Only a little over a quarter of a century ago women were allowed to enter very few remunerative occupations. In 1840, when Harriet Martineau visited this country to study its institutions, that she might be able to forecast the type of civilization to be evolved from them, she especially investigated the position of women in the young republic. She was surprised to find the occupying a very subordinate position in a country calling itself free, and to find they had entered only seven paying occupations. They were allowed to teach, to be seamstresses, which included tailoring, dress-making, and millinery; they could keep boarding-houses, enter domestic service, become operatives in factories, compositors in printing offices, and folders and stitchers in book binderies.
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About Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was a 19th-century English writer and sociologist. Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist. She wrote from a sociological, holistic, religious and feminine angle, translated works by Auguste Comte, and, rare for a woman writer at the time, earned enough to support herself. Read more on Wikipedia →