ABSTRACT

In this chapter I review a series of research projects that I have undertaken and bring insights gained from them to bear on the problem of women’s careers in higher education. The notion of career developed in the nineteenth century with the abolition of patronage and the reform of the professions, government service, grammar and public schools. Examinations were introduced to select those entering the expanding and increasingly hierarchical government organizations and professions. It is one of the central features of Weber’s notion of bureaucracy (Weber, 1968). Young men entered the Civil Service or the Indian Army seeing their futures as a progression up a ladder. In 1988 I published Making a Man of Him: Parents and their Sons’ Education at an English Public School 1929-1950. When I started that study of 2,000 letters from parents to the headmaster of a minor public school I saw it as a study of careers. Only gradually did I realize that careers are one aspect of masculinities, which became the central focus of the book. Sons’ careers were the fulcrum of family ideologies about social class and masculinities. They were the realization of families’ aspirations for status maintenance and upward mobility. Fathers planned and directed their sons’ educational and subsequent careers as an integrated enterprise requiring a family strategy. Examining the question of what the problem is with women and careers in higher education depends on an understanding of ‘career’. The concept of career connotes individual life histories and their relation to family, education and work. They concern individuals within families and their gender and class relations.