In Subordination: Professional Women, 1870-1970

Terry A. Crowley is an associate professor of history at the University
of Guelph and the author of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality.

The title of this volume is misleading in the sense that the focus is
actually restricted to professional women in Manitoba. Drawing upon
primary sources and oral interviews, University of Manitoba historian
Mary Kinnear charts the place carved out by these women in the fields of
education, medicine, and law (though, curiously, not in librarianship).
Although they constitute a majority in the nursing profession and among
elementary-school teachers, professional women have found themselves a
decided minority in other areas. Kinnear attributes the low proportion
of women in professions, up until 1971, to the difficulties of
shouldering the double burden of domestic and professional work; men’s
resistance to treating women as equal partners; and widespread
assumptions about the proper role of married women. Her book,
essentially a series of discrete studies of particular jobs, is unified
by the theme of subordination, a position women found themselves in
whether they were majority or minority members of a profession.