Patriarchy and Professions: The Gendered Politics of Occupational Closure

Anne Witz

253 citations0/0 files storedSociology

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Gender and Feminist Studies Employment, Labor, and Gender Studies Education, sociology, and vocational training

Abstract

The relationship between gender and professionalisation is a neglected one, and female professional projects have been overlooked in the sociology of professions. The generic notion of profession is also a gendered notion as it takes what are in fact the successful professional projects of class-privileged male actors at a particular point in history and in particular societies to be the paradigmatic case of profession. Instead, it is necessary to speak of `professional projects', to gender the agents of these projects, and to locate these within the structural and historical parameters of patriarchal-capitalism. Professional projects are projects of occupational closure, and a model of occupational closure strategies is needed which captures both the variety of strategies that characterise these projects and the gendered dimensions of these strategies. Such a model is set out and distinguishes between exclusionary, demarcationary, inclusionary and dual strategies of closure. This model is substantiated with material drawn from the emerging medical division of labour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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References

1986Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge 1975Professions and Power.1982Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique 2022Midwives and Medical Men 1989For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women 2013Feminism and materialism 2002An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing 1984The medical profession in the Industrial Revolution

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