The Employments of Women: A Cyclopædia of Woman's Work — A Closer Reading

A Practical Response to Crisis

Penny’s preface establishes a tone of urgent practicality. She dismisses existing books on “The Sphere of Woman” as irrelevant to women who lack the “comforts of life.” Instead, she proposes to open “avenues where they are wanted.” The language is direct and unadorned, focused on economic necessity rather than moral argument. Penny acknowledges the difficulty of measuring woman’s condition: “No mathematical nicety can be brought to bear upon the subject.” This admission of uncertainty contrasts with the detailed wage tables and employer letters that fill the subsequent entries.

Wages, Skill, and Gender in the Watch Trade

The entry on watchmaking illustrates Penny’s method: she reproduces correspondence from manufacturers, preserving their voices. A Boston chronometer maker reports paying women $4 to $6 per week, but notes that “men earn about double the wages of women” because they do “more difficult work” and are “more ingenious, more thoughtful and contriving.” The same writer adds that women “are very apt to marry just as they become skilful enough to be reliable.” A second manufacturer at the American Watch Company in Waltham states bluntly that “we employ female labor, where we can, as being cheaper.” These quotations expose the structural barriers women faced: lower pay for comparable work, assumptions about mechanical aptitude, and the expectation that marriage would end their careers.

Cataloging the Possible

Penny’s cyclopedia is organized as a reference work, with entries for each trade listing required skills, wages, and working conditions. The watchmaking section specifies that “delicacy of touch, patience, and great carefulness” are needed, and that learning takes “a few months perhaps.” She includes details about factory size, hours (ten per day), and the proportion of women employed (seventy-five out of two hundred hands at Waltham). The entry on watch case and jewelry polishing notes that “a good polisher can earn $1 a day,” but that “some can never learn.” By presenting both opportunities and limitations, Penny gives readers a realistic assessment of each trade.

The Voice of the Compiler

Throughout the excerpts, Penny’s own voice emerges in brief editorial comments. She adds to the list of requisites for a watchmaker “patience and ingenuity.” She notes that hand labor is cheaper in Europe, but American watches are cheaper “because made by machinery.” These interjections reveal her analytical mind, comparing industries across countries and technologies. Yet she rarely moralizes; her goal is to present “woman as a working, every-day reality.” The cyclopedia’s structure—a compilation of evidence rather than a polemic—reflects her belief that practical information, not exhortation, will open new employments.

Readers should approach this cyclopedia as a historical document that captures both the possibilities and constraints of women’s work in 1863. Penny’s reliance on employer testimony means the entries reflect the biases of the era, including assumptions about women’s mechanical abilities and the inevitability of marriage. Yet the sheer range of occupations surveyed—from watchmaking to typesetting—challenges the notion that women’s work was limited to domestic roles. The book rewards selective reading: browse by trade, compare wage data, and note where Penny’s own commentary breaks through the compiled evidence.

Sometimes I think about Penny’s watchmakers, their wages pinned beneath men’s, and how quietly they kept working. That same stubborn patience surfaces in A history of postal agitation from fifty years ago till the present day — Reading Companion, where small, persistent grievances finally moved the machinery of change. Old reforms feel so inevitable now, but they were just people, pressing on.