Available from UMI in association with The British Library.

This thesis explores the explanatory potential of a concept of patriarchy on the substantive terrain of gender relations in the sphere of paid work. The central question of the thesis is defined as: how are patriarchal relations constituted in the sphere of paid work?.

The substantive case studies examine processes of intra-occupational and inter-occupational control within the medical division of labor during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries. Male and female professional projects in medicine, midwifery, nursing and radiography are analysed. These are investigated using primary contemporary records and journals of the occupations as well as theoretical and secondary sources. Professional closure in medicine was sustained by means of gendered exclusionary and collectivist practices. Women's struggle to enter the medical profession constituted a feminist project of inclusionary usurpation. Groups of midwives and nurses engaged in professional projects of closure, but these were constrained both by the gendered demarcationary strategies of medical men and by the patriarchal structuring of the institutional sites within which the means of professionalisation are mobilised, namely civil society and the state. Female professional projects are conceptualised as dual closure strategies. The substantive material on gendered professional projects of closure in the medical division of labour demonstrates how male power is institutionalised within different sites of social relations in modern society: in the labor market, civil society and the state. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).