Women's Lives
These data help complicate the picture of women’s work in the early 1900s. The Census data show that the “marriage bar” trope—the idea that women only entered the workforce for a short time before marriage—fails to fit the experience of Brown Bros. employees. Of the ten women who were of working age in both 1900 and 1910, six were single and working in both years, one woman married but remained in the workforce, and one can only be found in 1900 and not in 1910. Meredith Waterbury, as noted earlier, had separated from her husband.
The implicit assumption about middle-class women’s migration to the cities was that many were “women adrift”—alone and lacking the scrutiny and moral correction that parents or husbands would provide. Yet these data suggest that many women were unacknowledged “breadwinners.” Waterbury has already been mentioned. Further examination of the family structures of female employees shows that many had relatives living with them who were not themselves breadwinners. They were not “women adrift” but rather “women attached.” The wages that Brown Bros. paid were far better than could be found in other kinds of clerical or retail work. Even the firm’s most junior woman employee in 1910, 22-year-old Ella Mathisen, received a starting salary of $16 per week at a time when saleswomen with almost twenty years experience might make only $13 a week. It may well be that the media focused disproportionate scrutiny on women with business careers as independent and selfishly ambitious, even though in fact most women clerical workers were the sole or main support of their families, in order to evade confronting the fact that women’s need to act as their family’s breadwinners was often a consequence of men’s choices, including family abandonment and the lack of provision for life insurance.
