Women’s Employment and Professional Identity in Annie Nathan Meyer’s Woman’s Work in America, 1891

Clara Barton

Book

Meyer, Annie Nathan, Woman’s Work in America, 1891, is a major late-nineteenth-century anthology on women’s employment, professional achievement, and public service in the United States. Edited by Annie Nathan Meyer, later remembered for her central role in founding Barnard College, the book gathers essays by prominent women to document women’s work across education, literature, journalism, medicine, philanthropy, reform, and civic life. Its cultural value lies in the way it presents women’s labor as intellectual, professional, and socially necessary, offering a period argument for women’s expanded public authority during a decade of accelerating debate over higher education, paid work, and gendered citizenship.

Meyer, Annie Nathan, editor. Woman’s Work in America. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1891. First edition. 457 pages. Original blue boards with gilt lettering on spine, no jacket as issued, 8vo. With an introduction by Julia Ward Howe, the volume includes contributions by eighteen women, with chapters by Clara Barton on the Red Cross Society, Frances Willard on the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Ednah Dow Cheney on care of the sick, and Mary A. Livermore on women in the state. The book’s subjects include women’s employment, women in the United States, and women’s social and moral questions, indicating its intended breadth as a documentary and argumentative survey of women’s public contribution.

Published in 1891, the volume belongs to a period when advocates and reformers increasingly framed women’s education and work as matters of national progress rather than private exception. Meyer’s anthology is especially useful for studying how elite reform, professionalization, voluntary association, and women’s authorship intersected in public arguments about labor and gender at the end of the nineteenth century. Bumping and wear to corners and extremities, wear and tearing at top of spine, small tear at bottom of spine, expected page toning, generally clean and bright text, and watermark along bottom edge of text block; good. A substantial anthology of women’s occupational and civic claims, strengthened by contributions from several of the most visible women reformers and professionals of the period.

Item #16248

Price: $480.00