I am thinking a lot about my grandchildren at the moment and how they will deal with life in the coming century. Some people are drawing comparisons with the current situation in England and the Victorian era. If a middle class girl in Victorian England - let us say in Birmingham or at least outside London - didn't want to get married and settle down did she have other options? I am aware of some Victorian women who had careers and were influential in literature and science but I don't have a clear picture of how often that could happen.
I’m assuming that by ‘middle class’ you mean someone who is not independently wealthy, who needed to earn an income but was educated, literate and reasonably informed about the world.
Firstly the options that are not there : law, medicine ( except very late in the century when formal training was given to nurses, before then it was largely seen as a type of domestic service), engineering, office work ( clerks are exclusively male ), armed forces, police. Anything involving specialised training or contact with the public would be barred to a female, or not respectable enough for a middle class girl.
This was a dilemma that was well enough understood in Victorian times for it to become a trope in literature. The options that were open to young women were ( as explored by the Brontes, Conan Doyle, Collins, Dickens and countless others )
A. becoming a governess - considered a respectable form of being a servant looking, after and educating children usually boys up to 7 or 8 and girls to 13 or 14.
B. School teaching primarily to younger children. The increasing regulation of education through the century and the introduction and raising of the compulsory schooling age increased opportunities for teachers.
It took the labour shortages of the Great War for women to enter the workforce in administrative and retail work in significant numbers.