Think back to your mother or grandmother. If she worked outside the home in the 1920s, chances are she was a maid, a teacher, or a typist. Those were the three most common jobs for women a century ago, according to the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor.
The Women’s Bureau was created in 1920 to represent women entering the mainstream workforce. Its mission included advancing opportunities for women in profitable employment. And over the past hundred years, it has tracked exactly how those opportunities have shifted.
What Women Did in the 1920s
The number one job for women in the 1920s was domestic servant. Maids and housekeepers topped the list, even as factories were booming and more women were heading into cities for work.
Teachers came in second. Stenographers and typists ranked third. After that came farm laborers, clerks, seamstresses, and bookkeepers. Factory work did not even crack the top ten, which surprises a lot of people, given how much the Industrial Revolution had pulled women into new kinds of employment.
Part of why those jobs dominated is that they were considered acceptable for women at the time. Medicine, management, and most professional careers were largely off the table.
The decade itself was a turning point in other ways, too. White women had just won the right to vote in 1920. The losses of World War I and the Spanish Flu of 1918 had pushed many women into the workforce to fill the roles left behind by husbands, fathers, and brothers. And a new sense of independence was taking hold: shorter hair, bolder clothes, and the beginning of a real conversation about what a woman’s life could look like.
What Women Do Today
Fast forward to today, and the top job for women is registered nurse. As of April 2025, more than two million women were working as registered nurses in the United States. A hundred years ago, any career in medicine was considered a man’s domain. That shift alone says a great deal about how far things have come.
Teaching held on to second place, same as it was in the 1920s. One thing that has not changed much in a century.
Third on the list today? Manager. That was a role women could only dream about in 1920. The Women’s Bureau tracks women managers across industries without breaking them down by field.
Progress and Still Some Distance to Go
McKinsey’s 2025 Women in the Workplace Report found that the number of jobs for women has grown over the past decade. But opportunities to advance have actually declined during that same period.
Women are still underrepresented in STEM fields. Computer science and mechanical engineering are among the areas where women remain a small minority.
For those of us who watched the workforce transform over the last fifty or sixty years, who saw the first women doctors on television, the first female managers in the office, the first daughters encouraged to study science, this history feels personal. We lived through a big chunk of it. And it is something worth remembering.
