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Bringing Home the FodderA woman carries home hay to feed animals in Jageshwah, Uttarakhand, India. Women make up more than half of India’s livestock-farming labor, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.

Photograph by Alex Treadway, Nat Geo Image Collection

15 Pictures of Women at Work for Labor Day

To celebrate the “working man’s holiday,” here are some of our favorite pictures of working women around the world.

ByBecky Little

September 5, 2015

The U.S. holiday Labor Day—marked on the first Monday of September—was born out of the tumultuous 19th century American Labor movement. Industrialization led to many workers grinding through 12-hour days in unsafe conditions. Strikes and protests were common. At its founding in the 1880s, Labor Day was intended to be a “working man’s holiday.”

Or a working woman’s. In these photos from National Geographic’s archives, women around the world perform jobs as various as their lives—from working in a steel mill, to teaching students, to driving a hay-baling machine while breastfeeding.