Personal Writing in Professional Spaces: Contesting Exceptionalism in Interwar Women's Vocational Autobiographies

This essay draws on genre theory and recent conceptualizations of the personal as rhetorical in order to investigate the collective stakes of writerly self-representation. Contextualizing and analyzing a widely published early twentieth-century genre, the vocational autobiography, I argue that female professionals made use of the rhetorical resources available in the genre to personalize their professional identities, counteracting a widespread discourse of exceptionalism and flouting widespread advice about the necessity of strict separation between personal and professional identities. By using personal narratives to depict their gendered and embodied presence in powerful professional spaces such as laboratories and newsrooms, female writers made use of this genre to normalize their presence and to open up access to such spaces for other women.