Archives, Autobiography, and the Professional Woman: The Personal Papers of Mary Agnes Hamilton
Name
Heidi_Egginton__Archives_autobiography_and_the_professional_woman__in_Precarious_Professionals__2021_.pdf
Description
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Size
498.93 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
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Resource type
Book chapter
Creator (person)
Egginton, Heidi
Date published
October 2021
Abstract
Mary Agnes Hamilton's (1882-1966) career spanned two world wars and defies easy categorisation: journalist, translator, political campaigner, editor, broadcaster, BBC governor, civil servant, welfare reformer, and public relations officer. Between 1929 and 1931, she also served briefly but brilliantly as a Labour MP, becoming parliamentary private secretary to Clement Attlee and one of two female British delegates to the League of Nations. The making of Mary Agnes Hamilton's professional identity provides a useful optic on the complicated and often indefinable path through the professional society followed by the classic early-twentieth-century woman graduate, for whom work and recognition rarely consisted of a series of progressive promotions. In contrast to what she deemed to have been a 'precarious' tenure in parliament and at the BBC, writing — including journalism, creative fiction, and biography — became the foundation of Hamilton's long and varied career, providing both financial support and a means of establishing a professional persona. This chapter re-examines Hamilton's work as a biographer and public expert on careers for women from the 1920s to the 1940s, focusing a set of her private wartime diaries which have recently come to light in the papers of one of her contemporaries at the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.
Series name
New Historical Perspectives
Book title
Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain
Editor
Egginton, Heidi
Thomas, Zoë
Pagination
233-262
Publisher
University of London Press
Place of publication
London
Rights statement
In Copyright
Additional information
Published in association with the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society