Challenging Professions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s Professional Work edited by Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne and Alison Prentice, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 334 pp., ISBN 0-8020-4319-4.

Critical analyses of the professions have been few and far between. The early literature, largely American, tended to define professions by listing the traits or attributes of particular occupations. Theorists such as Eliot Friedson (1973) later challenged this perspective, thus paving the way for more theoretical analyses that placed professions in the context of the larger stratification system (see Natalie J. Sokoloff, Black Women and White Women in the Professions,New York: Routledge, 1992). Most of these more recent contributions, however, have focused on class relations, with relatively little attention to the relationship between gender and professionalization. For their part, feminist researchers have tended to move away from the study of paid employment generally, and there have been only a limited number of new feminist studies of women in the professions (see for example, Kathryn McPherson, Bedside Matters, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996; Natalie J. Sokoloff, Black Women and White Women in the Professions, New York: Routledge, 1992; Anne Witz, Professions and Patriarchy, London: Routledge, 1992). The collection of articles edited by Elizabeth Smyth, Sandra Acker, Paula Bourne, and Alison Prentice therefore comes as a welcome and timely contribution to those of us who still care about women and work; the material inequities in women’s lives, and the gendering of jobs and occupations. The authors of Challenging Professions were participants in an SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary network on women and professional education. The collection is the culmination of ongoing discussions of this group. On the whole touched by feminist scholarship, the authors seek to “pare away some of the mystique of professionalism, by putting particular professional groupings under scrutiny and examining their gendering and its consequences, in various places and over time.” The network, consisting largely of university professors, began this project with a skeptical look at professionals’ claims to exclusive expertise, the power of one profession over another, the category of semi-profession, and other related themes. A critical examination of the relationship between the mystique of professions, professional control and power, and gender relations is indeed long overdue. The promise of a fresh approach to the seemingly outdated concept of the profession is inspiring. I thus approached the collection with enthusiasm. It is not clear, however, if Challenging Professions delivers on this promise. And I hesitate to describe the book itself as inspired. The collection is divided into three sections. Part One, “Individual Odysseys” profiles four women in Canada’s past: Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal evangelist; Elizabeth Gowan, a professor of Social Work; Florence Jessie Murray, a medical missionary; and Jean Coulthard, a musician/composer at the University of British Columbia. Part Two, “Multiple Reflections,” presents us with group biographies of women in Physics, Nutrition and Dietetics, Nursing, and Forestry. Part Three explores larger collectivities of women in the professions: women students in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto, Roman Catholic religious women, women chartered accountants in Nova Scotia, and women in pharmacy. As I made my way through the many chapters, my level of enthusiasm wavered. My reaction to the book as a whole was therefore mixed. One problem is that while the collection presents some meticulously researched, informative commentaries on the lives and careers of woman professionals, there is a lack of consistency from chapter to chapter—a unifying argument, a coherent theoretical framework, and a clear conceptualization of a profession, professionalization, gender, and patriarchy.While on the whole interesting, the various articles need to be pulled together by some common analytical (and political) threads. Without such interweaving, one is privy to rich detail about individual lives, but does not learn significantly about …