ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the problems faced by women competing with men in professions such as medicine, art and journalism, showing how New Woman novelists seized on the figure of the lady-joumalist in particular in their attempts to tell the story of the modern woman. The aspiring journalist is forced out of the labour market into marriage, or at least encouraged to take up a more feminine occupation. George Gissing's examination of the lady-journalist in New Grub Street emphasises restrictions on employment through male judgements about what was deemed suitable work for educated women. Women's failure 'to make a paying business of literature' in the novel says more about their lack of support in a male-dominated competitive marketplace. Dominant images of the educated working woman in both fiction and scientific debate tended to categorise her professionalism in terms of her 'unnatural' gender and sexuality, even as feminist writers struggled to defend the modern woman's right to celibacy.
