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1. 1 2018-02-16T22:09:29+00:00 Atiba Pertilla 49e1cef3634460a9a4563de96681500e3121d311 Women's Lives 11 plain 2018-05-24T01:25:28+00:00 Atiba Pertilla 49e1cef3634460a9a4563de96681500e3121d311

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• 1 2018-02-16T22:09:29+00:00 Women's Lives 11 plain 2018-05-24T01:25:28+00:00 A closer examination of the data for those women who did move indicates strong family motives and the need to move considerable distances in order to fulfill family obligations. Three of the women moved either accompanied by or to join family members: Frances Kingsland, who had been a schoolteacher in western New York in 1900, moved to Harlem accompanied by her widowed mother; Helen Heydinger, who in 1900 was living independently in Boston and working as a stenographer there, was by 1910 working at Brown Bros. and sharing a home with her mother in downtown Brooklyn. Martha Maxwell French was an unmarried bookkeeper in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1900, but a decade later was married and living with her husband in Manhattan’s Hamilton Heights neighborhood. Meredith Waterbury had a child, separated from her husband, and entered the workforce between 1900 and 1910, but moved only a short distance within Harlem over the decade. Sarah Stowe—the only example in the data of a woman who left the workforce— married and left behind her business career; she became the wife of a Pennsylvania farmer in 1905 and received a parting gift of $250 from the firm.
  
  
  
  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.