영국 여성들의 대학 교육과 직업 ―거튼 칼리지 졸업생들을 중심으로, 1918-1948―

Abstract

This article is based on the life histories of female graduates of Girton College, Cambridge between 1918 and 1948. The main focus of the article is not on the history of Girton itself or that of Cambridge University, though the historical backgrounds of both are to be provided, but on the life histories of a group of highly educated women through the twentieth century. This article is to explore the reasons why a group of talented and highly skilled women had less successful careers than men. After World War II, the majority of middle class women got married. At the same time, middle-class married women were allowed to have paid work outside home. But their career opportunities had continued to be limited to a few areas like school-teaching at least until the 1970s. When new career opportunities opened, the women took up them enthusiastically. Those female workers who competed with men in male-dominated paid occupations, such as medicine and law, often experienced the hostility or discrimination from men. Most of them, throughout the period of that time, realized that it was so difficult to multitask marriage and child-rearing together with a her career work. There have long been a glass ceiling and a sex-gender system preventing most women from getting a successful level of career.