This impressive and original study is one of the first books to combine mainstream sociology with feminism in exploring the subject of the professions and power. This is an important addition to the corpus of feminist scholarship... It provides fresh insights into the way in which male power has been used to limit the employment aspirations of women in the middle classes. - Rosemary Crompton, University of Kent

This book engages with sociological debates about the social sources of professional power and with feminist debates about how gender segregation in employment is generated and sustained. The author argues that the gender blindness of prevailing neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian approaches to the study of professions has frustrated the development of an analysis of the relation between gender and professional projects. It is necessary to gender the agents of professional projects and to historically anchor occupational professionalism within the structural parameters of 19th century patriarchal capitalism. The author elaborates a model of occupational closure which concentrates in particular on the gendered dimensions of closure. It distinguishes between exclusionary, demaractionary, inclusionary and dual closure strategies of occupational closure. The explanatory power of the model is tested through an analysis of the professional projects and inter-professional rivalries of medical men, midwives, nurses and radiographers in the emerging medical division of labour in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This book should be of interest to students of women's studies, so