To have an occupation is almost as natural to the American girl of to-day as to her brother. For a woman to go into business used to be like climbing a mountain; now it is almost like going down a toboggan slide. When she leaves school she expects to work.
Sometimes she finishes her education in a public school and goes into a shop, factory, or mill. She may become one of the 75,000 milliners, the 100,000 saleswomen, the 120,000 cotton workers, the 275,000 laundresses, or the 340,000 dressmakers.
If she can stay longer in school, she may become one of the 320,000 school teachers. Or she may go to a college, which sternly closed its doors in the face of her grandmother, and carry off the prizes and the honors from the men. She can enter a university, come out B.A., M.A., or Ph.D., and join the thousand women who are already college professors.
IN THE LAST STRONGHOLDS OF MAN.
If she fancies law, medicine, or the church, her way is clear. All three professions number their women members by the thousand, though a generation ago the pioneers in each line were struggling against ridicule and opposition.
Painting and sculpture were once considered masculine accomplishments, but to-day 15,000 women have studios. The musicians are three times as numerous.
Even the more unusual occupations are well represented. There are 261 wholesale merchants, 1,271 officials in banks, 1,932 stock raisers, 378 butchers, and 193 blacksmiths. There are 200 women to mix cocktails or serve gin-fizzes behind the bar. If they sell after hours or to minors, there are 879 policemen and detectives to watch them.
The traveling public depends for its safety and its accidents principally upon men. But women already claim 2 motor-men, 13 conductors, 4 station-agents, 2 pilots, 1 lighthouse keeper, 127 engineers, and 153 boatmen among their number.
Almost every paper one picks up tells of women's successes in some line of work. A dozen women in Chicago, and probably three times as many in New York, are making ten thousand dollars a year or more, either as salaries or profits from business.
The property owned by actresses and singers must pay a handsome sum in taxes. It is said that Hetty Green, the shrewdest business woman in the world, can stand in City Hall Square, New York, and see five million dollars' worth of her own property; and every one knows she owes her millions to her own cleverness, not to either husband or father.