What work did women do in the 1800s?
Virginia Penny (1826-1913) was an author, social reformer, and a pioneer in the study of women’s labor markets. She also was an early woman’s rights activist and a labor unionist.
To write her book The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Women’s Work (1863) Virginia Penny interviewed hundreds of women across the country. In the book she listed five hundred possible occupations for women, railed against the artificial barriers that prevented women from entering certain fields of work, and critiqued the wage differential between men and women. Among the many occupations being done by women in the 1860s according to Penny, included astronomers, bankers, brokers, preachers, cameo cutters, designers, seed envelope stuffers, oyster picklers, junk dealers, and firearm makers among many others.
Her work is considered one of the first American sociological studies.
When lawyers scrabbled away her inheritance, she founded the People’s Protection Society Against Lawyers in Louisville, Kentucky. Then she moved to New York City, where for many years she ran an employment agency. Despite her work on behalf of woman, the last years of her life were spent destitute, living in a Brooklyn tenement.
Excerpt from The Employments of Women
“Of those who speak so bitterly of women engaging in some pursuits now conducted by men, we would inquire, What would you have destitute single women and widows do, by which to ear their bread! You surely would not have women steal, that cannot obtain employment. What then can they do? Why may they not have free access to callings that would insure them a support? Those that oppose them, generally do so from selfish motives. Many men would banish women from the editor’s and author’s table, from the store, the manufactory, the workshop, the telegraph office, the printing case, and every other place, except the school room, sewing table, and kitchen. The false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must change ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage. Yet I would love to see thrown open to women the door of every trade and profession in which they are capable of working. (The Employments of Women, pp. vi-vii)
More on nineteenth century women’s employment
Women and Work in the Nineteenth Century
More on Virginia Penny
Penny, Virginia (1869). Think and Act: A Series of Articles Pertaining to Men and Women, Work and Wages. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, & Haffelfinger.
Virginia Penny, Economist and Suffragist