Of course, when it comes to historical jobs, there seems to be some distinct categories. First, are the dangerous and degrading jobs often reserved for those who are poor and marginalized. Or ones where the desperately poor and marginalized are often drawn to. Second, are the professions occupied by more wealthy people that have some strings attached such as lack of decision autonomy or a need to take on considerable debt. Third, are the jobs that are still around today and seem pretty normal. But had other implications due to lack of certain technologies or policy at the time. Fourth are the jobs that we idealized and dream about that actually weren’t that great. Like being a princess, queen, samurai, knight, or an ancient warrior for Sparta or Rome. In this post, we’ll look into more historical jobs that weren’t as great as we think they are.

21. Princess – At some point in their lives, many young girls often imagine themselves as wanting to be a princess thanks to a steady diet of Disney Princess films and fairy tales. After all, who doesn’t want to live in a castle, be waited on by servants, have sassy animal sidekicks, marry a handsome prince, and live happily ever after? However, when it comes to the days before constitutional monarchy and representative democracy, being a princess never really guaranteed you a happy ending. For one, your birth will probably be seen as a disappointment to at least one of your parents simply due to lacking the desired genitalia. After all, male heirs are desired and being born a girl will likely render you ineligible for the throne in countries with male-only succession laws. Especially if you’re the firstborn or born into a family of sisters. Second, if you have a brother or an older sister, you’ll grow up with someone in your family who’ll receive way more attention from everyone than you. Then there’s the fact that your royal status makes you daddy’s little political bargaining chip. So in the most likely scenario that you’re low in the line of succession, you’ll soon have to leave your whole life behind to marry a prince or king whom you haven’t met yet and in a country where you may not speak the language. The betrothal agreement may have been brokered when you were still in diapers and you may already know who the guy may be. In some cases, he may be the uncle or cousin or someone who’s old enough to be your dad or grandpa. But you don’t have any choice in the matter regardless. Once you’re there, you must go through with the ceremony regardless of your personal feelings about your intended husband and start learning the language, assimilate into the court culture, and popping out kids pronto. Know that boys are preferred and that if anything in the bedroom goes wrong, it’s always your fault. Even if your husband has his own sexual hangups (Louis XVI of France), is fundamentally sterile (King Charles II of Spain), or simply refuses to do his duty (Czar Peter III of Russia). If he’s got a mistress and doesn’t think much of you, well, you’ll just have to live with it. But don’t go get yourself a boyfriend since that’s just unforgivable. Because that could result in divorce and lifelong imprisonment at best or beheading at worst. If you find yourself in line to the throne, well, expect some major objection to your position just because of your gender. Just ask Empress Matilda who was her dad’s designated heir and still had to fight a war with her cousin King Stephen over it, which she didn’t get. And if you’re in ancient Egypt, you’ll have to marry your brother and worry about relatives conspiring to kill you.

22. Queen Consort – Sure, being a queen consort may be one step up from being a princess but with more power and responsibility. Well, power depending on who your husband is and the state of your relationship with him as well as how often he’s at the palace. Still, as the king’s wife, you must stand by your man, pop out kids, rule as regent when he’s unable to fulfill his royal duties, be a shining example as the kingdom’s mother, and ensure good relations with your husband’s kingdom and your home country. Even if he ignores you and prefers the company of his mistresses that you’ll just have to accept (King Henri II and King Louis XIV of France). Even if he openly hates you, treats you like crap in public, and banishes you from the country (King George IV of Great Britain). Even if your inability to get pregnant is more his problem than yours (King Charles II of Spain and King Louis XVI of France). Even if his whole family hates you (Napoleon Bonaparte). Even if he has you locked up because he just doesn’t like you (King Philip II Augustus of France). Even if you do everything right but he still wants to get rid of you because you’re entering your 40s and still haven’t given him a son that’s lived past infancy (Henry VIII). If you’re in an Asian country or the Ancient Near East, you’ll have to deal with concubines and secondary wives competing for your husband’s attention and favor. If you’re a Hapsburg or come from a heavily tangled family tree, expect to be constantly pregnant from your teenage years, bury a bunch of your kids during infancy, and die before you reach 30. In any respect, you’ll be under tremendous pressure to produce an heir if you don’t have one already and have little privacy especially on your wedding night and when you give birth. But if you play your cards right, survive the childbirth and palace intrigue, and retain your place at court as long as your husband’s still alive, you might graduate to queen mother who might be able to rule through your children. Although you’ll be asked to retire to a convent at some point.

23. Pharaoh – Oh, to be Pharoah of Ancient Egypt living in a palace with a pile of treasure and being treated as a living god. Except absolute divine power will never give you a break. As Egypt’s chief diplomat and HR manager, you spend a lot of time drowning in scrolls, reading military dispatches, settling land disputes, and handling endless taxes. As a living incarnation of Horus, you’re responsible for everything going wrong. And we mean everything like weak Nile floods, plagues, or failed harvests which were often signs of you upsetting the universe’s balance. So best to fake solutions to these problems you have nothing to do with and can’t fix anyway. Since you’re seen as a literal god, there won’t be a large gene pool of eligible spouses so you’ll marry your sister and cousin within a very tangled family tree. Also, expect your extreme royal inbreeding to result in high infant mortality and severe physical health problems in your kids like bone diseases and clubbed feet. As for your royal palace, it’s basically a Game of Thrones-style den of family plots and betrayals where your ambitious relatives would happily poison you for the throne if they could get away with it. Then let’s not forget that you must undergo exhaustive daily rituals to keep the gods happy like reciting specific prayers, eating sanctified food, and performing symbolic banishing of evil from sunrise to late at night. If you’re a woman, there’s a high chance you might have to cross dress at official ceremonies and keep fake beard. That or liken yourself as an incarnation of Isis. But at least you get an epic send off in a great big fancy tomb as well as leave a legacy of vast public work projects people will remember you for. Well, that’s kind of complicated. Yes, you’ll definitely get one hell of a funeral and be buried in a fancy tomb. However, it’s almost inevitable that your earthly belongings will be stolen once the sand around you grows cold. Especially if you’re entombed in one of those massive pyramids that eventually went out of style after the Old Kingdom. In fact, you’ll probably be lucky if future archaeologists just find your sarcophagus and nothing else. As for your monuments, well, there’s a chance future generations might violently chisel your face off your own temples or try to erase you from existence in the official records. Although erasure might mean that you get to keep your stuff in the afterlife until you’re dug up by some archaeologist in a few thousand years. Just ask Pharaoh Tutankhamen. Still, if your body ends up dug up and put on display in a museum, consider it a win.

24. Outlaw – Whether you’re in the Old West, Merry Old England, 1930s Middle America, or anywhere else in the good old days, everyone seems to love a dashing outlaw sticking it to the man as a Robin Hood figure that the public treats like a rock star. Yet, whether you’re a bank robber, train robber, highwayman, or gunfighter, being an outlaw wasn’t the fun and games it’s portrayed to be in movies or TV shows. Especially at a time when criminal protections were few and far between. If they ever existed at all. Being a fugitive from justice means that you’re stripped of certain legal protections and benefits that the rest of us enjoy as well as possibly running from the authorities for your life. If it’s medieval Europe, then anyone in the general public could murder you with complete impunity. At any rate, you’ll be living a nomadic existence where you’re always looking over your shoulder, unable to trust strangers or anyone else. Because law enforcement or bounty hunters are always on your tail. Whether they be the Sheriff of Nottingham, the King’s men, or the Pinkertons. You can never let your guard down, not even in front of your friends traveling with you. Because any one of them can betray you if there’s a reward. Which can leave you with nothing but enemies. You should also anticipate that you stand a very good chance of getting shot and watching your closest friends die or go to prison. Even if you survive the shootouts, you’re always on the run and will have to go hundreds of miles while wounded or in pain to avoid the local authorities. And you could forget seeking medical attention because you can’t count on every doctor being Samuel Mudd. Nor are most people going to treat you like you’re some sort of Robin Hood, especially if you have to steal from them just to feed yourself. Still, at any rate, you can always flee the authorities any way you can but the law will eventually catch up to you. Because many of you will die violent deaths like Bonnie and Clyde (shot in their car by police), Billy the Kid (shot in the back by Pat Garrett), Jesse James (shot in the back by Robert Ford), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (most likely killed in a Bolivian shootout), Dick Turpin (arrested for stealing chickens, turned in by his mailman, and hanged), and John Dillinger (shot in a movie theater by Feds).

25. WWI Fighter Pilot – Firing guns at each other in their biplanes, WWI dogfights are often depicted as a major spectacle in the sky. Hell, even Snoopy often fantasizes about being a flying ace hell-bent on taking down the Red Baron. Besides, better to be up in the air than down in those hellish trenches. However, we should note that by the time World War I broke out, the airplane was barely a decade old. Sure, your biplane may look pretty cool. But it’s a fragile, open cockpit death trap that’s often susceptible to engine failures and structural collapses. You’re talking about a flying contraption made from canvas, wood, and wire. But what kind of armor doesn’t have? Armor? Don’t be silly, there’s no armor on that thing. But wouldn’t a single burst of enemy fire inflict tons of damage? You mean shred the fuselage, disable the engine, or ignite highly flammable fuel tanks, yes. But what about parachutes? You won’t have a parachute. Are parachutes not available yet? They are. But military leaders refuse to issue them due to being too bulky for small cockpits. While some commanders are afraid that parachutes will only encourage pilots to abandon their aircraft too easily. So if your plane catches fire and has its wings shot up, best make your peace with God as you burn alive and crash to your inevitable death. So it’s no wonder that the WWI fighter pilot’s average life expectancy on the job is 4 to 6 weeks. Sometimes even mere days. Since we fight year round, expect to fly in freezing temperatures, wind, and rain at high altitudes. That it’s possible you can face severe frostbite before engaging in life-or-death dogfights. But surely the training’s good? You kidding? The casualty rate’s so staggering that the military needs new guys like yesterday. So training’s drastically cut short that we often get new cadets with less than a few dozen hours of flying time. Sometimes pilots have to build their own planes during instruction. But surely people see flying aces as heroes? No doubt about it. But know that your comrades in the trenches despise you since the superstar treatment reports give you often make them feel ignored. Still, at least your paid well and get better living quarters so there’s that.

26. Waitress – With financial volatility, prevalence of wage theft, long hours of constant physical labor, constant abuse from customers, establishment inefficiencies, sexual harassment, and poor management support, there’s no need to state that being a waitress absolutely sucks in today’s world. However, the waitresses have been around since at least the 1620s and they probably dealt with the same kind of bullshit as their modern counterparts and not much has changed. But until relatively recent times, they were seen as women of “loose morals” and were mainly employed to serve drinks to men from taverns to the music hall “pretty waiter girls” of the 1860s who were often paid in tips. And in these days before feminism was mainstream, you can guess what kind of side hustle many of these waitresses turned to after hours. Yes, prostitution since paltry salaries waiting tables made sex work necessary to make a living. Schoolteacher-turned-sociologist Frances Donovan went undercover in 1917 witnessing these waitresses’ lives in Chicago. But what’s shocking in historical times is how being expected to provide drinks and sexual services was just part of the waitress job description from the late 19^th century to Prohibition in fact. And their places were often targets of vice squads. One undercover vice investigator wrote about being in a New York City saloon during World War I wrote: “I picked out a blond waitress and went up with her on the upper floor. When she was ready to lay down she asked me for money.” Waitresses in 1918 El Paso were required to receive mandatory STD testing. Donovan herself took off her wedding ring to increase her day’s tips. Underlying it all was the cause of economic need, writing, “Because of the economic inefficiency of the men in her world, the waitress fails to reveal her ideal of domesticity and so she takes on a life of semi-prostitution.” Of course, Fred Harvey was seeking to turn waitressing into a respectable profession from the 1880s to the 1930s with his Harvey Girls at his restaurants as they were white girls replacing a workforce of black men and this idea wouldn’t take hold until much later in the 20^th century. Today, even though waitressing is still a rough and awful job filled with all kinds of abuse, at least no one expects the women waiting tables to give them a little something in the back. Even if it’s at Hooters, probably.

27. Frontier Settler – Americans always like to glorify the pioneering spirit of the western settlers in their covered wagons, taming the wilderness, and starting a new life in a humble homestead. Think you have what it takes to survive on the frontier? Well, before you embark on the Oregon Trail, here are some tips. First, make friends with the trees and animals because you’ll spend long periods of time completely cut off from civilization. So say goodbye to social gatherings and modern medicine. Second, always keep your hunting rifle in handy because survival often depends entirely on the weather. Settlers like you can face crop failures, droughts, and devastating blizzards. So if you can’t properly cache meat and collect firewood before the first snow, then you might well join the choir invisible. Third, you have to fell massive trees with basic axes to build your log cabin or dig out a sod house. Farming will be especially grueling so you’ll be planting your first corn crop around uncleared tree stumps. Fourth, you’ll have to carry every drop of water for cooking, cleaning and bathing, all of which you’ll have to heat on wood stove. While you have to build your own drafty outhouse for your own private business. Fifth, expect constant hazards such as dangerous wildlife like bears and mountain lions along with deadly diseases like cholera, malaria, typhoid, and the ever-classic dysentery. Also, expect violent clashes over local territory with the local residents who we like to pretend don’t exist and will eventually evict to some far-off reservation. Finally, remember to take care of your tools because relying on poor ones will often prove fatal. A dull knife, the wrong gunpowder, or the wrong sharpening techniques can be the difference between eating or starving to death. Just remember that many of those venturing into the wilderness either died or ultimately found the hardships so unbearable that they eventually abandoned their claims and returned to civilization. So happy trails.

28. Commercial Fisherman – When it comes to popular depictions of fishermen in historical times, they seemed rather genteel with great catches and always enjoying themselves and their families in the portside town. Even current depictions like in Coda depict fishing as a part-time job for high school kids. Except no, it isn’t. Far from it, in fact and more like “Downeaster Alexa.” Today, commercial fishing is considered to be among the most dangerous jobs in the world due to remote locations, small crews, and the constant threat of rogue waves. Crew members work grueling multi-day or multi-week shifts with very little sleep. While working during physical exhaustion dramatically increases likelihood of fatal workplace accidents. As for earnings, well, they’re rarely guaranteed and rely entirely on the catch’s size and market value, making it incredibly stressful when stocks or low or prices crash. In historical times, commercial fishing was likely no different since the 17^th century though catches were far more plentiful. However, keep in mind that until the late 19^th century, fishing crews also had to reside on wooden ships in squalid conditions, deal with pirates, and had no access to refrigeration. But at least it’s better than working on a whaling ship.

29. Roman Legionnaire – There’s nothing more glorious than serving in the Roman Army where you get to fight under illustrious Roman generals and expand her glorious empire. But before you go off galivanting throughout the Mediterranean, let’s go over a few things about being a Roman legionnaire. When you put your name on the scroll, expect your enlistment period to last a minimum of 25 years in a far-flung hostile frontier. So make sure you say goodbye to your loved ones because you may never see your hometown again. Your starting pay will be the same as a farm worker. But the state will deduct the cost of your weapons, food, and clothing directly from your paycheck. And you have to carry your armor, weapons, shield, and backpack 90 miles a day. Want to get married? You won’t be legally allowed to do so. Anyway, expect extreme discipline through terror. Should your unit mutiny or show cowardice in combat, commanders can enact a measure called decimation where every tenth man in your regiment’s beaten or stoned to death. Lesser infractions such as falling asleep on watch were punished by fustuarium, where everyone in the unit gets the lash. While you’ll be spending most of your time building things like roads, bridges, forts, and digging massive trenches. Because idle hands might mean potential mutiny. Nonetheless, if you stick this out, there is a chance you can rise through the ranks and receive a nice piece of land upon your retirement. That is if you make it through your 25-year enlistment first.

30. Spartan Warrior – Any fan of 300 might fantasize being among the 300 Spartan warriors in the Battle of Thermopylae. But before you get into your hoplite armor and take up your sword and shield, here’s a little FYI. For one, as a boy of seven, expect to be stripped from your mother and sent to the Agoge, a kiddie military school where you’ll be routinely beaten, sleep in freezing conditions, and go without any supper to encourage stealing, which only resulted in more beatings if you’re caught. And no, you don’t get a choice either. When you’re 15, expect to endure the Krypteria, where you’ll be sent into the wilderness to spy and murder enslaved helots. You’ll also participate in ritual public whippings at the altar of Artemis Orthia where you’ll endure extreme agony in order to prove your loyalty. After you go through the Krypteria, it’s 10 years in the army on active service followed by decades of reserve service until you reach 60. Assuming you live that long. Although you’ll be expected to marry by 30 and produce little Spartan warriors and future warrior moms, expect to spend your late teens and 20s living in the barracks. For meals, you’ll be eating syssitia, a combination of unappetizing pork and blood soup. If you can’t afford your food portion to these mandatory meals, you could be stripped of your citizenship. Also, remember whenever you’re entering battle, never show fear and retreat and always come home either with your shield or on it. Because returning without your shield is the ultimate disgrace guaranteed to result in social exile or suicide.