The Home Journal

WOMEN AS WORKERS.

ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS sums up in the Independent some of the things enterprising women have done.

In the capital of a stout-hearted, if not very broad shouldered little England State, one of the best blacksmiths in the city is said to be a young woman. She works side by side with her father, of whom she acquired her trade.

In one of the Territories, we find two young women, sisters, running a blacksmith's shop upon their own account. In the crude condition of the region the undertaking was as necessary as it seemed natural and, as they have made it, respectable. The girls dress in a Bloomer costume, and shoe a horse with ease and skill.

I think it is Detroit which boasts of the woman who took out a contract for macadamizing a road; engaged her workmen, kept them to time, and conducted them and her road safely and successfully through her agreement.

The same woman, if I am rightly informed, has more than once moved barns and other buildings on contract with composure and despatch.

In Wisconsin two girls, whose works rise up and call them blessed, have for six years managed a farm of one hundred acres, and supported their father and mother from its proceeds.

The same State estimates that there are in all two thousand women at work this year in its generous fields.

Iowa and Indiana contains two hundred women working farms on their own account successfully.

In one of the largest cities in the country a "young, pretty and accomplished" lady has opened an extensive boot and shoe store. Her clerks are all young women, and her trade is reputed to be of the briskest.

Of a woman in Washington Territory, we learn that she has just returned from a trip to China, where she carried a cargo of lumber. "She is said to be sharper," observes the source of information, "than any other mill-owner on Puget Sound, and got at least $10 more per thousand feet for lumber than was ever paid at Hong Kong before."

Of an extensive dry goods establishment in New Jersey, we are told that it is managed entirely by two ladies, and their credit in the large business centres is of the soundest and highest.

We are given to understand that they set up business eight years ago on a capital of from $1000 to $2000, and that they control a stock now worth from $20,000 to $30,000 in ladies' furnishing and fancy goods.

A young woman in Lewiston, Maine, has been fitting herself, under excellent promise, for the profession of a dentist. In the heavier work, which requires active muscles and steady eye, her employer has long since been accustomed to call upon her for very effective assistance.

A ladies' life insurance company all the employees of which are to be women, is forming in London.

And here we run against another Wisconsin woman (surely that energetic State is the woman's "Earthly Paradise") who supports a sick husband and his old grandfather off from a forty-acre farm.

And again from New Jersey. What says one of her leading papers? "Our entire newspaper is the work of young ladies, and every type is set by them -advertisements and all-and the 'maker-up' is a young girl. And we have no foreman in the newspaper-rooms, a young lady acting in that capacity."

To the above we may add, for Philadelphia, that one of the largest hotels on Chestnut street is owned and managed by a woman; that a woman is the principal of a boys' grammar school, and a leading teacher in one of the most flourishing school sections of this city; and that on Chestnut, Eighth and other streets there are several large stores owned and managed exclusively by women. In one store, owned by a woman, on Chestnut street, that we know of, a business amounting to considerably over $100,000 a year is done.