6 - Gender and the professionalization of Victorian society: the mission example

Summary

‘The proportion of women sent out being too large, arises from the fact that so many more women than men apply, and as this is a universal experience amongst missionary Societies, the only resort is in prayer, that the Lord will so interfere that men may come forward in larger numbers’.

Industrialism had resulted in a nineteenth-century Britain that was shaped by ‘a social revolution with social causes and a social process as well as profound social effects, including the demise of the pre-industrial aristocratic society and the rise of the viable class society of mid-Victorian England’. In the last two decades of that century, a non-entrepreneurial professional class began to overtake the aristocratic and capitalist elites of the previous generation in both numbers and importance. In the older social systems, wealth was limited to land and capital and was concentrated in the hands of the few who controlled those resources. The rise of professionalism represented an expansion of the concept of wealth to include the resource of skilled and knowledgeable labour. This resulted in a changing social ideal. The idea that a man could achieve success through access to labour and capital translated into a reliance on hard work and education. The professional proved himself ‘by persuading the rest of society and ultimately the state that his service was vitally important and therefore worthy of guaranteed reward’.One means of doing so lay in providing a service considered to be of value; the other was to subject this opportunity for individual advancement to rigorous scrutiny and exclude the unqualified, a term that was under constant revision. Gender was one important social category by which individuals in the late nineteenth century were understood by others and by which they defined themselves both personally and professionally. Gender played an important part in this revision of the concept of professional qualifications as increasing numbers of women began to have access to education and thus were granted entry to professional job markets.

How the profession of ‘missionary’ was defined underwent a profound change over the course of the nineteenth century.