page_74 < previous page page_74 next page > Page 74 occupational disease research. She herself opened the door to a more exclusive, expert-dependent knowledgeone with which she would never feel entirely at home. 18 BETWEEN SCIENTIFIC PROFESSION AND SOCIAL PURPOSE When she accepted a position as head of an Illinois commission to study occupational disease and embarked on full-time research in this area, Alice Hamilton was already forty-one years old. It was a risky move: she virtually abandoned a career in bacteriological laboratory research, to which she had devoted well over a decade, for a kind of research whose status and future remained highly uncertain. Her plunge into occupational disease researchwhich soon became more decisive and irreversible than that of Edsall, Winslow, Andrews, or Osgoodhad roots in a much deeper ambivalence about her prior career path. Gender figured heavily in this difference: whereas men fastened on the subject to pursue projects defined largely by their respective professional worlds, Hamilton came to it through the conflict she perceived between her professional role and the extraprofessional one she played in the predominantly female world of Hull-House. She had more incentive to stake her career on a topic that she knew her male medical colleagues shunned as "tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor."19 Hamilton had cultivated an interest in occupational disease for at least two years before her appointment to the Illinois investigation. Her embrace of the subject was only her final and most successful attempt to transport her medico-scientific knowledge and skills beyond what she experienced as an all-too-private and esoteric professional life. As Barbara Sicherman has shown, Hamilton's dual commitment to Hull-House-style public service and to the scientific profession that initially became her career reflected her ongoing struggle with the challenge that her life posed to "the classic polarities separating men's and women's spheres" in the late nineteenth century.20 Among those who made up the first full generation of female college graduates, the ones who went on into predominantly male professions such as Hamilton experienced considerable difficulties reconciling their careers with continuing expectations about women's service-oriented role. Long deprived of direct influence in the political arena, not yet even able to vote, middle-and upper-class women fashioned novel ways of taking part in public affairs such as the "settlements" in impoverished urban areas like Chicago's Hull-House.21 Hamilton's experience at Hull-House familiarized  < previous page page_74 next page > If you like this book, buy it!