Women and the Job Market in Victorian England and Progressive America

The doctrine of the separate spheresDoctrine of the separate spheres was seriously questioned in the late nineteenth century, when middle and upper-class women, who were used to perfom their role of wives and mothers in the domestic sphere, entered the workforce. This phenomenon was primarily the result of the struggle for secondary education for girls and women at that time. Differently from them, lower-class women had always used to work in the domestic sphere either as servants or as workers, sometimes runners, of small home-based businnesses.