Women’s Struggles Through the Prism of Gender and Profession

When we think about professional inequality today – the gender pay gap, the underrepresentation of women in leadership, the so-called “glass ceiling” – it is easy to forget that the barriers women once faced were not subtle. They were written into law, enforced by institutions, and justified through pseudo-science. Understanding how those barriers were built – and how women dismantled them – requires both a historical lens and a sociological one. The concept of social closure, developed by sociologist Frank Parkin, gives us a precise framework for reading this history: not as a series of unfortunate accidents, but as a deliberate system of exclusion.

What is social closure and why does it matter for gender? 🔗

Social closure, as a concept, originates with Max Weber and was later developed by Frank Parkin in his influential 1979 work Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique. According to Parkin, social closure is the process by which social collectives seek to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of eligibles. This is not simply about individual prejudice – it describes a structural mechanism through which dominant groups actively guard their privileges.

Parkin identified two main types of closure strategy. The first is exclusionary closure, where one group secures a privileged position by subordinating another. The second is usurpationary closure, where the excluded group fights back – using collective action to reclaim resources and opportunities denied to them. Social closure, in short, has two faces: opportunity-hoarding for the in-group and deliberate exclusion of the out-group. Both dynamics are clearly visible in women’s long struggle to enter professional life.

Importantly, the criteria used to justify exclusion do not need to be rational or fair – they just need to be socially accepted. Education, for instance, is treated as related to work competence, so it becomes a socially acceptable basis for exclusion – allowing powerful groups to disguise other forms of bias, including gender discrimination, behind the language of credentials and qualifications. This is exactly what happened when women sought entry to the professions.

The medical profession as a case study in exclusionary closure 🔗

No profession illustrates Parkin’s concept of exclusionary closure more vividly than medicine. For most of the 19th century, the medical profession was effectively men-only – not by accident, but by design. The first evidence of the systematic exclusion of women from medical practice in Britain appeared in an Act of Parliament as far back as 1511, which grouped women among the “great multitude of ignorant persons” deemed unfit to practise medicine or surgery.

The barriers multiplied further as medicine became more formally regulated. The 1858 Medical Act sought to professionalise medicine by formalising educational requirements for practice in Britain. But by placing registration in the hands of institutions that already prohibited women’s medical education, it effectively created an insurmountable barrier for women who wished to practise. The more professionalised medicine became, the more systematically women were locked out.

The triple lock of exclusion 🔗

Until the mid-19th century, women faced a triple lock excluding them from surgical careers: they could not secure apprenticeships, they were not allowed entry to medical schools, and they could not work on hospital wards. The formal requirements of the profession had been designed in ways that structurally excluded women at every stage of the pipeline.

There were two major forces driving this exclusion. The first was ideological – a set of beliefs about women’s physical, mental, and emotional natures that deemed them unfit for professional practice. Arguments against women’s entry stated that their biology made them mentally and physically unsuitable as doctors. It was declared that menstruation would render women unstable and reduce their mental sharpness. Some claimed women had smaller brains and inferior intellects. Others said that exposure to blood, surgery, and dissection rooms would be dangerous for their “delicate health.” Women who wanted a medical career were publicly denounced as traitors to their gender and threats to the “civilised social order.”

The second force was openly self-interested. Critics of women’s exclusion noted that the opposition was based on “sordid, commercial grounds” – male practitioners simply did not want competition from women in the medical marketplace. Professional jealousy, in other words, was as important as ideology in maintaining closure. The two reinforced each other: biological arguments gave a respectable face to what was, at its core, a strategy of monopolization.

Legal loopholes and their deliberate closure 🔗

A telling detail of how seriously the male establishment guarded these boundaries is what happened when individual women found ways in. Elizabeth Blackwell and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first recognised women doctors, entered the profession through legal loopholes – which were subsequently closed to prevent other women from doing the same. The system responded to each breakthrough by tightening its restrictions. This is precisely what Parkin’s model would predict: when usurpationary strategies succeed, exclusionary groups typically adapt their closure mechanisms rather than abandon them.

Similarly, when a Bill was proposed in 1875 to allow women to qualify as doctors using degrees from European or North American universities that admitted women, the General Medical Council objected – on the grounds that men were not permitted to register with foreign degrees. Even the argument for fairness was turned against women’s access to the profession.

Women’s responses: individual and collective resistance 🔗

Parkin’s framework is not only a theory of exclusion – it also accounts for the strategies used by excluded groups to push back. Women’s resistance to professional closure took both individual and collective forms, and often the two worked together.

Individual acts of resistance 🔗

Some of the most striking examples of individual resistance involved women concealing their gender entirely to gain access to a profession that refused them. Margaret Ann Bulkley presented as a man throughout her adult life, qualifying as Dr James Barry in 1812, going on to have a distinguished career as an army surgeon in South Africa and the Caribbean. The fact that a woman had to live as a man for decades to access a profession is itself a stark measure of how total the exclusion was.

Other women found narrower legal openings. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, rather than disguising herself, navigated the rules as they existed – studying privately, collecting certificates, and earning a medical licence in 1865 from the Society of Apothecaries, whose charter did not permit them to discriminate against her. She later obtained a medical degree from the Sorbonne in Paris in 1870, since no British medical school would enrol her. These were extraordinary individual feats, but they remained exceptions – not a general opening of the door.

Collective action and institutional change 🔗

Individual breakthroughs, while important symbolically, could not dismantle the system alone. What transformed women’s access to the professions was organised, collective action. By 1874, the London School of Medicine for Women had been established, followed by similar institutions in Edinburgh and Glasgow. These institutions were themselves acts of collective resistance – women creating parallel structures when existing ones refused them entry.

The wider suffrage movement brought this struggle into the political arena. First-wave feminists in the 19th century focused not only on the right to vote, but on striking down barriers to education, employment, and the professions – understanding that formal citizenship rights and professional access were inseparable. Susan B. Anthony, writing in her newspaper The Revolution, argued explicitly that the ballot would open to women the schools, colleges, and professions, delivering equal opportunity in the world of work.

In Britain, a key milestone came in 1876, when an Act was passed permitting women to enter the medical professions – and Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s qualification was finally officially recognised. Yet even after this, universities could still legally exclude women from their medical schools. By 1881, there were only 25 women doctors in England and Wales – just 0.17 per cent of the profession. The legislative door had opened, but structural resistance remained firmly in place.

Education as a site of struggle 🔗

Access to education was not a separate issue from access to the professions – it was the foundational battleground. Women faced two interlocked obstacles: medicine was a male monopoly, and it required a university education which was largely denied to women. The two barriers reinforced each other perfectly. Denying women university education meant denying them professional credentials; denying them professional credentials then became the justification for keeping them out of universities.

Even when women managed to gain admission to universities, exclusion continued in subtler forms. The University of London was the first British university to grant women access to degrees, but it did not admit women to its Medical Faculty for another 39 years. When Edinburgh University finally admitted women students in 1892, they were taught separately from the men – integrated enough to be counted, but segregated enough to be reminded of their marginal status. This is the texture of what Parkin would call a partially opened system: the formal exclusion relaxes, but the informal mechanisms of subordination persist.

From usurpation to transformation: the long arc 🔗

Parkin’s concept of usurpationary closure describes how subordinate groups challenge the monopoly of those above them. But it also implies something more gradual – that pushing open a closed system requires sustained effort across generations, combining legal challenges, institution-building, political activism, and the slow erosion of ideological legitimacy.

By the end of the 19th century, the British Medical Association had admitted women to its membership – having specifically excluded them in 1878 – and there were nearly a thousand female doctors in Britain by 1914. This was progress, but it came only because women had organised, litigated, founded their own schools, lobbied Parliament, and refused to accept the biological arguments used to justify their exclusion.

Social movement scholars note that collective action on behalf of women has historically blossomed during times of generalized social upheaval – when changes in labour force participation, access to education, and shifts in reproductive roles created the structural conditions for feminist organising. The push for professional access was one dimension of a broader transformation in gender relations, not an isolated campaign.

Today, the GMC has confirmed that women now outnumber men in practising medicine in the UK – a reversal that would have seemed unimaginable to the men who rioted against women students at Edinburgh in the 1870s. But this transformation did not happen automatically. It was the product of sustained individual courage and organised collective resistance – exactly the kind of usurpationary action that Parkin’s framework predicts.

What this history tells us about gender and power 🔗

The history of women’s exclusion from medicine – and the professions more broadly – is not simply a story about old-fashioned prejudice that time has corrected. It is a case study in how power operates through institutional design. Institutions contain mechanisms that make exclusion possible, functioning as amplifiers of individual bias. The rules about apprenticeships, exam boards, medical registers, and degree requirements were not neutral – they were shaped by those who already held power, and they worked to keep that power concentrated.

Understanding women’s professional struggles through the lens of social closure also clarifies why progress has been uneven. Opening a formal door – passing an Act of Parliament, changing admission rules – does not automatically dismantle the informal hierarchies, the underfunding of women’s institutions, or the cultural assumptions about whose knowledge and labour counts. Closure processes can be challenged through usurpationary movements, institutional regulation, and interactional resistance – but each of these requires its own sustained effort. The lesson of the 19th century is that formal equality and substantive equality are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where the real work of social change takes place.

What do you think? If social closure explains how powerful groups maintain their dominance through institutional design, where do you see its mechanisms operating in professional life today? And to what extent do you think individual acts of resistance – like those of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson or James Barry – can shift structural inequalities, compared to collective action?

References

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