From Moral to Professional Authority: Secularism, Social Work and Middle-Class Women's Self-construction in World War I Britain

World War I is an episode that illuminates the long-term change in
definitions of women's authority from the nineteenth-century hege
monic concept of female moral authority to a latter-twentieth
century at least partial acceptance of women's professional and official
authority on the basis of competence and rights. Historians of women
have not examined often how gender has operated in the construction
of authority in specific historical contexts, how gendered definitions
of authority have changed, or how women have understood authority
they have exercised. This article examines particular definitions of
authority women adopted in three career fields during World War I:
Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) social workers,
women police officers and patrols, and women industrial welfare su
pervisors. The central narrative focuses on the dramatic war's-end
[130.56.97.26] Project MUSE (2024-09-02 04:03 GMT) Australian National University
upheaval within the YWCA, which reveals a telling shift toward secu
larism in social workers' understanding of the mandate for their work.
Calls for "modern," young YWCA workers were linked directly to
notions that YWCA social work had become a paid career for trained
women. Furthermore, for middle-class women seeking to prove their
abilities and further their career possibilities, their relationships with
working-class women formed an important basis for their self
justification. Studied together, these three expanding careers demon
strate women's blending of older and newer bases for their authority.
While YWCA social workers increasingly introduced qualifications
and methods of secular professionalism into an evangelical enterprise,
women police and welfare supervisors drew upon older, religiously
based definitions of women's special nature to stake their claims in
masculinist organizations.