This chapter explores three representations of Oxbridge women undertaking jobs other than teaching. The novels in this chapter first address stereotypes castigating working women in general and damning university-educated working women in particular. The novels make generally quick work of these reactionary storylines, launching into complex portrayals of the characters. Interconnected with careful character development, this fiction expends significant energy complicating the visions of what leads university-educated women into the workplace. That work produces stories about women who, rather than stealing positions from others, lean toward creating new jobs or introducing innovations within occupational possibilities for themselves and, potentially, others. As “lean toward” intimates, these different plot threads are not woven into narrative wholes at the novels’ ends. Instead, these novels oscillate through multiple visions of possible jobs and lives for highly educated women with vocational aspirations.

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The Careerists: Re-envisioning the Disreputable, Harnessing Exaggeration, and Alternating Between Extremes

  • Laura Rotunno

摘要

This chapter explores three representations of Oxbridge women undertaking jobs other than teaching. The novels in this chapter first address stereotypes castigating working women in general and damning university-educated working women in particular. The novels make generally quick work of these reactionary storylines, launching into complex portrayals of the characters. Interconnected with careful character development, this fiction expends significant energy complicating the visions of what leads university-educated women into the workplace. That work produces stories about women who, rather than stealing positions from others, lean toward creating new jobs or introducing innovations within occupational possibilities for themselves and, potentially, others. As “lean toward” intimates, these different plot threads are not woven into narrative wholes at the novels’ ends. Instead, these novels oscillate through multiple visions of possible jobs and lives for highly educated women with vocational aspirations.