The 50 Most Common Jobs Women Held 100 Years Ago
By
Ellen Dewitt, Stacker News
On 1/23/21 at 9:00 AM EST
The past century has been a remarkable one for women in the workplace. Today their presence is generally unquestioned and, at least before the pandemic, women outnumbered men. As of December 2020, women held 50.04 percent of the jobs in the United States, not counting farm workers and the self-employed, according to the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the 1920s, more than 8 million women, or 1 in 5, were earning salaries, typically as clerks, waitresses, teachers, and telephone operators, laboring amid attitudes that women should not work outside the home if their husbands were employed and that working women were taking jobs away from men who needed them more. Plenty of high-paying, powerful jobs were kept out of women's reach, and women often were expected to quit their paying jobs if they got married.