By the end of the Gilded Age, more than five million American women worked outside the home, a number that had tripled since 1870, yet the range of jobs open to them remained narrow.
Working-class and immigrant women most often found employment in textile and garment factories, where hours were long and wages low. Domestic service remained one of the most common jobs for women, particularly for immigrants and Black women, who were frequently restricted to servant or agricultural work, regardless of their skills or education.
Middle-class single women had somewhat more variety, taking jobs as teachers, nurses, store clerks, and secretaries as new technologies like the typewriter and telephone created clerical positions that had not existed before. Even within these more respectable fields, women were paid less than men for the same work, a gap justified at the time by the assumption that men, not women, were meant to support a household.
A smaller number of women managed to build professional careers in fields typically reserved for men, including fine art. Painting was one of the few creative professions where a woman could earn real recognition, and figures like Cecilia Beaux achieved genuine success as portraitists, earning a reputation that placed them among respected contemporaries like John Singer Sargent.
Most working women, however, whether in a factory or a painter's studio, still encountered some version of the same rule: opportunity existed, but always within limits set by others.
