Roy Porter Student Prize Essay, Professional Entrepreneurs: Women Veterinary Surgeons as Small Business Owners in Interwar Britain

Summary

Although a recent resurgence in interest in female entrepreneurship has focused attention on working ‘on their own account’, the artificial distinction made between professional women and women in business has had the effect of segregating rather than integrating research findings. This article focuses on the first cohort of women to qualify as veterinary surgeons in interwar Britain to challenge the assumption that moving beyond the experience of professional women is the only way to bring new insights into women in business. It examines the construction and contestation of the image and role of the female veterinary surgeon in the two decades after they were first able to qualify in 1919, and the experience of women running their own veterinary businesses. It concludes that in a profession with high levels of self-employment, women’s identities were defined to a greater degree by their business activities than their professional status.

A recent resurgence of interest in female entrepreneurship has focused attention on women working ‘on their own account’. British scholarship lies predominantly in the nineteenth century, mapping women’s engagement in the urban economy, the influence of sex and gender on the running of a business, and whether the operation of female-owned businesses reflected or diverged from the experiences of men.¹ North American scholarship is pushing the revisionist historiography of women in business into the twentieth century as a counter-balance to the perceived over-emphasis on professional women clustered in occupations predicated on the traditional female attributes of caring and nurturing. Scholars suggest more is to be gained by turning attention to occupations where success was measured solely though economic achievement, such as women owning their own businesses. To this end there has been a concerted focus on ‘adding entrepreneurs’ into the historiography of women in careers, professions, and work.²

Although this new direction is welcome in order to capture the myriad of experiences of women at work, it perpetuates the artificial distinction made between the history of professional women and those in business, which together with the additional unhelpful category of ‘women in medicine’ has the effect of segregating rather than integrating research findings. This is epitomised by the preoccupation of how largely white middle-class women forged their professional identities in traditionally male-dominated professions of medicine, science, and the artistic world, redoubled by interest in the passage and meaning of the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, that opened up many professions to women for the first time.³ The attention given to women’s place in the ‘professional project’ has deflected attention from enterprising women.

This article asks that, with research into twentieth-century female entrepreneurship in Britain still in its infancy, we embrace the opportunity to rethink these research assumptions, so that moving beyond the experience of professional women is not seen as the only way of bringing fresh perspectives to the history of women, and women in business history. It takes a step in this direction by focusing on the experience of female veterinary surgeons in interwar Britain. As a group of women whose entry was facilitated by the 1919 Act, their status was naturally partly dependent on the regulation of professional training and qualification that is viewed as a form of social exclusivity.⁴ Beyond this, veterinary surgeons were also a significant group of women in the interwar period who worked for themselves. At this time veterinary medicine was dominated by small businesses of self-employed practitioners operating almost exclusively in the private sector. With a regulatory body unwilling to interfere too closely in the operation of practices, there is a lack of information about the number and nature of such practices until the 1980s, but we do know that a typical practice for much of the century comprised one or two Principals. These practices often employed a recent graduate as an Assistant, some of whom had secured the position through a period of work experience with a vet referred to as ‘seeing practice’, others through advertisements carried in the trade journal The Veterinary Record, and yet more through word of mouth.

In general, a new graduate would expect to spend two years as an Assistant before becoming a partner, or leaving to set up their own practice. Although this apprenticeship was advised, it was not mandatory, and women falling foul of the discriminatory hiring practices of senior male Partners and unable to secure an assistantship, were forced into putting up their plates at a much earlier stage than their male colleagues. This was mirrored in other professions with high levels of self-employment, such as the bar and pharmacy where women enjoyed a greater degree of self-determination of the professions to circumvent discrimination.

The disjuncture between the enabling legislation of 1919 and the continuance of older patterns of discrimination continued to hamper women’s access to training and employment which meant even for ‘successful’ women a level of professional attainment and visibility based on an increasing level of prestige and prosperity was difficult to achieve.⁵ This article therefore proceeds from the assertion that the 1919 Act not only created a new generation of professional women, but a new generation of business women. It argues that amplifying their identities as business women provides us with an opportunity to enhance women’s historiographical visibility at a time when they were small in number and marginalised in professional terms. It takes its lead from the feminist critique that traditional business history is flawed by focusing solely on large organisations and huge profits. Instead, it shows that enterprises that did not necessarily make vast sums of money but had the entrepreneurial hallmarks of decision making and innovation are equally valid sites of interest.⁶ This can highlight the importance of business history to women’s history by accounting for the influence of sex and gender, whilst also taking women’s businesses on their own terms.⁷

As Angel Kwolek-Folland has noted, this is not just pointing out ‘women were there, too’, but that the presence of women forces us to rethink the nature of economic activity, when change occurred, and to help us rethink the legal, social and economic meanings of such concepts a entrepreneurship’.⁸ In terms of the entrepreneurial character of veterinary medicine, significant change in European veterinary medicine is traditionally located in the 1950s, with a significant shift in the type of animal and the method by which animals were being treated. Although the number of practices of animal species was vague and contradictory for most of the twentieth century, by far the most common type of practice throughout the twentieth century was ‘mixed practice’, also known as ‘general practice’, where the bulk of the work was farm animals such as cattle, sheep, horses, goats, pigs and poultry, but which also saw dogs, cats and other domestic pets, normally in evening surgeries. There was also a considerable number of exclusively large animal practices and to a far lesser extent, at a time when spending money on the treatment of pets was highly unusual, exclusively small animal or ‘pet’ practices. This changed in the 1950s when the male-dominated profession re-articulated from large to small animal practice through the development of vaccinations, new surgical techniques, and most importantly the realisation that the affluent owners of pets would be willing to pay for advanced treatments.⁹

Although recent evidence has challenged this narrative by locating the origins of the ‘small animal turn’ to the interwar period, the presence and role of women veterinary surgeons is still largely ignored.¹⁰ This despite the fact that they were almost entirely clustered in exclusively small animal practices during this period. As a corrective to this, the present article highlights how women’s entry in the interwar period dovetailed with other changes in the profession, to examine not why women became clustered in the lower paid and lower prestige work of small animal practice, but how the space and innovation they created in this emerging field can help us re-think when change in the profession occurred.

To do this, the article first examines how the profession opened up to women, facilitated by the 1919 Act but amplified by the publicity campaign of Professor Sir Frederick Hobday, Principal of the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London. In 1927 Hobday took charge of an institution down on its luck: governmental committees set up to investigate the state of veterinary education had recently criticised the RVC in the roundest terms for its dilapidated buildings and their inadequate teaching facilities, and had concluded that the RVC was a national disgrace, bringing the veterinary profession into disrepute.¹¹ As a private institution dependent on student fees, Hobday quickly recognised that student numbers and publicity would be vital not only to secure money for extensive renovations but to provide the College with a sound financial footing for the future. As such, in late 1927 he took two major steps: he set up a building fund for the extensive renovations, and he opened up the RVC to women for the first time. The first section of this article examines the construction and dissemination of this publicity campaign, that beyond the familiar narratives of ‘women firsts’ in the professions, to place the role of female vet as business women squarely at the centre of their identity.

The second section reflects on the lived experience of women, pieced together from scarce and fragmentary evidence. It centres on Connie Ford (1912–1998), who entered the RVC at the height of Hobday’s campaign in 1929.¹² As well as incomplete practice accounts and documentation, her archive contains a diary she kept in her final year of veterinary training in 1933, as well as extensive correspondence she sustained with friends and colleagues; reflecting her lifelong interest in writing, having been a published poet since an early age, these are infused with insight, self-awareness, and emotional honesty.¹³ Taken together with an extensive oral history conducted with the 1937 RVC graduate Mary Brancker (1914–2010), as well as women’s contemporary voices and opinions in the Veterinary Record, they paint a picture of the joys and frustrations of a life as a woman veterinary surgeon and business owner in the interwar period.

Constructing the Female Veterinary Surgeon

Hobday’s message was simple: a girl with ‘brains and a love of God’s creatures’ could do far worse than train as a veterinary surgeon.¹⁴ Not only was the profession ‘under-crowded’ but she had unique qualities which suited her for a particular role working with companion animals, particularly cats and dogs. This was partly due to the great degree of physical strength and endurance required for work with agricultural animals, which made it unsuitable to all but the ‘most sporting girl’, and partly due to reasons of delicacy; Hobday felt the ‘natural chivalry’ of the male of members of the profession ‘made them shudder when they thought of the women doing “dirty work” which accompanied medical or surgical attendance on sick horses and cows’.¹⁵ Instead, he was sure that women would prefer ‘the more congenial field’ of canine practice, perhaps in a large town or fashionable residential or seaside resort. As women ‘obviously, had more gentle hands’ they were better suited to the affectionate care of small domesticated animals.¹⁶ Their lightness of touch was matched and assisted by their innate empathy and connection with animals: No man, he claimed ‘however gentle he might be, would ever obtain the response which a sick dog or cat would give to a woman’s care and endearment. Even with sick horses the animals can sometimes be coaxed to take food by a woman when it has refused to open its lips to a man’s blandishments’.¹⁷

The appeal of small animals in pain, Hobday claimed, was irresistible to women and such was the magnetism between them that women’s entry to the profession was inevitable, ‘even if we did not want them in the profession, we could not prevent them from entering it’.¹⁸ A favoured rhetorical flourish was to predict that the first 50 women who specialised in one or other of the veterinary sciences, particularly in the diseases of poultry and game birds, rabbits, fish, or laboratory research, would find both ‘fame and fortune’.¹⁹

The picture Hobday painted of woman vets sat well with the prevailing image of the modern 1920s women continuously communicated through the pages of the popular press. The idea that women could and should expect expanded job opportunities was shored up by the appearance of careers advice in the women’s pages across the spectrum of the press, profiling such work as the electricity industry and photography, and suggesting women ought to visit the Women’s Service Bureau, choose a career, and ‘resolve to train and become as efficient as possible’.²⁰ Hobday’s sentiments therefore received uncritical reportage from newspapers such as The Times, to the feminist journal Time and Tide and high-end magazines such as Horse and Hound, often accompanied by photographs showing ‘girl students’ with a variety of small and large animals and even, on the occasion of a carnival procession at the RVC in 1931, giraffes.

This impression of the veterinary profession as one dominated by women calmly and efficiently tending to a variety of different animals was shored up by Hobday’s many public appearances in support of his campaign. In May 1928, at a time when the campaign for full suffrage was at its peak, he spoke to the Union of Women Voters.²¹ Women’s appearances on the public stage through the extension of the vote and the election of the first women MPs had given them a greater profile in civic life, and was credited for a shift of ethos on a number of issues. The Sunday Times commented that a ‘livelier sensibility’ to the suffering of animals was down to the influence of women: ‘Women’, it claimed, ‘by stepping forward into the sphere of public life have a voice more clearly heard than before in the shaping of public opinion; and their admission as veterinary surgeons is more than justified.²² Women ‘vets’ were also included in Vera Brittain’s 1928 publication, Women’s Work in Modern England, pitched as a guide for young women to careers in newer and less orthodox professions which also included photography, commercial travelling, and insurance.²³ During a talk hosted by the Fabian Women’s Group, Brittain suggested that young women seeking professional careers ‘might well consider the possibilities and promise in scientific research, especially research in veterinary surgery, where women can do good work in the treatment of canine diseases, the care of birds and small animals, and in laboratory work’.²⁴

Although much of the publicity surrounding veterinary medicine was celebratory, some was more cautious in tone, recognising that the profession was still in the pioneer stage and that there were no ‘cut-and-dry’ jobs waiting for women.²⁵ Many articles also recognised that it was not an easy or cheap profession to enter: fees were regularly quoted as £30 per annum, with the total cost including living expenses being between £400 and £500.²⁶ This intense press interest also extended to a range of careers, many of which seemed more suitable. There were other occupations such as teaching, which were both a desirable and respectable careers for young middle-class women during the interwar years and nearly 75 per cent of female graduates, including those from middle-class backgrounds attending elite women’s institutions such as Girton College, Cambridge, went on to teach.²⁷ Indeed it could also be a financially viable option for those from less affluent backgrounds, with many women having ‘signed the pledge’ to teach in exchange for loans for training.²⁸ The interwar period also saw new opportunities in law, accountancy and professions like surveying, as well as those which were well regarded though ‘not quite professions’, such as social work and the civil service; during this period the new Policewomen departments were also attracting women from the lower middle class.²⁹

There was also the more obvious career path in medicine, which by the 1920s was an established though exclusive option for middle-class women. There was natural overlap between human and veterinary medicine as ‘caring’ professions, and some young women did seem to have initially wanted to become doctors. It is likely that women holding this ambition found that profession difficult to enter in the interwar period: informed by ideas of a post-war retrenchment of gender roles in early 1920s, the initial celebration of women doctors had given way to a discussion of the ‘invasion’ of women, and in this ‘overcrowded territory’ women were seen as expendable. The result was that by 1928 five of the medical schools in London were closed to women.³⁰ We can see how Hobday’s rhetoric of veterinary medicine as ‘undercrowded’ would have stood in positive contrast to this and given women, especially for those wishing to study in London, a feasible alternative.

Yet it would be wrong to see vets simply as frustrated doctors, and women’s testimony instead suggests that a general but unfocused love of animals expressed by girls was marshalled by teachers and parents during this period in the direction of a purposeful and remunerative career. When, for example, the science mistress of Connie Ford learned that Connie was contemplating secretarial training, horrified at this prospect, she instead suggested a biology degree and hope for a research post; it was an idea Connie, failing to make the connection between ‘watching live things in a field and dissecting dead ones in the laboratory’, rejected outright. It was only when her teacher returned from hearing Hobday speak on veterinary surgery as a new career for women, that Connie alighted upon a career which would provide ‘useful and remunerative work which at least involved live animals’.³¹ Connie decided that becoming a vet would satisfy ‘the vague medical leaning’ she had always felt.³² Mary Brancker, 70 years later, recalled that her interview with Hobday had been ‘routine’, because he had been ‘mad keen to get women, because he could get something in the papers’ whilst mentioning the building fund in the next breath.³³

This genuine connection between the campaign and the increased intake of women into veterinary education makes it easier to dismiss it as a cynical ploy to further the interests of the RVC. Certainly, Hobday’s stewardship created a more consistent policy of admission than at any of the other four centres of veterinary training, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Dublin, and by 1939, 72 of the 118 women graduates had passed through its doors.³⁴ Yet this conclusion underplays Hobday’s genuine conviction that women’s ‘natural’ empathies could be utilised in companion animal work, at a time when he was genuinely looking to improve small animal practice and to benefit its patients. Towards the end of the nineteenth century he was running a fashionable small animal practice in Kensington, and by 1900, at a time when he held the post of Professor in charge of the free out-patients clinic at the RVC, he published Canine and Feline Surgery as a text book intended for ‘students engaged in the daily work of the Clinique for small animals, and perhaps also the busy practitioner’.³⁵ An enlarged version appeared in 1905, now entitled Surgical Diseases of the Dog and Cat and Anaesthetics, and by 1924 this book was in its third edition and had been expanded once more.³⁶

Hobday was interested in how the humane treatment of small animals was a natural corollary of advanced scientific methods, such as the advances in anaesthetic administration, monitoring and recovery. Yet he was also mindful that there had to be the will to take the suffering of small animals seriously; a good veterinary surgeon, he felt, was not motivated by a ‘washy sentimentality, but a realization that animals were conscious of pain and deserved thoughtful regard’.³⁷ During the interwar period there was recognition that men had a partial claim to these twin attributes of care and scientific detachment in companion animal work. When, for example, The Evening News published an article in 1931 suggesting that being a veterinary surgeon could not only be a remunerative career but also suited boys’ ‘instinctive liking for animals’, it was drawing on accepted beliefs that kindness to animals was a marker of civilised society, transmitted through organisations such as the Boy Scouts: their 1908 manual Scouting for Boys enjoined its followers to be not only honourable, loyal, useful, friendly, courteous, and financially thrifty, but also kind to animals.³⁸ The article went on to suggest that if this liking was missing, or worse still animals showed an instinctive dislike for the boy, then his parents ‘should see the red light’.³⁹

However, whereas boys were variously described as ‘liking’ or ‘being fond’ of animals, women are characterised as ‘loving’ them.⁴⁰ Throughout the nineteenth century animals had been laden with gendered meaning, becoming sites onto which ideas about women’s natures, femininity and capabilities could be projected. Women were seen as having a particular empathy with animals, and being involved in their protection through philanthropic organisations such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals (RSPCA) was seen as suitable voluntary work for women.⁴¹ Yet women were also mocked for being over-emotional, sentimental and superstitious; prominent in the anti-vivisection campaigns of the nineteenth century, their opposition to this practice was often dismissed through suggestions that women were incapable of understanding the scientific rationale for vivisection.⁴² In this context Hobday’s claim that the unique advantage of a woman qualified in veterinary medicine was that she was motivated by a natural love of animals, which informed by her superior bedside manner with both patient and client, was bold. He tempered this by emphasising that, given the right scientific training, she was able to keep sentimentality in professional check.⁴³

This direct and positive attempt to recruit more women to veterinary medicine drew considerable opprobrium from a male veterinary elite who sat on the Council of the RCVS who were already grappling with the nature and status of the post-war veterinary profession. Broadly, the profession had emerged from the First World War in a confident state. Having dealt effectively with the health of animals in wartime, it was anticipating a greater role in public health, and in 1920 the National Veterinary Medical Association (NVMA) had been resurrected by the Principal of the Edinburgh (Dick) Veterinary School, Dr O Charnock Bradley, with the addition of its own journal, The Veterinary Record. It was, however, also facing serious challenges. The totemic animal and mainstay of the profession, the horse, had been gradually disappearing since the turn of the century, and with agriculture in depression during the late 1920s the livelihood of country practitioners was threatened.⁴⁴

This threat to the veterinary living was compounded by a shifting demographic of veterinary students. Whilst the profession had once been populated by experienced country boys, often the sons of farmers or veterinary surgeons who had experience of animals in health and sickness, it was now being overrun by what the Veterinary Record labelled the ‘unregenerate, pallid and studious sons of suburbia’.⁴⁵ This was causing anxiety amongst senior practitioners that the profession was attracting the wrong type of student, and particularly that young men from urban backgrounds would be unable to cultivate the ‘economic outlook’ so important to agricultural practice. This outlook emphasised that whilst decisions about animals with economic value should not be taken lightly, in particular destroying animals, neither should judgement for an individual animal be clouded by sentimentality. It rested on a tacit understanding between vet and farmer that even with a bad prognosis, the farmer would accept it with no ill feeling, which was particularly important in sustaining long-standing relationships between farmers and vets. This has been termed the ‘barnyard culture’ in the US context, and much of the fretting about the urban background of these students can be understood as an elegy for tacit knowledge of agricultural life, which had been the traditional way of bridging the gap between vet and farmer.⁴⁶

On this basis, with the reduced employment opportunities in general practice, but still wishing to drive up the standards of the profession, Charnock Bradley concluded that in terms of practitioners it ‘was not a matter of quantity; it is quality that is wanting’.⁴⁷ Encouraging women’s entry would do nothing to reverse this problem and could only serve to exacerbate the trend of unsuitable candidates. McFadyean in particular felt this came ‘perilously near to an attempt to lure women into the veterinary colleges under false pretences’; to claim that women, in competition with men, were anything other than labouring under the most serious disadvantages was, he concluded, to grossly exaggerate her prospects within the profession.⁴⁸

What became increasingly frustrating for the opponents of women vets was their inability to conceptualise a category of ‘women’s work’ in veterinary medicine. The Veterinary Record supported the suggestion that women vets could be usefully deployed in veterinary laboratory research, particularly in routine diagnosis and poultry pathology; women, they felt, were perfect for the ‘painstaking and tedious collection’ of data required by ‘eminent men research workers’ to exploit their original ideas.⁴⁹ Amongst the broader profession, research work was not seen as desirable, Hobday himself attributing the dearth of suitable (male) graduates in research to the ‘small salaries, slow promotion and no security’, and in this context it was suggested that qualified women were preferable to unqualified men in these research roles.⁵⁰ Other commentators suggested roles for women vets included veterinary administration as a means of supporting male vets in public service, as was working with veterinary literature by abstracting papers and collating technical information.⁵¹ These suggestions for women in veterinary medicine were firmly embedded in a more comfortable vision of ‘women’s work’ predicated on the belief that women’s ‘natural gifts’ meant they were more meticulous and conscientious with dull, repetitive tasks, and which were contemporaneously playing out in other scientific careers.⁵²

The reality, however, was that outlets other than general practice did not exist at this time. Although there was greater acceptance of these jobs in scientific laboratories and librarian roles as ‘women’s work’ in veterinary medicine, there were actually few jobs to fill. There were few veterinary institutes in the interwar period, and no interest, and no funding for research in fish and rabbits. Although interest in poultry research was increasing, this did not equate to an expansion in roles for qualified vets: in 1933, speaking at an event aimed at attracting women to the profession, qualified vet Beatrice Lock had to admit that there were no research jobs currently open to qualified women vets, although she felt research into the diseases of poultry might yet be a fertile field, as this was work ‘women could do well’.⁵³ The roles in which the RCVS Council did concede there were vacancies, such as colonial and public appointments, heads of Research Institutes ‘and the higher paid staff’, were not only closed to women at this time, but were deemed unsuitable for them.⁵⁴

The lack of lesser prestige, non-practitioner roles for women meant the elite had to confront head-on Hodbay’s most generous interpretation of the role of women: that female vets were not just suited to working as practitioners, but that they would excel as small animal vets. This was exceptionally problematic. The downturn in agricultural practice during the interwar period had led to a greater dependency on small animal work, and although mixed practices saw pets, this work attracted less prestige and fees and was frequently associated with a sentimentalism many in the profession found distasteful. With other sources of work falling away, they were nonetheless becoming increasingly reliant on small animal work as a source of income, to a degree few were comfortable admitting. It fell to Hobday, from his comfortable status as a highly successful small animal vet, to suggest that combined, small animal work in a mixed practice and exclusively small animal practices provided a living for about a third of the profession.⁵⁵

This livelihood was in turn being threatened by the activity of several animal charities, the most prominent of which—the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA)—were treating the pets of the poor for free using unqualified practitioners.⁵⁶ Provided these unqualified practitioners did not call themselves ‘veterinary surgeons’ they could continue to treat animals, and the protracted dispute between the profession and the animal charities was not fully resolved until the 1948 Veterinary Surgeon’s Act. With vets already competing for small animal work amongst themselves, as well as with unqualified practitioners during the interwar period, the idea of the introduction of even greater competition by attracting more women into the field proved exceptionally problematic, exposing the conflation of issues of sex and gender with money and professional advancement informed by the insecurity of the profession in a time of depression.

In Hobday’s most generous interpretation, women were not simply notional competition; they had a particular professional leverage in the field provided by their gendered attributes that guaranteed their success. Cloistered from the rough world of farm animal practice, she would be able to harness her natural love of animals and better attend to pets and their owners, whilst also maintaining the detached, unsentimental approach that characterised a good veterinarian. Given such a lack of suitable roles specifically for women, and with male competition in small animal work, the elite found this claim nonsensical. In part, this inability to acknowledge women might benefit small animal practice was largely because significant sections of the male profession had caught themselves in the contradictory position of defending their right to small animal work without attempting to increase the prestige of such work.

During this period of considerable change in the profession, particular criticism of Hobday drew on the established self-narratives of the profession that it was distasteful for any vet to enter the profession seeking monetary rewards. Opponents found the expression ‘fame and fortune’ particularly distasteful, jarring as it did with the profession’s self-perception of their role as a public duty, ‘the benefiting of others and advancement of knowledge’.⁵⁷ Feeling they lacked the prestige and remuneration enjoyed by men in human medicine, law and engineering, an editorial in the Veterinary Record instead made an appeal to the ‘joy and pleasure which the veterinary surgeon who loves his job’ experienced after a successful operation or treatment which could not be measured in monetary terms; this, surely, was unsurpassed in other professions.⁵⁸

Many vets clearly found this characterisation outdated. One veterinarian hoping that the days when a vet could be distinguished by his ‘obsequiousness and Cinderella-like attitude’ had passed for ever; ‘the bad old days’, he concluded ‘when the scientist worked in a garret and died a pauper’, had lost their prestige.⁵⁹ S.H. Gaiger, Fellow of the RCVS and Chief Investigator of the Animal Diseases Research Association, also concluded that it was the tendency for vets to be ‘retiring, unassuming, hard-working individuals’, satisfied with the good work they were carrying out without pressing legitimate claims to recognition, that had denied the veterinary profession its rightful place in the country.⁶⁰ The means by which veterinarians made their money, and how much they made, was clearly not just an issue concerning women but part of a broader debate about how the profession adapted to their changed circumstances. In specifically encouraging women into the profession through promises of wealth created by their own enterprise, however, Hobday managed to conflate in the minds of his opponents women’s entry to the profession and the attack on the traditional values of the profession.

Women as Small Business Owners

The remainder of this article considers the operation of this contested idea of the female veterinary surgeon as it moved beyond the confines of elite discourse, and began to impact on the careers of the interwar generation of women vets. The presumption that women would become small animal practitioners bought no concessions in the formal education women received at veterinary school: with the veterinary curriculum focused on producing ‘omnicompetent’ practitioners who could pass examinations and become a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (MRCVS), women were as nominally qualified as their male peers to work with both large and small animals.

Formal education, however, was only one component that influenced the career path of veterinarians. Equally important was the period of ‘seeing practice’. In its idealised form this period of work experience with a senior vet introduced students to the realities of veterinary practice, to see how vets handled animals as well as their owners and, in the unregulated period before the 1948 Veterinary Surgeons Act, allowed students to perform operations on animals. The quality of the experience depended on the temperament of the student’s host, but at its best it was an important period of networking.

It was at this stage that women had the first taste of problems to come. Women during this period reported finding it difficult to find farm practices to take them, with senior male vets and male farmers feeling uncomfortable having qualified women in positions of expertise and responsibility.⁶¹ With the majority of practices being mixed, with vets expected to deal with animals large and small, most were not prepared to take on a woman even if she could feasibly confine her work to small animals. With exclusively small animal practices being rare during this period, women found little opportunity to see practice before qualifying as a vet. They were therefore less able to create valuable networks, and without the benefit of networking and socialisation afforded by seeing practice, many women were at a severe disadvantage on graduation. This disadvantage was compounded by the interwar depression and the slim pickings to be found in the ‘positions vacant’ section of the Veterinary Record, where the image of the good veterinarian was clearly realised: here there were promises of a good salary, ‘good prospects’ or ‘permanency’ for a suitable ‘really first-class man’.⁶² Recent graduates were preferably single, but managers or more experienced vets were more likely to fit the criteria if they were married; in most cases, the implication was that practices were seeking male applicants.⁶³ Together with men being clearly preferred, advertisements carried in the Veterinary Record also routinely asked applicants to ‘give height’ and to send a photograph, focusing on their physical appearance and presentation.⁶⁴

It is clear that women seeking employment would have found little in these columns with which to identify. The requirements for self-presentation which emphasised the masculine physiology of the applicant appear to have daunted many women, and they sought alternative paths to private practice. The popularity of the Assistant House Surgeon post in the poor outpatients department of the RVC, for example, would suggest that a year’s salaried position within a familiar and supportive environment held a particular attraction for women graduates before they chanced their fortunes in private practice. In total, the RVC received nine applications for the post starting in September 1933, seven women, five of whom were graduates of that year, and two from the previous year. In the end, two posts were awarded, one to Stuart Paterson, the other to Madeleine Oyler, a student so exceptional that there had been talk within the student community she might be offered more attractive jobs.⁶⁵

Women unable to secure the House Surgeon position found few other safety nets. One such qualified vet was Connie Ford. Having graduated from the RVC in 1933, just shy of her twenty-first birthday, Connie’s jubilation at becoming MRCVS quickly turned to despondency. She had hoped to work with cattle, in the specialism of bovine sterility, but having found it difficult to secure ‘seeing practice’ she had neither personal contacts nor the accumulated experience to persuade employers that, despite her sex, she would be a competent assistant. Applications to advertised posts went unanswered, promising personal leads came to nought, and whilst some of them found work, the general consensus amongst her friends was that senior male vets were ‘all “afraid to have a woman!”’⁶⁶

After a visit from a graduate of the previous year, Kathleen Hermanen-Johnson, who was contemplating setting up her own practice in Sutton, Connie realised that putting up her own plates might be her only chance to practise.⁶⁷ Feeling it was ‘better to be in debt than to lose what skill I have through lack of practice’, in October she approached the Connolly Memorial Fund. A charitable organisation, the Fund normally granted training loans to women to become teachers, but was excited to have a vet on the books. It was overseen by Kate Barrett, Principal of the Horticultural College in Swanley, Kent, as well as a member of the Council of the Women’s Farm and Garden Association. At the same time as she was giving cautious support to Connie, she was extending an invitation to women students at the RVC, with the support of Hobday, to attend courses at the Horticultural College.⁶⁸ Given her enthusiasm for new careers for girls, it is unsurprising she felt ‘drawn’ to Connie’s scheme, and after a series of meetings and supportive letters, the Fund granted Connie a loan of £100, payable in instalments.⁶⁹

Connie was only one of a number of women taking advantage of the flexible model of small business ownership in veterinary medicine as a way of circumventing discrimination. As Anne Digby has shown for (human) medicine, since their entry in the 1870s, qualified women were able to bypass hostile employers by putting up their own plates in the ‘semi-detached professional sphere’ of general practice.⁷⁰ As women they were conscious they would have to be better and more professional than their male counterparts if they were to succeed, endure poor profits, and be restricted to certain types of work involving women and children, but it at least allowed them to practise.⁷¹ As early as 1923, a year after Aleen Cust officially qualified, ‘SCM’ in the Manchester Guardian was also advising women that due to prejudice against them ‘whenever possible it is wise to buy a practice. This will give woman prestige at once, and it only remains with her to maintain it with her own skill and energy.’⁷² The pattern of women putting up their plates without a period of assistantship had become so marked that by 1934 the Veterinary Record reported that women had ‘forged an alternative’ to the traditional employment path of general practice, that from assistant to partner. They were quick to report, albeit missing the reasons behind it, that women had ‘chanced their careers in private practice; few have sought the shelter of a salaried appointment’.⁷³

In setting up a practice, women had to develop a business outlook that few already possessed. Largely from a middle-class or upper middle-class background, they had little experience with financial matters and many, including Connie, still lived at home and had never held a bank account. She had been gently marshalled into securing the loan, but was clearly unsure how to proceed, initially suggesting the Connolly Fund hold the money and deal with financial transactions on her behalf. The idea was gently rebuffed by Kate Barrett, who instead arranged for an account to be set up in Connie’s name: ‘I think,’ she explained ‘a Bank with your own cheques will be far more suitable for a professional woman about to start a career’.⁷⁴

Although families of many women supported them by enabling them to set up practices in the front rooms of family houses, the costs of this enterprise could be extensive. A costing made by Connie for her application shows that the costs could be prohibitive—even during an era in which a basic surgery with rudimentary fittings and equipment were deemed sufficient to practise small animal medicine. In a period when domiciliary visits were the norm, Connie’s greatest expenditure was the purchase and taxing of a car (£20), the building of a garage, including widening the gate and railing off the drive (£14). Kitting out the surgery—redecorating the room in white enamel, putting up shelving, lockable drawers and rubber curtains—cost her near enough £15. She spent a total of £3/6 on drugs, £1/8/6 on instruments; the rest was spent on printing cards, notices in the press and a subscription to the Veterinary Record until Christmas.⁷⁵

Even with the buffer of financial assistance, Connie realised that she had been forced into the adoption of financial responsibility much earlier than if there had been an assistantship. Having been unable to secure enough work experience as a student, she blamed her lack of exposure to the business side of practice for her ‘gross inefficiency’ during her first few years of practice, particularly in book-keeping and organisation, which in turn had lowered her rate of profit.⁷⁶ Her gratitude in having a means to practise was always tempered by her disappointment in her profits: after seven years in practice her net income was still only £160, which she felt was little to show for her hard work.

In many ways Connie and other women who set up their own small animal practices in the interwar period were the realisation of Hobday’s idealised image of female veterinary surgeons. Yet what can their own voices tell us about women’s engagement with this ideal? The wealth and depth of the evidence we have for Connie reveals a particularly jarring dissonance between appearance and reality. In private she was candid about her dislike of dogs, and perhaps more tellingly, ‘still more so wealthy dog-owners’, and she expressed a complete lack of interest in canine practice, labelling it a clinical and scientific ‘cul-de-sac’.⁷⁷ This apparent disgruntlement was shared by other female vets: when the Central Veterinary Society held their first ‘Ladies’ Night’ at the RCVS in 1934, Kathleen Shedlock was similarly candid about the continuing stigma of being associated with animals of lesser prestige. She told the meeting that ‘when our secretary asked me to join Misses Lock and Jordan in a discussion this evening I was very proud to do so, but when I was told the subject chosen it sent me thinking and my pride fell. The first time women members have contributed to the evening they are asked to speak on “Cats”. Where is the professional tact?’⁷⁸ Reports of laughter in the room might suggest it was perhaps intended as a joke; the tenor of her contribution suggests not.

In reality the likes of Connie, Beatrice and Kathleen did not have the luxury—as did the majority of their male counterparts—of snubbing work or clientele they felt beneath them.⁷⁹ Unable to fall back on the traditional mixed economy of general practice, women had greater incentives for embracing a style of practice that emphasised caring and sensitive attendance on pets, and a manner of dealing with owners that emphasised consideration for their feelings. As early as 1928 Helena, the first woman to practise in the self-employed profession of the bar and vocal advocate for women in the professions, was suggesting that gender and the prospects for a business were directly connected. Writing in Good Housekeeping she suggested that, from a legal standpoint, a case of negligence against a veterinary surgeon, whilst very hard to prove and rarely successful, could ruin a practice; it could be ‘about the worst legal possibility our budding woman veterinary aspirant has to face’.⁸⁰ In a direct appeal to the readership of the magazine, Normanton urged pet owners not to precipitate this state of affairs by allowing their emotions to overcome common sense when faced with bad news. Yet she also counselled female vets to practise ‘sympathetic courtesy’, to inform owners of their pet’s progress and notify them of their deaths immediately; ‘this is a trait in human nature which the successful woman vet will have to had to allow for from the first moment of her professional life’.⁸¹

Some years later Kathleen Hermanen-Johnson reflected on the reality of practising ‘sympathetic courtesy’ to making a veterinary living. It is telling that she was the only woman speaker in a group bought together to discuss the ‘evolution of small animal practice’ in 1934, and whilst the men focused on the clinical and scientific aspects of such practice, Kathleen shared what ten years of practice had taught her about ‘the psychology of client management’.⁸² She suggested there was an experience familiar to all practitioners: that in the first few moments of meeting, the client’s confidence in a vet’s ability was either born or died. It was a vet’s duty, therefore, to give the right first impression. Equally, she counselled that should the client want them to take their pet into kennels for treatment, a vet must have the ability to ‘quickly assess the client’s emotional, financial, and social standing, and importantly their willingness to pay’. Borrowing the expression from Hobday, but the lessons from her own experience, she reiterated the importance to vets of getting the fee ‘while the tear was in the eye’.⁸³

This ability to leverage payment from clients was of particular concern for women in small animal practice, because they were operating at a fee level markedly below that of other exclusively small animal practitioners, such as Hobday in his exclusive West London practice. Beatrice Lock, a previous holder of the House Surgeon post at the RVC, recognised that one of her problems in ‘feline practice is an economic one. The majority of my cat patients have no economic value and great as their sentimental value is, it cannot overcome their owner’s financial limitations’.⁸⁴ This limited her opportunities for surgery, as well as the profit she could make from the practice.⁸⁵ This did not mean that she could afford to show lesser regard for her patients or clients, given they were her only source of income. Clinical competence was still key: clientele were unlikely to return to a practice in which treatment of their animals was sub-standard.⁸⁶ To a great extent, however, shared business practices with men were useful only to a point. Rather than those skills associated with the economic outlook of mixed practice, of more use in small animal practice were patience, courtesy and a recognition that pets had worth to their owners beyond the simply economic.

Despite the clear frustration she felt at her professional options, Kathleen Shedlock successfully ran her own business, with its expansion allowing her to take on an assistant, Rosemary Holman, who took over on Kathleen’s retirement.⁸⁷ Madeline Oyler, now Sheppard, had a similar experience. Having graduated in 1933 as one of the best students of her year, her hopes for a job in pathology were curtailed by the lack of research posts available to women. Later, when opportunities in research had opened up, she declined to pursue them having found ‘genuine fulfilment in the intricacies of small animal surgery’ and no longer wished to pursue a research career; she was quick to point out that her practice had also proved profitable.⁸⁸ There are also hints that even high-profile advocates of small animal practice, such as Joan Joshua, made her practice profitable partly by viewing it in dispassionate terms as a business. A graduate of 1938 she established a small animal practice in her mother’s front room in Finchley and practised there single-handedly. By 1942, she confided to Connie that in terms of her own practice she had ‘become more or less resigned to things as they are’.⁸⁹

In this way, women setting up their own small animal practices in the particular conditions of the interwar period were genuinely in the vanguard of a new way of practising veterinary medicine. The operation of sex and gender had a real influence on how they managed their businesses, and in negotiating the clinical and social demands of this emerging field they were giving form to ways to make exclusive small animal practice sustainable, and in some cases profitable. This holistic attitude to small animal practice remained important in sustaining the small but growing number of women graduates, who totalled 118 by 1939. With women setting up in partnerships, expanding and then taking on assistants, it created a new employment stream for women, which organisations such as the Society of Women Veterinary Surgeons built upon on their inception in 1941. Many women such as Kathleen Shedlock encouraged students to see practice with her, introducing them to the clinical side of the work, but also the attendant personal and social skills.⁹⁰ Seeing practice where small animals were the primary and not the secondary concern was an important development for students, both women and men, who followed this first generation of women graduates. In particular, women whose careers continued to be shaped by the ideal of the normative female vet well into the twentieth century, benefited from observing and absorbing the lessons of small animal practice which was emerging as a new business model in veterinary medicine.

Conclusion

Amplifying the business identities of female veterinary surgeons will never fully overcome the challenges of gathering historical evidence for a profession driven by opaque practices and decisions, but reframing women’s experience as defined to a greater degree by their business activities than their professional status does allow us to re-think the meaning of that evidence. Judged against the professional hierarchy devised by the male veterinary elite, women practising as veterinary surgeons in the interwar period were firmly on the bottom rung; largely confined to working with small animals whose owners were on the lower end of the income spectrum, they were categorised and marginalised.

Listening to women’s own voices opens up space to take their experience on their own terms. In moments of self-reflection, women’s preoccupation with the business enterprise is striking, and beyond their formal qualification it was the ability to create and sustain a veterinary business that defined the trajectory of women’s careers to a greater extent than their professional status moments. Even when women had secured ‘seeing practice’ or an assistantship in a mixed practice, the business practices of men—centred on ideas of mixed economy—were of limited use to women having to make their own way with a different patient and client base. Working on their own account, there was agency in the decisions they made about the nature and operation of their practices.

When considering the longer-term influence of this cohort of women, embedding business history into the history of veterinary medicine forces us to reconsider when change happened in the profession. In exclusively small animal practice, the embrace of ‘sympathetic courtesy’ amongst women was a necessary expedient given they were funnelled into a particular career path. More than this, in exercising it they were not simply carving out their own professional careers, but contributing to the development of a new model of veterinary business that found fuller expression in the 1950s. Recognising and locating women’s involvement in the development of this new model can therefore inform and expand our understanding of entrepreneurism to include incremental change, and to take into account the influence of sex and gender as a driver of change and innovation in the profession.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the members of the Roy Porter panel for the award of the prize, and their helpful comments on the original draft, as well as the reviewers for their careful reading and critique. I would also like to thank Prof. Abigail Woods for her supervision and support of the thesis from which this material is drawn, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial assistance.

Julie Hipperson is Research Associate at King’s College London, UK, on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project on the history of hospital infection control, 1870–1970. Her PhD, awarded in 2016, examined veterinary training and work in the century from 1919 from a female perspective, and she has previously published on Arbor Day in England, as well as walking on the nineteenth-century English estate.

Footnotes