Women at Work During the colonial era into the 19th century, the primary accepted ideal for non-enslaved women was that of the virtuous housewife and helpmeet, and women''s work was generally confined to the domestic sphere of home and assistance with family farm or plantation. Midwives were an exception: Women gave birth at home; there were no hospitals or trained nurses; and few doctors were available, especially in rural areas, to attend to women in childbirth. Midwifery was an indispensible and respected profession, as well as a potentially lucrative one for a practitioner. As towns and cities were founded, expanded, and prospered, women in non-farming families often worked alongside their spouses in shops, inns, taverns, and in printmaking and publishing. Widows in colonial cities were sometimes able to earn a decent living by working as craftswomen, shop owners, and administrators of their late husbands'' businesses until a son became of age to take over. Women also managed inns, boarding houses, and even prisons. However, in an era when wages were generally low, many women who lived in cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston and worked either to supplement a household income or by necessity after the death of a parent or the death or desertion of a spouse frequently faced limited employment opportunities, which left them on the edge of economic sustainability and often in poverty. Untrained and unskilled in the trades that were open to men, women worked as laundresses, cooks, seamstresses, wet-nurses, and domestic servants for half the wages of unskilled male laborers.

By the early 1800s, women were also working for wages as schoolteachers. Teaching was considered to be the most respectable profession for unmarried women, who often began work when they were in their teens. During the 1800s, domestic work was a primary source of employment for free or newly freed African-American women and unmarried Irish women immigrants. Irish women began to arrive in East Coast cities during the first half of the 19th century and would eventually comprise fifty-three percent of Irish immigrants by the end of the century. More than sixty percent of Irish women worked as maids, cooks, nannies, or housekeepers, They came to the United States to leave behind their hardscrabble lives on Irish farms and to find the employment opportunities and marriage prospects which had greatly diminished during the Great Famine of 1840-1849 that devastated Ireland. Because newly arrived Irish women had few means and little knowledge of the country, they tended to stay in the cities where they landed rather than venture elsewhere for work. The advantages of working for wealthy and middle-class families included faster assimilation into American culture and wages that were higher than those of factory workers. Once Irish-Americans assimilated and became more economically successful, fewer women of Irish descent worked as domestics.

During the 20th century, African-American women and Latinx women immigrants comprised the majority of domestic workers in the United States. The Mill Girls: The First Women Factory Workers When an industrial economy started to emerge during the Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain in the 1770s and spread to the United States during the 1790s and early-mid 1800s, the textile industry was the first to be affected. Eli Whitney''s mechanical cotton gin, invented in 1793 and patented in 1794, revolutionized the cotton industry, greatly enhanced the South''s economy, and created a ready-made clothing industry; however, the cotton gin also increased the demand for slaves, who were needed to operate the machine. Home-based clothing manufacture became a common trade for women and, like teaching, was considered a respectable female wage-earning occupation, since spinning cloth and making clothes for their families was one of women''s traditional domestic tasks. One center of clothing manufacture was Troy, New York, where hundreds of women sewed collars and cuffs at home for the city''s clothing manufacturers. The home-based manufacture of "piece work" would become an integral part of the clothing industry in the mid-1800s and especially in the latter part of the 19th century into the 20th, when a large influx of immigrants from Europe arrived in New York City. There, they lived and worked in their tenement apartments, as well as in factory sweatshops. In 1793, English industrialist Samuel Slater (1768-1835), who had brought his expertise in operating looms and the spinning jenny to America from Great Britain, opened the country''s first factory: a water-powered textile mill on the Blackstone River in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Slater, who would go on to open mills in Massachusetts, first employed children aged seven to twelve to operate mill machinery and then hired whole families to work in his mill, developing company-owned villages to house his workers. Hours were long and wages were low, but the factory practices Slater called the "Rhode Island System" and was later known as the "Waltham-Lowell System," or simply the "Lowell System," became firmly established in American industry during the Industrial Revolution and later on in the century, during the development of such industries as mining. The success of Samuel Slater''s mills and the increasing demand for manufactured cloth drew the attention of Massachusetts businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775-1817), who formed the Boston Manufacturing Company with investors in 1813. The following year, the company built a textile mill in Waltham that featured the first power loom, based on the British model, which offered a significant technological improvement in the making of cloth. Lowell integrated the chain of tasks under single roof, beginning what would become the American factory system in the nineteenth century. The mill became the most famous in the nation and highly profitable for their investors. After Lowell died in 1817, his business partners opened mills on the Merrimack River in Northeastern Massachusetts, which were in operation by 1823 in a planned settlement of boarding houses and eventually ten mill complexes that would make Lowell, incorporated as a city in 1836, the center of the nation''s textile manufacturing. Other mill towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine would be similarly developed, although not as quite as large a scale.

Rose Pesotta (1896-1965) A labor activist and anarchist, Rose Pesotta was one of the first female vice presidents of the International Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In that capacity, she challenged the authority of the male union leaders and was branded a troublemaker. Between 1934 and 1944, Pesotta was one of the most successful labor organizers in the United States. Born Rakhel Peisoty in the Ukraine, Pesotta was exposed to anarchist views early from the books in her father''s library and in a local anarchist group. She refused her parents'' arranged marriage for her and immigrated to New York City in 1913, where she found work as a seamstress in shirtwaist factories. She joined the International Ladies'' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). She would create the union''s first education department in 1915, and in 1920 was elected to an executive board position. Pesotta''s charismatic personality, boundless energy, and empathy with the workers made her a sought-after and highly successful labor organizer, and she traveled the country broadcasting the union message and aiding workers'' strikes and demonstrations.

In 1934, she was elected as vice president of the ILGWU, a position she held for a decade. On loan from the ILGWU, she participated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in several of the key labor disputes of the 1930s in Akron, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan. She protested the lack of leadership positions for women in the union and refused a fourth term on the CIO Executive Board, stating that "one women vice president could not adequately represent the woman who now make up 85 percent of the International''s membership of 305,000." Instead she went back to the factory from which she began, supporting herself as a seamstress.Following her resignation from ILGWU, she published two memoirs, Bread Upon the Waters (1945) and Days of Our Lives (1958), while supporting herself largely through factory work. She resigned from her job after a cancer diagnosis and moved to Florida, where she died alone in a Miami hospital. Esther Peterson (1906-1997) For more than fifty years, Esther Peterson was a determined advocate for workers'' rights who was honored by the National Women''s Hall of Fame as "one of the nation''s most effective and beloved catalysts of change." She was a driving force in the fight for legislation to secure equal pay for equal work, creating the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women to document workplace discrimination toward women.

Born Esther Eggertsen, Peterson was the daughter of Danish immigrants. She grew up in a Mormon family in Provo, Utah, graduated from Brigham Young University in 1927, and earned a master''s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1930. She held several teaching positions, including one at the innovative Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. After her marriage to Oliver Peterson in 1932, the couple moved to Boston, where she taught at the Winsor School. In 1938, Peterson became a paid organizer for the American Federation of Teachers and then served as assistant director of education and lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (1939-44, 1945-48). From 1958 to 1961 worked in Washington, D.C. as legislative representative of the industrial union department of the AFL-CIO.

She would move on to various positions in the United States Women''s Bureau of th.