Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890–1940 by Penina Migdal Glazer, Miriam Slater (review)

384 Shorter Book Reviews this book is as a reminder that efforts ''to see women unbound'' (282) will never proceed in a straight line, that contradictory impulses will push and pull any society and any feminist movement or movements back and forth in a series of endless tensions. The strengths of Cott's book lie in its useful distinction between the nineteenth-century woman movement and the twentieth-century feminist movement, and in its wealth of wonderful documentation and interpretation of feminist activities in the 1920s. Anita Clair Fellman Women's Studies Simon Fraser University Penina Migdal Glazer and Miriam Slater. Unequal Colleagues: The Entrance of Women into the Professions, 1890-1940. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, I987. xii + 295 pp. Illus. Unequal Colleagues is a highly readable synthesis of historical, especially feminist, scholarship on women and the professions in the ·United States in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The authors examine the first generation of professional women in college teaching, medicine, scientific research and scientific social work. Using a biographical approach that focuses on the experience of nine extraordinary pioneers, the authors assess their experience in the history department at Mt. Holyoke (Mary E. Woolley, Nellie Neilson and Bertha Putnam), in a medical profession that increasingly denigrated female competitors (Dorothy Reed Mendenhall and Anne Walter Fearn), in the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (Florence R. Sabin and Alice Hamilton), and in the Smith College School for Social Work (Mary Jarrett and Bertha Reynolds). Although every woman had some victories to her account, all, especially the two who married, faced substantial opposition as a result of gender prejudice. Despite their industry and talents, they faced male professionals who were determined to bar the way not only to all ethnic and racial minorities but especially to female rivals. For all their strategies of "superperformance, subordination, innovation, and separatism'' (14), these women could not safeguard their fields for future generations of women. As the authors conclude, a revived feminist movement is women's only real hope of challenging male professionals' claim both to define and monopolize spheres of competence and knowledge. Veronica Strong-Boag Department of History Simon Fraser University ...