Women Flower Sellers - 19C US Womens Work

 

Flowers are the mementoes of an earthly paradise. They are said to be “the alphabet of angels, whereby they write mysterious things”- the mysteries of God's love & goodness. Earth would be a wilderness without them. 

Girls sell flowers most profitably at opera houses, theatres, & other places of amusement. They buy of those who devote themselves to the raising of flowers, & arrange them into bouquets. A number dispose of flowers on Broadway; &, summer before last, I observed a French woman at the Atlantic ferry selling bouquets to people waiting for the boat. 

A florist told me he disposes of flowers to girls who make up bouquets & sell them. One of them pays $500 rent for her room. It yields a handsome profit when a person has a good stand. He would like a stand at the opera house, but a great many others are looking forward to it. Some pay for the privilege, .others obtain it by being known to the managers. 

I was told by a man who supplies bouquets that he pays to florists from $8 to $10 a day for flowers, & then makes up his own bouquets. I have been told that at some hotels in Germany, girls pass around the table at dinner, & give bouquets. Such recipients as feel disposed, pay a small sum. 

The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia
Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863 

To read about women's changing roles in the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.

Amanuensis - 19C US Womens Work

 In 1863. Virginia Panny wrote that stenographers are employed to write from dictation, generally by authors. Prescott, who was nearly blind for several years, employed one or more. Editors whose papers have an extensive circulation, sometimes require the services of an amanuensis. 

Female secretaries, or writers out of books, were not unusual in Rome. "Origen," says Eusebius, "had not only young men, but young women to transcribe his works, which they did with peculiar neatness." 

Some persons in London (whose employment, perhaps, scarcely brings them under this title, yet we know not where else to place them) make it a business to write letters for beggars, for which they are paid a small sum by each applicant. 

Stenographers or office workers are usually employed by the week, month, or year. Some education is of course necessary, and will doubtless influence their pay. Experience increases their value still more; and those who have to exercise their brains, are of course best paid. 

I have been told by competent authority, that amanuenses are usually paid according to agreement; that authors of distinction can afford to pay a good price, and that the most common salary is $600.

See The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863

Stenographers - 19C US Womens Work

In 1885, a young, single, white, native-born woman named Isabel Wallace did something that was still considered quite unusual in its time; she took a job as a clerical worker in Chicago.  Isabel, who lived with her mother and apparently needed to help supplement the small family's income, took a temporary position as a copyist in an office in Chicago, where her uncle already worked. (Copyists copied letters & other important documents into large ledger books in the era before typewriters, carbon paper, & photocopying.) 

Even though Isabel was grateful for the job, she expressed some anxiety writing to her mother. "The desks are comfortable, the chairs, etc. light, good, and the room well heated," & "there seemed a pleasant set of ladies," but, "I felt like somebody else all day. Out of my element and sphere somehow. It made me feel less womanly and somehow as if I was doing something I didn't approve of. I suppose it's because it's in the Court House and in an office."

Throughout much of the19C the image of a clerk was a man. But, by the end of the 19C century in large cities like Chicago this association began to change & young women like Isabel Wallace were in part responsible. When Isabel Wallace penned these lines to her mother, she probably did not realize that she was a pioneer & that her painful & tentative steps into the office would help not only to change office work into woman's work, but also initiate a transformation of urban spaces in cities like Chicago, making the city more accommodating to women's daily presence. Young women like Isabel Wallace helped to open up an array of office jobs to women workers, & woman's work in the city, for better or for worse, would never be the same.

In Isabel's day, office work was very different than we think of it today, especially because it was still primarily a man's job. Before the widespread use of the typewriter (during the 1890s) & its association with stenography, most office workers were copyists, file clerks, & bookkeepers. In 1880 in Chicago, almost 90 percent of the 1,120 office workers listed in the census were male. The huge increase in the number of Cgicago office workers between 1880 & 1890 (from 1,120 to 41, 015), due to the creation of the position stenographer/typist, doubled women's percentage of the office work labor force to 21 percent. And this started an unstoppable trend. By 1920, the number of office workers in the city approached 200,000, with women comprising half of the labor force.

See The Office Northern Illinois University 

In 1863. Virginia Panny wrote that stenographers are employed to write from dictation, generally by authors. Prescott, who was nearly blind for several years, employed one or more. Editors whose papers have an extensive circulation, sometimes require the services of an amanuensis. 

Female secretaries, or writers out of books, were not unusual in Rome. "Origen," says Eusebius, "had not only young men, but young women to transcribe his works, which they did with peculiar neatness." 

Some persons in London (whose employment, perhaps, scarcely brings them under this title, yet we know not where else to place them) make it a business to write letters for beggars, for which they are paid a small sum by each applicant. 

Stenographers or office workers are usually employed by the week, month, or year. Some education is of course necessary, and will doubtless influence their pay. Experience increases their value still more; and those who have to exercise their brains, are of course best paid. 

I have been told by competent authority, that amanuenses are usually paid according to agreement; that authors of distinction can afford to pay a good price, and that the most common salary is $600.

See The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863