Careers Advice for Women and the Shaping of Identities

This article focuses on representations of women's work in two sets of articles, both entitled 'Careers for Women' that appeared in the Woman's Record in 1921-22 and the Australian Women's Weekly in 1933. Each provided advice about careers to potential women workers in traditional fields such as teaching and nursing as well as some relatively new occupations in the world of commerce. Although a range of discourses can be applied to women's work, the article explains how three in particular — vocation, career and character — were interwoven to represent different occupations. The article argues that although both journals purported to offer little more than 'practical guidance' in the matter of occupational choice, they were deploying the discourse of character to construct specific individual and occupational identities for middle-class women workers.