Women Attached and Men Adrift
This essay, focused on "Women Attached and Men Adrift," addresses two interesting patterns found in the data: first, almost all the women found were in the workforce in both 1900 and 1910; second, the data bring to the surface several women who began their working lives in one place and then moved a considerable distance to continue working somewhere else. Typically, these women were not starting new careers on their own, but rather traveled with or to other family members. The findings from this small-scale study matter on two levels: first, on the level of historiography, the experiences that are revealed suggest how we might broaden our understanding of women’s clerical labor in this era beyond the common tropes of short-lived careers cut short by the “marriage bar” and the image of the “woman adrift”; simultaneously, on the methodological level, the results illustrate the dangers Lara Putnam warns against in her recent American Historical Review article on the limitations (notwithstanding the delights) of practicing “text searchable” history. In short, what we decide we can search for will determine what histories we write.