Women: Professions

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Women: Professions

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female participation in professional fields was limited to areas related to the household and family, or those that emphasized nurturing skills. A woman might routinely step out of her traditional role and take over her husband's profession, trade, or shop while he was away on business because the family's livelihood depended on it. Other women worked in the medical profession; midwives such as Martha Ballard delivered babies, tended new mothers, and treated illness in both female and male patients. By the 1820s, though, most states enacted laws requiring practitioners to be graduates of medical schools, and this effectively limited the practice of medicine to men only.

Even as the medical profession contracted, the fields of education, writing, benevolence, and reform opened to women. Following American independence, the physician Benjamin Rush argued that mothers were the perfect people to teach republicanism, patriotism, and virtue to their sons while passing on domestic skills to daughters. This renewed emphasis on domesticity and the added emphasis on goodness enabled women to move into new types of work, related to their assigned roles as family educators and moral guardians. In 1792 Sara Pierce opened a female academy in Litchfield, Connecticut; over the next decades, Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, and Zilpah Grant also established schools in New York and New England for young women. By the 1830s, when a newly established public school system faced a teacher shortage, an army of educated young women filled the void. (The influx feminized the profession, and teachers' salaries were halved.)

Writing was another professional choice for some women. In the late eighteenth century, Mercy Otis Warren defied convention by writing plays; in 1805 she completed a three-volume history of the American Revolution. In this same period, Judith Sargent Murray published essays, plays, and poetry on women's education and equality, but she wrote under a male pseudonym to avoid criticism. By contrast, early-nineteenth-century authors Catharine Beecher, Lydia Maria Child, and Sarah Josepha Hale gained popularity, not by taking on a male persona or writing on typically male subjects, but by focusing on women's issues such as the domestic economy and child rearing. In fact, Child supported her husband, a struggling attorney, by writing. Hale was particularly influential as the editor of Ladies Magazine from 1827 to 1836 and Godey's Lady's Book from 1837 to 1877.

Benevolence and reform also offered a professional path related to what were seen as women's moral and domestic roles. Southern women were less likely to attend seminaries or become teachers than those in the North, but women in both regions were involved in benevolence. In 1812 women in Petersburg, Virginia, started a female orphan asylum; New York women organized a society to aid widows and children as early as 1797. After 1830 some Northern women adopted such causes as abolition, temperance, saving prostitutes, and woman suffrage. These experiences paved the way for women to become organizational managers and social workers, as well as teachers and writers, though professions such as medicine, law, and the ministry remained closed.

bibliography

Boylan, Anne M. The Origins of Women's Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Kerber, Linda K. "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787–1805." In The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial. Edited by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. New York: Knopf, 1974.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New York: Norton, 1976.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Diane Wenger

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation