By: networking

networking — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:31:50 +0000

In the early 19th century, the jobs most readily available to women were domestic work and factory work. However, during the first half of the ninenteenth century, teaching became a respectable job for middle-class women. During the second half of the 19th century, women began to make breakthroughs into other kinds of work. In 1850, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to qualify as a physician in the USA (though there had apparently been women doctors in America in the 17th century). The number of women doctors grew during the late 19th and early 20th century, in 1910 there were more women practicing medicine than there would be again until the 1980s. Nursing became a respectable job for women in the mid-nineteenth century.

During the Civil War, many women in both the north and the south filled clerical jobs that men had left in order to go to war. After the war, women continued to be employed in offices. The introduction of the typewriter in the 1880s led to more office jobs for women, since women’s hands were considered to be better suited to typing than men’s, being smaller and more nimble. By 1880, 40 percent of the stenographrs and typists were women, and by 1900, it was three-quarters. The federal beauracracy found more jobs for women as it grew, by 1900 women occupied a third of all government jobs. The infant telephone industry decided that women were natural switchboard operators as soon as it discovered that men tended to talk back to the customers. Women also made inroads into library work.

Thanks in large part to the new department stores, 142,000 female sales clerks were hired before the end of the century. Department store saleswomen worked long hours and were sometimes required to go on unpaid leave during slow seasons. The work was hard but not necessarily grim. an in-house newspaper written by the workers at the Seigel-Cooper department store was crammed with stories about who was dating whom and comments on other workers’ hairstyles and clothing, dancing ability, and general popularity. The men in the mail-order department accused the members of the Bachelor girls social club of being “man haters” a charge the Bachelor Girls denied. “No, we are not married, neither are we man haters, but we believe in woman’s rights, and we enjoy our independence and freedom notwithstanding the fact that if a fair offer came our way we might…..consider it.”

Some women worked as journalists, like the famous Nellie Bly, who in the 1890 took up the challenge to travel around the world in 80 days, like Jules Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg. She made it in 78 days.