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• 1 2018-02-17T22:25:59+00:00 Women Attached and Men Adrift 14 plain 391 2018-08-28T16:50:26+00:00 “Mapping Mobility: Spatial and Class Change in the Gilded Age Wall Street Workforce” is one component of a project that combines thirty years of payroll data from Brown Brothers, a New York City investment bank, with demographic information drawn from online databases for the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Census to gain insight into the lives of the first generation of financial workers to include women in large numbers. The project depends on search algorithms that this researcher is unable to make direct contact with but which make the process of linking Census records feasible; it is particularly important that these algorithms enable the linking of women’s Census records, a methodology that has stymied researchers in the past and that some hope to put off confronting for the time being. This site provides demographic, salary, and geographic data for 115 of the 123 workers who worked at Brown Brothers in either 1900 or 1910, tracing not only those workers who were at the firm in both years but also finding both future employees in the 1900 Census and former employees in the 1910 Census in order to garner understanding of the lives of Wall Street workers before, during, and after their time at this one specific firm.
  
  
  
  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.