When Emmeline Pethick returned to England after finishing school in Germany, she found herself uncertain of her position as an educated, upper-middle-class woman, for whom employment was not possible because, as she was told, taking a job would be tantamount to stealing work from more needy women. The expectation that she would remain dependent on a man began to stifle her: I began to be weighed down in spirit, by the fact of my dependence. While marriage appeared to be her only option, [m]arriage as an abstract proposition held no attraction.

FN unsuccessfully petitioned to join St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin for nursing experience; she applied again in 1852 but was put off on grounds that the buildings were under repair.

Patrick Brontë opened a National Church Sunday School at Haworth, to which Emily , and Anne , and CB contributed by teaching.

Her mother's invalidism meant that from the time of FPC 's departure from school until her father's death nearly twenty years later, she kept house, which included managing a budget of above £600. She also assisted him in the running of the estate, for instance drawing the plans and elevations for new tenant cottages, based on Arthur Creagh Taylor 's Designs for Agricultural Buildings Suited to Irish Estates.

It now seems that EF was not the Mrs Fenwick who was running an admirable school at Flint House, Greenwich, just outside London, from at least the later 1780s well into the 1790s. This Mrs Fenwick taught, or at least oversaw teaching, in botany, drawing, and music. She drew many pupils from plantation-owning, slave-holding, English families in Jamaica. One of them was Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton (whose name is often wrongly given as Sarah Moulton-Barrett), a cousin of Elizabeth Barrett Browning . The identification used to be mentioned by the Orlando textbase as at least possible.

MAW was much later employed (in 1882 and 1888) as an examiner in Spanish for the Taylorian scholarship at Oxford .

The year after completing her education at Oxford , MR went to work at the Victoria Women's Settlement in the slums of Liverpool.

By the time ER completed her degree, she was determined to engage directly with contemporary social concerns, rather than take on academic research and teaching. In 1900 she rejected her friend Hilda Oakeley 's offer to collaborate on a philosophical project, explaining, I have grown utilitarian, in one way. It is nearly always in connection with some practical problem that I think of the ultimate problems, and it is for their bearing on people's lives that I care for them . . . . in such a world with all its wrongs shouting in one's ears and every miserable face claiming kinship, how can one be sorry that it is no longer easy to shut one's ears and revel in thought for thought's sake.

View reference

qtd. in

Alberti, Johanna. Eleanor Rathbone. Sage Press, 1996.

18

Kathleen Royds (later Innes) became First Assistant Mistress of the Upper Grade (non-Governmental Department) at St Katharine's College Practising School, Tottenham.

UM took a secretarial position with the Salvation Army in Kingston, Jamaica. This job initiated her long-term involvement with social work and advocacy for Jamaica's poor.

During her childhood Caroline Jones (later CC ) visited and helped sick villagers in Wootton.

CS began early to see herself as a professional. She placed her first full-page illustration in the Pall Mall Magazine at the age of sixteen, and was so delighted at its acceptance that she took her two guineas in payment without verifying her confused impression that she had been offered three. She sent work for criticism to Harry Furniss , and elicited his encouragement and support. He suggested that moving to London would help her career. Her first illustrating work for the stage was a drawing of the comedian George Robey for a pantomime souvenir programme. After moving to London she did elaborate illustrations for souvenirs of two Beerbohm Tree Shakespeare productions. She worked first as an illustrator, next as a theatrical designer, and later as a writer, first for the stage and then for publication.

EJH got her first real job acting at Stratford at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. She acted in three plays, making insufficient money to eat properly, and could not go on stage for her third role because she had fallen ill. In the winter came a small part in a radio play. Since she was not getting anywhere with the stage, either acting or writing, she went for interview as a officer in the WRNS , but was rejected because she had no School Certificate and no typing: a first intimation of the total inadequacy of her education. She did, however, later work as an air-raid warden, then at making camouflage nets, and then at putting on a production of The Importance of Being Earnest at Holyhead with naval personnel for actors.

On 24 April 1845 AL witnessed the marriage of her fourteen-year-old elder sister Eliza to thirty-eight-year-old Sergeant-Major James Millard. Support by the army ended at fifteen, so the sisters would soon be forced to leave the garrison. Biographer Leslie Smith Dow argues that this marriage may have frightened Anna, who was thirteen, into contemplating the prospect of a similar marriage if she did not find employment. Domestic service would have been out of the question, Dow argues, because upbringing in an army barracks was widely considered to be fundamentally immoral, and no society woman would knowingly darken her door with that sort of girl. The only employment options open to AL would have been nursing in disease-infested hospitals, marriage, or teaching. Around this time she may have started working as an assistant schoolmistress.

When she became the author of a book, IB used the money she earned for charity, for instance to benefit poor Scottish fishermen.

ML continued to paint after the birth of her daughter and exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne , beginning in 1904 (where she first used the name Mina Loy ), and the Salon des Beaux-Arts , beginning in the spring of 1905.

During this trip, KM encountered leprosy for the first time and dedicated herself to treating patients who suffered from it. Her supervisor reported that she cared for sick nurses rather than wounded Russian soldiers. Emily Norris , one of two women with whom KM lived later in her life, provided a dramatic and probably inaccurate vision of her work in a letter, written in 1931, shortly after KM died. She claimed that Marsden kept the soldiers out of the harems, suck[ed] tubes of tracheotomy in the field hospital, when they had epidemics of diptheria, and used to go out alone at night, except for her bearers, onto the battlefield, to tend to the wounded and dying.

Willa Anderson (later WM ) taught classics at Brancepeth Rectory Home School , near Durham.

She became a passionate mountain climber. At nineteen, she was a member of the Ladies' Alpine Club and was known for skilful climbing in the Alps (with professional guides) and in the mountains of Central Europe. One of her adventures was climbing at Courmayeur on the south side of Mont Blanc for seven weeks. She went on from there to Zermatt, where with her brother Jack she made the fourth ascent of the northeast face of the Weisshorn by a new route. This climb was recorded in the Alpine Journal. She also climbed a lot with George—George Mallory , who was later lost on Everest. When she revisited the Alps with a daughter, she was still remembered there, by her birth name, among professional climbers. Later in life she was keen on ski-ing, sailing, and swimming.