In the seventeenth century, women wage earners were primarily domestic servants. Following European traditions, American women did not usually hold land or have access to apprenticeships that could have provided skills leading to economic independence. Nevertheless, the idea of a man supporting his wife was not commonly accepted, for "husband and wife were⯠mutually dependent and together supported the children." The colonial wife used her physical stamina to produce "household necessities and ply⯠her crafts and her plow beside a yeoman husband."1 In the change from an agrarian economy to a balance of farming and manufacturing in the Revolutionary War period, the work of women became critical. Women from all levels of society labored in support of this war as they would in subsequent wars involving U.S. troops. Following the war for independence, urban poor women and surplus farm women were sought as factory workers. However, confusing messages produced confusing role perceptions. Home and family were to remain the centerpieces of their lives. Yet America's lack of an adequate supply of workers and ongoing need for cheap labor required that women become the first industrial proletariat.2 With the development of factories and mills, men like Alexander Hamilton saw mercantilism as the helpmeet to agriculture, with industry providing jobs for farm wives and children. Factories would also absorb the idle and dependent, making them productive members of society. With the decline in home manufacture of many items, farm women had the time to accept either "given out" work (clothes to be sewed at home from cutout patterns, for example) or to spend their days at nearby mills or factories. The large number of women working in factories and mills challenged basic assumptions about the role of women in society and led, among other things, to the beginning of class differences between women who had to work for their own or their family's survival and those who did not, paternalism, and public reaction against women who organized or went out on strike to better working conditions and wages. With increasing urbanization and higher factory productivity, upper-class women - most often native-born whites - no longer needed to contribute their wage labor to ensure the financial security of home and family; but poorer women - especially widows, free blacks, immigrants, and rural women who moved to the cities in search of jobs - had no choice. Female wage earners, "whether they worked inside or outside their homes⯠fulfilled the hopes of the most ardent Hamiltonians. They constituted the essential core of industrial development."3 By 1840 some 65 percent of the industrial workers in New England were women, while in the less industrialized South, 10 percent of free white women worked in industry. Despite the regional disparity, half of all workers employed in manufacturing in America were women. As industrialization moved ahead, fueled in large measure by female labor, something else was affecting women's lives in the first half of the nineteenth century. Social mores were changing, and a new domestic code embracing the old Puritan ethic and laissez-faire economics was becoming a powerful force. While this new outlook encouraged men to develop competitive, individualistic attitudes and to look for greater economic success, it offered women very constricted roles. Pious, nurturing, submissive creatures, they were to provide males with emotional support, make the home a refuge, and guard society's moral values. Homemaking came to be viewed as a profession requiring training, and women became almost the sole supervisors of children with men gone from home for long hours trying to climb the economic ladder. Although the domestic code could mean little to new immigrants, blacks, and other women for whom work was a necessity, society's "sympathetic perceptions of women wage earners sacrificing for the sake of their families gave way to charges of selfishness and family neglect." Women workers were very adversely affected. They did not stop working - most of them could not afford to - but "the belief that women belonged at home permitted employers to pay wages that were merely supplemental," justified men in discriminating against their female co-workers, increased job stereotyping, and thwarted the efforts of women to unionize for their mutual benefit.4 Middle-class, non-wage-earning women failed to understand or support their working sisters. Myths arose: The workplace was more dangerous for women than men and would harm future mothers and their unborn children. Women would find it difficult to overcome the temptation to sin. Marriage would solve all or most of the problems of women. Governments often collaborated in such myths by passing legislation that restricted the roles of women at work, thereby confining them to the lowest rungs on the economic ladder. Nevertheless, after 1880 married women began entering the work force in greater numbers for several reasons: smaller households, lower birthrates, and technology that displaced domestic help. As a by-product of the new technology, married women became more isolated in their homes, and the more affluent of them became bored. Young unmarried women began looking for work and aspired to new goals. Professions like medicine and anthropology attracted women, and education at the college level became more accessible. Despite these changes, at the end of the nineteenth century, notions of woman's place in the home and the temporary nature of female employment were solidly entrenched. Such ideas channeled most women into a few slots in the work force and, instead of providing them with the safe, clean jobs talked of in state legislatures and union halls, reduced them to working under some of the worst conditions of any wage earners. Necessarily brief, this overview provides at least some context for examining the economic role of women in Utah. From the beginning of permanent white settlement in the mid-1800s to the turn of the century, Utah experienced a gradual shift from a frontier economy based primarily on agriculture to the mixed economy of a developing agricultural-commercial-industrial state. The role of women in that transformation resembled that of women in other parts of westering America. 5 In the first stage of settlement in Utah the individual family formed the basic economic unit of most towns. Husband, wife, and children worked together to build the family dwelling, raise food, and make or barter for as many of the other necessities of life as possible. Some Mormon women assumed larger roles in the home economic unit when polygamy required them to share a husband or when missionary work took him from home for prolonged periods. Polygamy and evangelism aside, the frontier farm home as the center of economic activity was essentially the same in Salt Lake City, Cache Valley, and Parowan as it had been in colonial New England; however, transformation occurred much more rapidly in Utah.6 Almost as soon as a new settlement was firmly rooted, it began to change. Individuals with special skills - dressmaking and teaching, tinsmithing, and bricklaying, for instance - found outlets for their talents and began altering the character of the town. Structures to house fledgling businesses and industries were erected along dozens of Main Streets from Kamas to Kanab. As these businesses became increasingly important, the economic life of most towns no longer rested entirely on more or less self-sufficient (although interdependent) farm families. Once begun, the breakdown of the family economic unit continued apace. As commercialization and urbanization increased, the family and its activities became divided. Some women participated in the shifting economy by opening millinery and dress shops or running boardinghouses and small hotels. A few entered the professions. Some continued to work alongside their husbands by becoming active partners in a family business. Young unmarried women became clerks, telegraph operators, and office workers, while other women and girls - especially the foreign-born and black - entered domestic service and worked in factories and laundries. The number of women working outside the home increased each decade from 1850 to 1900, with economic necessity as the principal factor propelling them toward gainful employment. Yet society consistently undervalued the contribution of women to the economic development of cities and towns. Furthermore, no matter how vital her wages were to the survival of her family, the female domestic or factory worker of the late nineteenth century never enjoyed the status of the sturdy farm wife of frontier fame. By the turn of the century, the pattern of most working women's lives in Utah was largely set by national events and trends. War and peace, depression and prosperity dictated the circumstances of daily life, while social theorists and the arbiters of social convention defined the proper role of women whether they lived in Buffalo, Memphis, or Ogden. The dynamic interplay of national forces with the particular conditions found in urban and rural Utah has affected working women from 1900 to the present. This chapter focuses on the contributions of gainfully employed women in Utah, the conditions of their employment, and their place in the larger regional and national context. Special attention is paid to women in business and industry during the first half of the twentieth century, with other female workers mentioned in passing to show the total employment picture. © 2005 by The Utah State University Press. All rights reserved.