The period around the year 1900 has always interested me, perhaps because it was around this time that my grandparents emigrated from Europe to the United States. But historical information from this era really caught my attention when the 1900 census data first became publicly accessible. As these data were being entered into computer files, my eye was drawn to the case of a husband and wife in California who both worked as raisin pickers. I found this situation odd, since one could not possibly pick raisins—you pick grapes, which are dried to make raisins. But after I understood...

It is popularly believed that during the twentieth century there was a dramatic increase in women’s paid labor force participation. Published census data appear to support this assumption by indicating that 20 percent of all U.S. women were gainfully employed in 1900 and that 63 percent participated in the labor force during 1996 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1997). Nonetheless, scholars have concluded that this quantitative increase was not as large as it appears to be because of two data problems. First, the technical definition of employment has changed over time, becoming more inclusive of women’s labor since 1940, which means...

The early twentieth century was a time of rapid industrialization that began with the mixed commercial-, early manufacturing-, and agriculture-based economy of the 1880s and culminated in the swift technological development of industry associated with World War I. What factors impelled women’s entry into gainful employment during this era of change? There is no doubt that women’s opportunities were in flux, with some occupational sectors opening to them and others closing.

Throughout this forty-year period (1880 to 1920), women’s major forms of employment were in the domestic and personal service industry. Gradually, native-born white women were able to leave private...

The many forms of women’s uncounted, and often unpaid, work in the informal economy were explored in Chapter 2, while Chapter 3 examined factors that shaped women’s entry into paid work in the formal economy. This chapter describes the occupations women held in 1900 and, more important, considers the implications of the work they did. The range and variation in occupations among women from different racial-ethnic groups reflect the nature and breadth of their economic opportunities, while the jobs most women held in common reveal the restrictions of their occupational segregation.

Overall, women’s work options were much more limited than...

In 1900, a full third of all employed women in the United States were doing domestic work. Immigrant women, especially from Ireland, Germany, or Scandinavia, dominated domestic work in northeastern and midwestern cities, and black women predominated in the South, but large numbers of third-generation native-born white women were still employed as servants in rural areas. This chapter focuses on the lives of women who were employed as live-in servants.

The census data for 1900 tell us little about the birth families of such women, and so many of the reasons why they entered domestic employment cannot be fully determined....

Different terminology is used now than at the end of the nineteenth century for describing women who head households or are single mothers. The earlier discourse spoke of deserving widows, deserted wives, and “fallen” mothers of illegitimate children; now we debate policy proposals affecting single-parent families, teenage mothers, and welfare mothers. The vocabulary we use has shifted for multiple reasons, including the dynamics of the social welfare profession, the social visibility of various racial-ethnic groups, and actual changes in family and household composition.

According to Gordon (1994), Brush (1997), Kunzel (1994), Mink (1995), and others, urban reformers in the North...

Two types of geographic disparity in labor market opportunities—those according to region and by population density—have caught the attention of researchers and workers alike. Geographic differences in employment rates are not so much due to physical terrain as they are to the economic, social, and demographic features of a specific area. In this way, place of residence sets a context that expands or limits a person’s work possibilities—a fact of life that was as true at the beginning of the twentieth century as it is today.

Labor market disparities among regions occur because places tend to experience...

Contemporary discussions about globalization of the economy or global interdependency often start with “as the United States becomes more diverse….” This recent discourse too handily dismisses old realities, including the fact that diversity has always been an integral part of U.S. society. We could easily call the time around 1900 a period of diversity as well, although the old images of assimilation and the mythical melting pot have a strong hold on the public imagination. Immigration was as serious a public issue a century ago, with 14 percent of the population foreign born, as it is now, with about 9...