When a European hears of the independent careers of American women, he is apt to imagine something which is unknown to him—a woman in the judicial wig or the minister’s robe; a woman doctor or university professor. Thus he represents to himself the self-supporting women, and he easily forgets that their number is vanishingly small beside the masses of those who earn their living with very much less preparation. The professional life of the American woman, her instinct to support herself, and so to make herself equal to the man in the social and economic worlds, cannot be understood merely from figures; for statistics would show a much larger percentage of women in other countries who earn their living, where the instinct for independence is very much less. The motive is the main point. One might say that the European woman works because the land is too poor to support the family by the labour of the man alone. The American woman works because she wants her own career. In travelling through Europe, one notices women toiling painfully in the fields; this is not necessary in America, unless among the negroes. Passing through New England, one sees a hammock in front of every farm-house, and often catches the sound of a piano; the wives and daughters have never thought of working in the fields. But women crowd into all occupations in the cities, in order to have an independent existence and to make themselves useful. They would rather work in a factory or teach than to stay on the farm and spend their time at house-work or embroidery.
As a matter of course, very many families are actually in need, and innumerable motives may lead a woman to the earning of a living. But if one compares the changes in the statistics of different employments, and looks into the psychology of the different kinds of occupation, one sees clearly that the spirit of self-determination is the decisive factor, and that women compete most strongly in the professions which involve some rational interest, and that they know where it pays to crowd the men out. There is no male profession, outside of the soldiery and the fire department, into which women have not felt themselves called. Between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans there are 45 female locomotive engineers, 31 elevator attendants, 167 masons, 5 pilots, 196 blacksmiths, 625 coal miners, 3 auctioneers, and 1,320 professional huntresses.
Apart from such curiosities, and looking at only the large groups, we shall discover the following professional activity of women: In 1900, when the last census was made, there were 23,754,000 men and 5,319,000 women at paid employment—that is, only 18 per cent. of the bread-winners were women. Of these, only 971,000 were engaged in agriculture as against 9,404,000 men, while in the so-called professions, the intellectual occupations, there were 430,000 women against 828,000 men. In domestic positions, there were 2,095,000 women against 3,485,000 men; in trade there were 503,000 against 4,263,000, and in manufactures 1,313,000 against 5.772.000. The total number of wage-earning women has steadily increased. In 1890 it amounted to only 17 per cent., and in 1880 to only 15 per cent. The proportions in different parts of the country are different, and not only according to the local forms of industry, but also to the different stages of civilization; the more advanced the civilization, the more the women go into intellectual employments. Among a hundred wage-earning women, for instance, in the North Atlantic States, there are only 1.9 per cent. engaged in agriculture, but 7.6 per cent. in intellectual occupations, 37.5 per cent. engaged in domestic service, 12.9 per cent. in trade, and 40.1 per cent. in manufactures. In the Southern Middle States, on the other hand, out of a hundred women only 7.2 per cent. are in manufactures, 2.6 per cent. in trade, and 4.4 per cent. in intellectual professions.
Of these occupations, the most interesting are the intellectual, domestic, and trading activities of women. The great majority in intellectual employments are teachers; the whole story of American culture is told by the fact that there are 327,000 women pedagogues—an increase of 80,000 in ten years—and only 111,000 male teachers. The number of physicians has increased from 4,557 in 1890 to 7,399 in 1900; but this is not ominous in comparison with their 124,000 male colleagues. There are 52,000 musicians and music teachers, 11,000 teachers in drawing, 5,984 authors—a figure which has doubled since 1890; and in the newspaper world the troup of women reporters and journalists has grown in ten years from 888 to 2,193. There are 8,000 women officials employed by the state, over I,000 architects produce feminine architecture, and 3,405 ministers preach the gospel.
Turning to domestic activity, we find of course the international corps of house-servants to include the greater part; they number 1.283.000, and the statistics do not say whether, perhaps, one or two of these who have a white skin were born in the country. This number was 1,216,000 in 1890, so that it has increased only 5.5 per cent.; while during the same time population has increased 20.7 per cent., and the increasing wealth has greatly raised the demand for service. Let us compare with this the increased number of trained nurses, whose occupation is an arduous but independent and in itself useful career. The number of trained nurses has increased from 41,000 to 108,000—that is, by 163 per cent. The figures for all such domestic employments as admit of social independence have also increased. The female restaurant keepers have increased from 86,000 to 147,000; the boarding-house proprietresses number 59,455, double the figure of ten years ago. The independent profession of washer-woman attracts 325,000, while there are only 124,000 independent domestic labourers as compared with 2,454,000 men in the same occupations. The increase in the figures for such free professions as are classed under trade and commerce is in part even more striking. The number of female insurance agents, which in 1890 was less than 5,000, is now more than 10,000; book-keepers have increased from 27,000 to 74,000; sales-women, from 58,000 to 149,000; typists and stenographers from 21,000 to 86,000—that is, fourfold—and there are now 22,000 telephone and telegraph operators. The number of shop-keepers at 34,000 has not increased much, and is relatively small beside the 756,000 men. There are only 261 women wholesale merchants against 42,000 men, 946 women commercial travellers against 91,000 men; the profession of lady banker has decreased shamefully from 510 to 293, although this is no ground for despairing of the future of American banking, since the number of bankers other than women has increased in the same time from 35,000 to 72,000.
Finally, let us look at industry and manufactures. The number of seamstresses has been the same for ten years with mathematical exactitude; that is, 146,000. Since the population has increased by one-fifth, it is clear that this form of work has been unpopular, doubtless because it involves personal abasement and exposure to the arbitrariness of customers, and is therefore unfavourable to self-assertion. At the same time the workers in woollen and cotton factories have increased from 92,000 to 120,000, in silk factories from 20,000 to 32,000, and in cigar factories from 27,000 to 43,000. There are 344,000 garment-workers, 86,000 milliners, 15,000 book-binders, 16,000 printers, 17,000 box-makers, and 39,000 in the shoe industry. The whole picture shows a body of women whose labour is hardly necessary to support the families of the nation, but who are firmly resolved to assert themselves in economic and intellectual competition, who press their way into all sorts of occupations, but avoid as far as possible anything which restricts their personal independence, and seek out any occupation which augments their personality and their consciousness of independence. If all women who were not born on American soil, or if so were born of coloured parentage, were omitted from these statistics, then the self-asserting quality of American women who earn their living would come out incomparably more clearly.
The bread-winning activity of women is, however, only a fraction of their activity outside of the home. If of the 39,000,000 men in the country, 23,754,000 have an occupation, and of the 37,000,000 women only 5,319,000 work for a living, it is clear that the great majority of grown-up women earn nothing. But nobody who knows American life would take these women who earn no wages from the list of those who exert a great influence outside of the family circle, and assert themselves in the social organization. Between the two broad oceans there is hardly any significant movement outside of trade and politics which is not aided by unpaid women, who work purely out of ideal motives. Vanity, ambition, self-importance, love of diversion, and social aspirations of all kinds, of course, play a part; but the actual labour which women perform in the interests of the church or school, of public welfare, social reform, music, art, popular education, care of the sick, beautification and sanitation of cities, every day and everywhere, represents incontestably a powerful inborn idealism.
Only one motive more, which is by no means unidealistic, dictates this purely practical devotion; it is the motive of helping on this very self-assertion of women. Work is done for the sake of work, but more or less in the consciousness that one is a woman and that whatever good one does, raises the position of the sex. Thus, in women’s clubs and organizations, through noisy agitation or quieter feminine influences, the American woman’s spirit of self-assertion impresses itself in a hundred thousand ways. Women are the majority in every public lecture and in every broadly benevolent undertaking; schools and churches, the care of the poor and the ill are enlivened by their zeal, and in this respect the East and the West feel quite alike. Certainly this influence beyond the home does not end with direct self-conscious labour; it goes on where there are no women presidents, secretaries, treasurers, and committee members, but wherever women go for enjoyment and relaxation. Women form a large majority in art exhibitions, concerts, theatres, and in church services; women decide the fate of every new novel; and everywhere women stand in the foreground, wide awake and self-assertive.
It is incredible to the European how very much the unselfish and high-minded women of America are able to accomplish, and how so many of them can combine a vast deal of practical work with living in the midst of bustling social affairs, and themselves entertaining perhaps in a brilliant way. Such a woman will go early in the morning to the committee meeting of her club, inspect a school or poor-house on the way, then help to draw up by-laws for a society, deliver an address, preside at some other meeting, and meet high officials in the interests of some public work. She expends her energy for every new movement, keeps in touch with every new tendency in art and literature, and is yet a pleasant and comfortable mother in her own home. This youthful freshness never succumbs to age. In Boston, the widow of the zoölogist Agassiz, although now eighty years of age, is still tirelessly active as honourary president of Radcliffe College; and Julia Ward Howe, the well-known poetess, in spite of her eighty-four years, presides at every meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, still with her quiet but fresh and delightful humour.
The leadership of women which is a problem to be discussed, as far as public life is concerned, is an absolute dogma which it would be sacrilege to call in question, so far as social and domestic life go. Just as Lincoln said that the American government is a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” so certainly American society is a government of the women, by the women, and for the women. The part which the wife plays determines so unconditionally the social status of every home, that even a man who has his own social ambitions can accomplish his end in no better way than by doing everything to further the plans and even the whims of his wife. And the luxury in which she is maintained is so entirely a symbol of social position that the man comes instinctively to believe that he is himself enjoying society when he worries and over-works in order to provide jewelry and funds for the elaborate entertainments of his wife