ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on some of the main employment sectors for women and, specifically, those that came under public scrutiny during the period 1870 to 1914. Laundry work, domestic service and manufacturing still continued to be important employers of working-class women, although agricultural work and pit brow work was in decline. Changing aspects of these sectors will be examined later in this chapter. New opportunities were appearing for the better educated working-class and lower middle-class young women with shop work and clerical work increasingly needing vast numbers of low-paid, low-status assistants and clerks to carry out the tasks of an increasingly consumerist and administratively based economy. Professions, too, were beginning to open up and nursing joined teaching as a respectable occupation which employed women in large numbers.
