How did jobs change for women in the early 19th century?

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In the early 19th century teaching became a respectable job for middle-class American women. There was a shortage of male teachers, so women were encouraged to take up teaching. School boards liked them because they could pay women teachers a lot less than men. Despite the poor pay, teaching offered educated women a respectable way to earn a living.

The growing factory system in America was also keen to employ girls, because they were cheaper and more easily managed, also they usually left after a few years to get married. By the 1820s, New england was full of textile factories where virtually all the workers were women, each making $2 or $3 a week (the supervisors, who were men, got $12 a week.

In 'America's Women' Gail Collins writes:

'During the first half of the nineteenth century, America became crammed with what Nathaniel Hawthorne bitterly called "a d----d mob of scribbling women" who supported themselves with their pens. Although most made little or no money, some of the women novelists, essayists, poets, and short-story writers actually became rich - Harriet Beecher Stowe, who hoped Uncle Tom's Cabin would make enough for her to buy a new dress, wound up with a mansion and a Florida orange plantation. Hawthorne's irritation had a great deal to do with the fact that The Lamplighter, the novel by twenty-seven year old Maria Cummings that inspired his outburst, sold four times as many copies in the first month as the Scarlet Letter sold in Hawthorne's lifetime.

It is hard to imagine how women made the leap into professions for which they had no role models, no invitation, and very little encouragement. Antoinette Brown ignored her weeping parents and went off to Oberlin college determined to become the nation's first ordained female minister, even though the faculty assured her it would never happen. Brown was not permitted to graduate, but she eventually found a progressive parish in new york where she was ordained and made pastor.

Elizabeth blackwell, the first woman to graduate from an American medical school, claimed she was inspired to go into medicine by a frined in Cincinatti who was dying of uterine cancer and, like somany women, ahd been unable to discuss her medical problems freely with a male physician. Dozens of medical schools turned down her application. finally,s he was accepted by Geneva College, a small medical school in upstate new york. She went on to graduate first in her class, and later to found both the New York infirmary and a medical college for women. '