What Can a Woman Do? Her Position in the Business and Literary World

Noting that 50 years earlier, only seven industries were open to women, this book details the massive expansion in opportunities for women in both the business and the literary world. This explores through inspirational accounts the careers open to women in all professions from journalism to music to medicine to beekeeping, dressmaking, gardening, engraving, government clerks, home-makers, poets - everything from the law and medicine to stenography and the profession of elocution. Martha Louise Rayne (1836-1911) established the world's first school of journalism in Detroit in 1886. She was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia and began a career in newspapers in the early 1860's. By 1870 she had reached Chicago, freelancing for the Chicago Tribune. In 1870 she became editor of the Chicago Magazine of Fashion, Music and Home Reading. She interviewed Mary Todd Lincoln when she was confined to a mental institution at Batavia, Illinois. Mrs. Lincoln had refused to talk to male reporters and Rayne's published interview with her led to her release. By 1878, Rayne moved to Detroit to work for the Detroit Free Press. Rayne's book is divided into two primary sections. The first, "Women in the Business World," provides detailed introductions to the career opportunities then open to women, as well as biographical sketches of those women in the respective fields and is still one of the most important contemporary sources for this biographical information. Of the authors in the second (the literary) section, some of these authors remain canonical (George Eliot; Letitia E. Landon; Elizabeth Barrett Browning), while others have long since disappeared from college syllabi. As such, the volume is important for its contemporary compendium of quite a few now-lost voices, as well as an indicator of the author's tastes and her contemporaries' aspirations.