How do Fern’s essays (specifically, “The Working-Girls of New York”) seem to respond to the nineteenth-century ideals of Separate Spheres and/or The Cult of Domesticity/“The Angel in the House”? How does Fern represent women’s roles during her lifetime in her essays? What kinds of imagery and writing strategies does Fern use in presenting her ideas on gender roles and women’s lives?

Fern's "The Working Girls of New York," written in 1868, is actually part of a longer piece, "Folly as it Flies." In it, Fern identifies that there is "a great book . . . yet unwritten about women," and attempts to rectify this by offering a portrait of the women of New York, whom she divides into two broad categories. The first category includes those "whom the world styles 'fortunate,'" middle-class women whose husbands are "a stranger" to the household and who provide adequate food, shelter, and material needs for their wives, but not "love" or "sympathy." The second category describes those women who are not provided for by a husband of means, who live in close quarters in lodgings, rise early to go to their places of labor, and must ask day by day, "Is this all life has for me?" Notably, however, Fern questions whether the so-called "fortunate" women are actually any less "miserable" than the others.

The nineteenth-century "Separate Spheres" ideology held that women should never be competitors to men, because their natural virtues placed them into a different field entirely. While men thrived in the workplace, and were active and strong, women could excel in the decorative arts, in becoming excellent housewives, and in producing things (whether this be artistic things like singing or needlework, or pragmatic things like cooked meals) which would please the husband. "The Angel in the House," similarly, is an idea taken originally from a poem by Coventry Patmore, which stated that "Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is women's pleasure." This grew into the concept that women should provide a pure space, untainted by the miseries of work, for men to come back to, and that their only occupation should be in pleasing their husbands.

In Fern's essay, we see that neither group of women could really be said to be performing this kind of femininity. The women who rarely see their husbands cannot spend time in pleasing them because their spheres are all too separate, leaving their hearts "unappeased." Meanwhile, the working group of women, particularly those who are factory laborers, are within the sphere that should have been reserved for men: they spend their days at "labor," and return to a room they do not have time to clean. Their breakfast is "ill-cooked," and their labor takes place in a factory where the noise of the machinery is "deafening." "They might as well be machines," Fern says, except that, in answer to the question of why they would not prefer to be in domestic service, she states that it is because "when six o'clock in the evening comes they are their own mistresses."
These girls choose this way of life over another, even though it places them into a loud environment that should have been anathema to their delicate natures, according to the ideology of the time, exactly because it gives them some power over themselves. This seems a direct rejection of the idea that women live to serve, whether it be their own husband or someone else's. Instead, these girls endure abject misery purely because it entitles them to their own free time. When, indeed, they "rush for escape into ill-sorted marriages," they find that they have now entered a miserable state "from which there is no release but death."

In presenting a portrait of these women, Fern elicits sympathy by identifying, journalistically, specific women by name, creating a sense of intimacy between character and audience. "Lizzy," whom Fern identifies as an orphan girl of fifteen, cannot be seen as just another working girl: instead, Fern describes her struggles, the cruelty of her mistress, and the girl's own virtuous nature, her "abounding spirits" and "pretty face." In some ways, then, Fern does rely upon the expectation of the "Angel in the House" in order to express that this "creature" does not deserve to be treated as she is. Her mistress is depicted as cruel not only for her poor wages, but for failing to allow "romance" to the girls she employs. Lizzy is praised for leaving her cruel mistress for a marriage; but, also, there is an interesting interplay between herself and her new husband, George, in that Lizzy provides for him financially while he cannot work. Rather than being subservient to, and looked after by, him, Lizzy has been taught by her experience to allow a certain mutual give-and-take in a marriage, although ultimately she looks forward to the day she can give up her work to be his wife.

Fern concludes by expressing that these women, whose "virtuous toil" is to them the only possibility, should be offered more help; there is a suggestion that they are worthier than those more often helped by charity, those who "have seen better days." Women workers have not engineered their own destruction in any way, but have become trapped in an urban situation not of their own making. As such, Fern would like to have them sent to the country, a way to "strike at the root of evil." Some of them will marry, but "some may not marry at all," and they would still be better off outside of the city, being able to see some fruits of their labor in terms of savings and disposable income. The terrible situations in which the women of New York work is Fern's primary concern, but she does not object to the idea of women working at all. According to her writings, some working women cling to their hard work simply because it allows them some escape from being another's slave, which is not something married women—of any class—can look forward to at the end of the day.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/thackeray/angel.html

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/g/gender-ideology-and-separate-spheres-19th-century/