If American women would only turn their attention to the cultivation of fruits & flowers for market, instead of giving it up to ignorant foreigners, how much better it would be! A few hundred dollars would make a very handsome beginning; & those who do not have so much at their disposal, could their friends to advance it.
At Shrewsbury & Lebanon, much fruit is put up by the Shakers, & sent to New York for sale. Women might have orchards, raise fruit, & send it to market.
Mrs. D. owns a farm, & does not disdain to graft fruit trees, superintend their planting, gather fruit, send it to market, &c.; & she realizes a handsome profit. The grafting & budding of fruit trees might be done very well by women, & also the budding of ornamental shrubs.
“Miss S. B. Anthony,” says the Binghampton Republican , “resides at Roches ter, & supports herself by raising raspberries from land given to her by her father.” I have been told that on one acre of land near New York city a thousand dollars' worth of strawberries can be grown.
In New Jersey & Delaware, women are employed to gather berries for market. If a lady is within a few miles of town, & has facilities for raising & sending fruit to market, she will not be likely to fail in meeting with ready sale. Berries bring a good price in the markets of a city. In Cincinnati, from May 21st to June 1st, 1847, 5,463 bushels of strawberries were sold, & near St. Louis is a gentleman that has some hundreds of acres of strawberries in cultivation to assist in supplying the St. Louis market.
The drying of fruit affords employment, & generally well remunerates time so given, if carried on extensively.
The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work by Virginia Panny Published Boston, MA. by Walker, Wise & Company. 1863
To read about women's changing roles in the 2nd half of the 19th century. see:
Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. New York:Random House, 1973.
Clinton, Catherine. The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1984.
Cott, Nancy. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
Cott Nancy. History of Women in the United States, Part 6, Working the Land. New York: K. G. Saur, 1992.
Degler, Carl. At Odds: Women and the Family from Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Green, Harvey. The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Juster, Norton. So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America 1865-1895. New York: The Viking Press, 1979.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982
Mintz, Stephen and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; London: Collier Macmillan, 1988.
Ryan, Mary P. Womanhood in America front he Colonial Times to the Present. New York: F. Watts, 1983.
Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. New York Pantheon Books, 1982.
Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions : the American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens : Ohio University Press, 1976.
