Although the woman movement has multiplied and extended the social relief work of woman in innumerable directions, still it has not yet opened to her the field in which formerly deaconesses, and much earlier still nuns, were engaged. But what is new as result of the woman movement is that more and more single _cultured_ women now devote themselves to the occupations of governess, nurse, midwife, and kindred callings; as well as that more special training is demanded for these vocations to which women turned earlier with downright criminal carelessness.
Simultaneously with the need of the middle-class woman for new fields of work, came the extraordinarily rapid development of commerce and business, which occasioned the need of new working forces. Feminine honesty, orderliness, and devotion to duty—alas, also her modest demands of compensation—made the state as well as private employers favourably disposed to employ women in increasingly greater numbers in the different branches of commerce: in the post-office, railroads, telegraph, telephone, as also in banks, counting houses, agencies or stores, as secretaries, stenographers, and clerks. In cases where the wife or daughter was the husband’s or father’s assistant such work then received a personal interest, and what woman’s labour in this form can signify for national wealth can be seen in France especially. But as a rule no real joy in work could illuminate the days and years of the generation of women who in all these vocations have grown gray and at best have been pensioned. Nevertheless, in these offices one always sees fresh faces bending over the desk to fade away in their turn.
Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc. In America, on the contrary, there is no masculine occupation, from that of butcher and executioner to real estate speculator and stock-exchange gambler that women have not practised.
But while the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining “a work and a duty,” however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a _pleasurable_ labour has fortunately increased. Partly alone, partly co-operatively, women began to venture into the applied arts, handwork, farming, or kindred work. And since corresponding special training schools quickly arise to meet the awakening of the desire for a vocation, we can hope for good results for these, as yet rare, enterprising spirits. For special education is, in our time, the essential condition of success, especially in agriculture, where the women often succeeded without other help than their personal efficiency and the “farmer’s customary practice.”