be drawn from the chapter entitled “Medicine: ‘Tough Old Birds.’” This section on women physicians begins with the historical context for medicine in Manitoba. Kinnear then establishes three time frames—pre-1941, World War II, and the post-War period—in which to discuss the training, work experience, and impact on family life for women physicians. To conclude the chapter, she compares the Manitoba situation with other places. The “major qualitative primary source is a survey of thirty-nine women doctors, ranging in time from eight who qualified in the 1930s to ten who graduated in the 1960s.” (54) Kinnear’s intention is to “analyse women physicians’ views of gender and the profession of medicine.” There is no specific mention here of class and racial constructions; yet, there are episodes which lend themselves to such analysis.
Kinnear introduces the chapter with the reminder that during the mid-nineteenth century, before the College of Physicians and Surgeons was incorporated by the legislature of Manitoba in 1877 and gained the legal right to define and monitor health care, wives and mothers were most commonly the medical care providers for their families. Kinnear is not clear whether she means settlers or is including the various groups of Indigenous peoples living within the political boundaries of Manitoba. Later, Kinnear briefly describes how many East European women settlers at the turn of the century would continue their ‘Old Country’ roles as midwives and healers for their communities. (58) To maintain its right to professionalize and monopolize such procedures, the College of Physicians and Surgeons tried to prevent such women from practising. An interesting dimension of this policy might be to look at the stand taken by women physicians. To what extent did women themselves, to protect their professional status, participate in restricting non-professional women from acting as healers? To what extent might middle-class women physicians, in their gendered role as moral guardians, be affected by the racial and class constructions operating within the moral reform movement and the first wave of feminism?
As Kinnear herself points out, the most methodologically complex area of her study is the use of oral histories to flesh out the dry statistical surveys. The inclusion of individual voices presenting their lived experiences certainly does assist in the “understanding of the tensions of women who in some ways accepted and in others resisted the male models of working life.” (29) Because of their importance to the study, a much more detailed account of the lives and backgrounds of the women who participated might have been provided. Given Kinnear’s theoretical emphasis upon the importance of gender, class and race constructions, how would these women situate themselves? Here, of course, we get into the difficult methodological and ethical questions concerning how to collect and use oral histories. Kinnear does outline a number of the difficulties involved in using as historical evidence, “accounts created by the women themselves.” (24) She carefully explains how she selected the participants and the number who were either interviewed or answered a questionnaire. It would have been interesting for Kinnear to clarify why she made the decision to reveal the identities of her respondents and whether this had any impact on the kinds of questions she could ask them. What limitations might this place upon doing a full analysis of the gender, race, and class constructions operating in the professions? What questions were actually asked in the questionnaires and the personal interviews? Could she have included a more complete story of the women to give a body to the isolated voices appearing briefly as pieces of evidence at particular points along the survey? The author’s concern with the extent to which the number of common answers from her respondents might allow for statistical generalizations, tends to detract from the participants’ position as multi-faceted individuals, each with their own complex set of values operating in the work place.
Kinnear may deliberately leave the reader with unanswered, thought-provoking questions to encourage further investigations. Certainly, her work is essential in terms of drawing historians’ attentions to the place of professional women in Manitoban history and Canadian history as a whole. Also, Kinnear’s methodological approach provides another fascinating example of the role oral histories can play in demonstrating the dynamic interplay between social expectations and the diverse responses of women’s lived experiences.
Page revised: 26 September 2012
