A New Generation of Women

As sharp observers like Finley Peter Dunne's Mr. Dooley often noted, American born daughters of immigrants played as important a role in defining standards of success and respectability among the new Catholic middle class as their brothers did. Changes in the economy in the late nineteenth century opened up vast numbers of new white collar jobs to women, such as stenographers, sales clerks, and telephone operators. In some big northern cities lay Catholic women - the vast majority of them American born - dominated the ranks of public school teachers and administrators. Some of these women never married, preferring to follow their professions. Those who did wed brought their ambitions and refinements with them to their families and passed them on to their children.