Utah's Working Women
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No matter what they call us — no matter what they teach their children to call us — we must tamely submit and answer when we are called; we must enter no protest; if we did object, we should be driven out without the least ceremony, and, in applying for work at other places, we should find it very hard to procure another situation. 1
Utah's working women were no exception in the labor force. Although opportunity for work was limited in Utah in 1870, by 1900 expanding business offered another alternative to educated women. In this study, all women over ten years old are considered eligible to work, married or single. T h e percentages of women in the Utah work force are taken from the published censuses of 1870, 1880, 1890, and 1900. Two random samplings of the manuscript censuses in 1870 and 1900 were conducted for comparison and accuracy. T h e work force is considered to be those employed at occupations outside of the home. In 1870 Utah was a small frontier territory, and agriculture was the main enterprise. Not surprisingly, census takers recorded that only 4 percent of women in Utah were employed outside of the home, and of that, 84 percent were employed in domestic service. These figures may be misleading. Ann Lobb and Jill Derr have noted that women made other contributions to the development of the frontier. They cite the example of Christina Oleson Warnick, who helped to build the family home, tilled and planted the fields, channeled irrigation ditches, and gathered wild hay for the cows.2 This contribution is significant; of the 20,309 men in Utah between sixteen and fifty-nine years old (at least a significant proportion of whom were married, since the U.S. census shows that there were 17,210 families), almost half were farmers or planters. 3 Utah's three major urban centers, Provo, Ogden, and Salt Lake City, were surveyed in the manuscript census by looking at every third woman over ten years old and seeing if an occupation was listed. T h e results for the 1870 survey seem to indicate that the percentage of women workers in urban areas was often double the state average. *W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy: A Documentary History, 1675 to 1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 248. 2 Ann Vest Lobb and Jill Mulvay Derr, "Women in Early Utah," in Utah's History, ed. Richard D. Poll (Provo, Ut.: Brigham Young University Press, 1978), p. 338. For the important role of pioneer women, see also Leonard J. Arrington "The Economic Role of Pioneer Mormon Women," Western Humanities Review 9 (1955): 145-64; Glenda Riley, "Not Gainfully Employed: Women on the Iowa Frontier," Pacific Historical Review 47 (May 1980): 265-84; and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, "Women's Work on the Mormon Frontier," Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (1981): 276-90. 3 U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States, 1870: Occupation, 2:585.
