Before she embarked on the Quaker activism that made her famous, MF worked as a servant to a couple named Tomlinson (Richard and Elizabeth) who lived at Selby in Yorkshire. As a Quaker minister and preacher she was one of two women who first brought the Friends' message to New England, and she was unique in preaching to the ruler of the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Following the successful completion of her studies, Constance Black (later CG ) was appointed as a lecturer in classical studies at Newnham College . However, it was only a single-term appointment and she soon began to look for work elsewhere. In 1884 she took a position as a governess, for which she was paid £100 per annum. While she taught the daughters of the family, the sons went to school. By September 1887 CG was appointed by Walter Besant as a librarian at the recently-opened People's Palace in East London (the ancestor of the present Queen Mary and Westfield College ).

The young Ann Cromartie followed in her mother's footsteps as a milkwoman. This occupation, traditional in the area, involving owning a few cows and carrying their milk daily to Bristol for sale. In this trade the labour was not hard, but it was unceasing, and profit would depend on the price of pasture and the (seasonal) yield of the cows.

Throughout the First World War, both before and after her marriage in 1915, Amabel Strachey (later AWE ) was a Red Cross VAD, first at her family home in Surrey (now converted into a military convalescent hospital) and then at another hospital with an operating theatre. At the latter, she served as a dirty nurse in charge of anything unsterilised in the operating theatre, such as amputated limbs. In her memoir she writes of the impact, both positive and negative, of the war on her own psyche and on her close relationship with her husband.

The twenty-one-year-old EW became a master at a prep school in the coastal village of Llanddulas in North Wales, Arnold House School .

The same year as her daughter Daphne's birth, RMW published her first collection of verse; she followed it with several more. She also became a busy reviewer, journalist, and editor.

MW began her involvement in theatre activities as a performer and then moved on to roles as playwright and critic.

When she was not working in revolutionary circles (a rare situation for her), Ethel Lilian Boole supported herself financially by tutoring an aristocratic family's children, teaching English and focusing on music. She was listed as a music teacher at only sixteen, in the British census of 1881.

After teacher training at Cambridge, Alice Jane Taylor (later AU ) took up a post as Junior Science Mistress at a London County Council Secondary School in Fulham in suburban London.

After moving back from rural France to Paris, FT found a job as a colourist with a lithographer named André Chazal .

Even before Alice illustrated her mother's book Alice in Jungleland, it was assumed in the family that she would grow up to be an artist. While she was still at school she exhibited African drawings in a Chicago gallery and sold to the New Yorker another drawing of a horse rearing and throwing its rider. Her biography gives most of a chapter to her serious self-development as an artist, which included several self-portraits in which she shows herself hideously aged.

While her career ambitions centred on becoming a writer, she also at her mother's urging found work as governess to a brilliant pupil, Oliver Knox, seven-year-old son of Dillwyn Knox —and nephew, therefore, of the writer Winifred Peck (though it is not clear that ET was aware of this relationship). Then she was asked to teach other children, and ran an impromptu kindergarten at her parents' home. Later came a job in the Boots circulating library at High Wycombe. She enjoyed this job, but left it when she got married. More important to her was her involvement in amateur theatricals. She was active on stage with High Wycombe Theatre Club in 1932-4, often playing leading ladies. She returned to acting only a week after her wedding, playing opposite her husband.

The Women Writers' Dinner was organized each year by a Chairman, who also gave the after-dinner address, and ASS took her turn in this role.

Though she wrote regularly, JS published infrequently and supported herself through a range of other occupations. Following her studies in Commercial Art at the Slade , she drew advertisements for patent foods, posters, and unspecified images for Vogue magazine. By October 1932, she was working as a receptionist for Barbara Ker Seymer , a friend of hers who was a photographer. By late 1945, Strachey was reading fiction for London publishers Secker and Warburg .

After completing her education, she taught privately. CS was also her daughter Marie 's primary educator until Marie reached the age of twelve.

In London if not earlier JS invested heavily in maritime salvage: expeditions to fish upon wrecks in an attempt to recover sunken valuables.

DS secured a few unremarkable acting jobs, many of them on tour, and one of them at the recently launched Everyman Theatre in Hampstead. She was especially pleased to be invited on tour with Lena Ashwell 's Concerts at the Front at the end of the First World War, but Ashwell demoted her to stage manager after a bad performance in Gertrude Jennings 's Between the Soup and the Savoury. Eventually, DS had to accept that she could not earn a living as an actress. She made a brief and unsuccessful attempt to earn money by writing before she interviewed for a position as a shop assistant.

Menella served as scribe (with her sisters) to her sick father, who died in 1836 at the age of forty-seven, after long suffering during which he heroically kept writing in order to keep earning for the support of his family.

During the first world war war ES , both out of patriotism and because she was poor, worked for twenty-five shillings a week (plus two shillings war bonus) at the Pensions Office in Chelsea. She resisted her father's importunity to leave and to work instead at a photographer's shop on which he wanted to receive confidential reports.