Women in Business in Faulkton, 1909

A while back I did a series of posts on the women included in the 1909 business directory for the city of Sioux Falls.  I came across a website with a 1909 list of businesses and their owners for the much smaller city of Faulkton (link here) and thought I’d try the same research experiment with the women listed there.  The directory was transcribed by K. Torp from a 1909 published county history by C.H. Ellis.  There were several that were hard to find, perhaps they were transient, or married and their marriage record didn’t come up, for whatever reason, on Ancestry.com.  Several of the women worked with/for their husbands or fathers, or took over the management of a business after their husband’s death.  Then, there was Abbie Jarvis who was known for delivering babies, which was a branch of medicine that I would assume was more accessible for women at the time, but she also was so driven to become a qualified doctor that she went to another city, with her two youngest children, in order to pursue that education.  She was the first woman licensed to be a doctor and pharmacist in the state,  and proceeded to have a long and respected career.