In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870-1970.

In Subordination is a general survey of women in five professional groups in Manitoba over a hundred-year period. The five groups chosen are university teachers, physicians, lawyers, nurses, and public and high school teachers. Each group is given a chapter of its own which provides a historical account of women's entry into the particular field and a discussion of their experiences based on interviews and surveys of those still living and accessible.

Kinnear's theoretical starting point is Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues,(1) which argues that there were four ways that women in the past managed to survive and succeed in the professions: separatism, super performance, subordination and innovation. What Kinnear then does is to examine those women who did become professionals in Manitoba to see whether this schema works within the Canadian context - it doesn't. Separatism wasn't an option in Canada, which had very few private schools and no private universities to provide a nurturing environment for women aspiring to the professions. Few of the women interviewed were superperformers. Almost all who were married agreed that their families came first and those not married often had personal priorities of their own. This did not mean that no superperformers existed but that it was not a choice made by many and so was not a characteristic of a particular group of women. To become an innovator required both power and ambition, both of which were lacking. Thus subordination was the route taken by most. Women in law, medicine and university teaching simply did not have the critical numbers for a consciousness of their position as a group to develop, and women in the other two professions were restricted by their nurturing image.

The finding that these women professionals almost all found themselves in some kind of subordinate position in their work lives, despite the fact that they were the most privileged of women workers, is not earthshattering. Neither is much of the detailed description of how women entered the fields or the treatment they received once they entered. What is most intriguing is the comparison of the five fields chosen for study. University teaching, medicine, and law were all-male bastions which until very recently remained so. There is little debate over their professional nature by most analysts. But when you include nursing and public and high school teachers the mixture becomes clouded. Questions can be raised about whether nurses and teachers were (and are) really professionals in the same way that the other groups were. Compared to the other three, nursing had always been dominated by women and remains so. Teaching also became feminized very early on. Thus the author has presented us with a very interesting spectrum of professions, and it is the contribution of the book to suggest some of the differences and commonalities between women's experience in them.

What emerges from her study of women university teachers is their awareness of the discrimination they received but their virtual unanimity in not challenging it. This is probably because they would have had to do so as individuals with little support of others behind them due to the few women who were actually in academe. What also is noteworthy is their commitment to teaching over research, at least until the 1960s. Research was not given priority by most.

Women doctors tended to remember their training fondly compared to lawyers. Although many mentioned the quota system that existed for most of the period which limited the number of women medical students accepted, they did not challenge it even when other groups, such as the Jewish community, raised pressure to rescind the quotas against them. The quota against women was perhaps part of the norms of society and so did not stand out. Women lawyers, however, did remember discrimination but the origin of this was one specific Dean of the Law School at the University of Manitoba from 1945-64. Perhaps because the discrimination was so personalized rather than institutionalized it remained a sore spot for many.

Nursing and teaching really were different from the other three professions. The numbers involved allowed nurses and teachers to form organizations to represent them. In the case of nurses, this was not always easy since divisions between university-trained nurses and hospital-trained nurses emerged. In the case of teachers, the women split off from the general teaching association to mount a more sustained campaign against inequities. What they were most concerned about was pay differential. Interestingly enough, they did not seem particularly perturbed by the prohibition on married women teaching which remained in existence until 1946.

What unites most of the women in these five professions is the consensus that their priority was family; their profession came second. Not surprisingly, this meant that in law and medicine many women felt they could not have both career and family, although a significant number of single women physicians adopted children. Nursing with its "flexible" shift work allowed married women to continue working. Also nursing with its image of nurturing did not seem to contradict the decision to became a mother. Teaching, however, was different due to the legal prohibition against married women. But when that prohibition was rescinded they were there. Having withdrawn from the work force to have their family did not disqualify them for reentry, which certainly would have been the case in medicine, law, and even university teaching.

What Kinnear has demonstrated in In Subordination is the variation in women's 'professional' experience, a variation which was probably much greater than for their male colleagues.

Wendy Mitchinson University of Waterloo 

ENDNOTE 

1. Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater, Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1891-1940 (New Brunswick, N.J, 1987).