“You speak of a new woman farmer, a new woman this, and a new woman that. . . . There are no new women, but there are new men; for they are beginning to recognize the worth of women, and to acknowledge it. Women are the same as they always have been, only the sudden opening of the world’s eyes to their power has given them courage to strike out and conquer new fields.

Occupations for Women starts out predictably enough on domestic themes; the very first case study is a young woman with a marketable talent for making what were then called “Saratoga chips”. But it is not long before we get to Women in Medicine and Women in Politics, Woman in the Pulpit and Women in Banking. There’s even a chapter on “Chances for Colored Girls”. Laundry, agricultural labor and domestic service, right? Wrong: Meet Tennessee’s Lutie Lytle, soon to become America’s first female law professor.

The Author(s)

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839–1898) was educated at Northwestern Female College—no relation to Northwestern University—graduating in 1859. And then, just to confuse everyone: in 1871 she became president of Evanston College for Ladies, which later merged with Northwestern (the well-known one). From 1874 she became involved in the temperance movement, founding the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, lovingly discussed in Chapter XXVIII.

If wikipedia can be believed, “FEW Spirits, a distillery located in Evanston, Illinois, uses Willard’s initials as its name.” Snicker.

Parts of Occupations for Women are adapted from the author’s 1887 work How to Win: A Book for Girls, which went through several editions over the years.

The book also incorporates nine articles from the ten-article series “A Girl’s Talk to Girls” by Sarah L. Joy. (The second-to-last article, subtitled “Flirtation”, didn’t make the cut.) They were originally published in Volumes XLI and XLII of the Universalist publication The Ladies’ Repository, spanning the dates March-November 1869. The “girl” in the title is accurate, since the author was no older than 22 when the series came out.

In 1874 Sarah L. Joy married Henry Keith White, yielding her later byline “Sallie Joy White” (1847–1909). Under this name she is listed as a co-author of Occupations.

The third named co-author is Helen Winslow (1851–1938), whom we have met elsewhere on this site as the author of Concerning Cats and Spinster Farm. Her name isn’t associated with any specific chapter, but it seems safe to guess that she had something to do with Chapter XVII, “Caring for Pets”.

Frances Willard is modestly not pictured. But Chapter XLV, “Newspaper Women”, includes photographs of both Sallie Joy White and Helen Winslow.

Illustrations

Occupations for Women features at least four types of illustration, beginning with the “portraits of prominent women” advertised on the title page. (I didn’t count, but 75 seems about right.) As usual for the time, the photographers aren’t named.

Interspersed with the photographs are a handful of original drawings. A few carry the date “1897”, so we know they must have been done for the book. Rather embarrassingly, all appear to be by men. Those with legible signatures include:

• Albert Hencke (1865–1936), painter and illustrator, provided “The Trained Nurse” and “We will sing every song in the book”.
• G. Kirk (I couldn’t make out his first name, and there’s no G— Kirk in Mantle Fielding), whoever he was, drew “An Errand of Mercy”.
• New York-born Charles Edward Mente (1857–1933) did “Physical Culture”.
• S. Nicolet—again, unidentified—did “Up and doing in the early morning”.
• Frederick Pegram (1870–1937) can be found elsewhere on this site as illustrator of Jerome K. Jerome’s Tea-Table Talk. In the present book he provided “A Pleasant Home”.
• French-born Victor Semon Perard (1870–1957) eventually moved to the US, where he taught at Cooper Union. His early works include alarming titles like Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (1890). He is unusually well represented in the present book: “Caring for Pets”, “Homelike Appearance inside the Observatory”, “Women Operating Typesetting Machines”, and “Woman Veterinary Hospital Ward” all have his signature.
• Elmer Joseph Read (b. 1862), painter and illustrator, contributed “Guides, Shoppers and Chaperons”. Mantle Fielding (1926) tells us that “During the winter he paints in the West Indies”. This may explain why his year of death is unknown.
• And then there’s . . .
• An artist whose signature I couldn’t decipher gave us “A Fine Needlewoman”.

And that’s not all. Every chapter has a decorative headpiece and—space permitting—tailpiece. Some are pictorial; others are more abstract designs. Quite a few of them are used inter­changeably, so one chapter’s headpiece will reappear as another chapter’s tailpiece.

Finally, each chapter has a decorative drop capital, again ranging from simple designs to tiny pictures. The headpieces, tailpieces and capitals aren’t specific to the text, but seem to have been pulled from a bin at random.

Words and Names

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) is especially remembered for refusing to take her husband’s name when she married. (Her daughter, Alice Blackwell, did get her father’s surname.)

“Jennie June” is Jane Cunningham Croly (1829–1901), American’s first syndicated columnist. Born in the UK, she came to the US with her family in 1841.

“Dr. Zakrewska”, sometimes abbreviated “Dr. Zak”, is correctly Marie Elizabeth Zakrzewska (1829–1902). She was trained as a midwife in Germany, years before German medical schools admitted women, and eventually got a medical degree in the US. Thanks to the quality of German medical education as compared to that in the English-speaking world, it is safe to say her real education was in that school of midwifery.

At a few points, the author mentions Harper’s Bazaar. This doesn’t look like a mistake to modern eyes. But at the time Occupations for Women was published, and continuing until somewhere in the 1920s, the magazine spelled its name “Bazar” with single “a”.

For those who have forgotten: A “typewriter” is a person who operates a typewriting machine. The book doesn’t mention calculators and computers, though it certainly could have done so.

The author consistently says “employe” rather than employé (masculine) and employée (feminine), and similarly “protege” without accent. To make up for it, she always says “résumé” with plentiful accents. She seems undecided whether the word is “musn’t” or “mustn’t”. The words “co-educational” and “business-like” show up both with and without hyphen; I have left them as I found them.

Formalities

This ebook is based on the 1897 Success Company edition.

Page numbers in [brackets] indicate full-page illustrations that have been moved to the nearest paragraph break. Typographical errors are marked with mouse-hover popups and are listed again at the end of each chapter. The word “invisible” means that the letter or punctuation mark is missing, but there is an appropriately sized blank space.