“Woman’s opportunities for work have increased. The number of single women who support themselves, and of married women who help their husbands in supporting their families, is much larger than before the war, and this class of women is more respected than in ante-bellum times. The number of vocations open to women is of course much larger than before the war, but the value in money of woman’s work is shamefully depreciated. No matter what work a woman does, men will not pay her its full value, not half what they would pay a man for the very same work. There is proof of this unjust discrimination in almost every female college in the South where men and women are employed to do the same or equal work as teachers, not to speak of other callings where they are performing exactly the same work for very unequal wages.”
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“The growing respectability of self-support in woman is everywhere recognized as one of the healthiest signs of the times. The number of vocations open to women is constantly on the increase. Some modes of self-support are, and always will be, socially more respectable than others. In the report for 1888 of the Commissioner of Labor concerning the number and condition of working-women in the large cities is the following concerning Charleston, South Carolina:
[In no other Southern city has the exclusion of women from business been so rigid and the tradition that respectability is forfeited by manual labor so influential and powerful. Proud and well-born women have practised great self-denial at ill-paid conventional pursuits in preference to independence in untrodden paths. The embargo against self-support, however, has to some extent been lifted, and were there a larger number of remunerative occupations open to women, the rush to avail of them would show how ineffectual the old traditions have become.]”
Girl & Cat Productions 