CHAPTER TWO

THE SINGLE STEPS OUT: BOWERY GALS, SHOPPIES, AND THE BOHEMIAN BACHELORETTE

I do love it—me makin’ a spectacle ’o myself…but that’s how it is now: [I’m] an American girl in her finery and telling the men “where d’ you get off?”

—IRISH DOMESTIC TURNED “FREE WORKING GIRL,” 1871

Here is the work-a-day fact: No one knows where you came from, no body knows where you go.

—THE LONG DAY, BY DOROTHY RICHARDSON, 1905

…Your white collar girls?…I see them on buses, poor damned share croppers in the Dust Bowl of business, putting up a fight in their pretty clothes and keeping their heeby-jeebies to themselves. There’s something so courageous about it, it hurts me inside.

—KITTY, EN ROUTE TO WORK, KITTY FOYLE

A GAL’S LIFE

Picture a silent-movie set in the heart of Manhattan’s old Lower East Side, scene one, twilight. We pan across the tenements and laundry lines and see what we expect to see: a tangle of peddler’s carts, drunk, disheveled men, and large-bosomed women surrounded by animals and children who race like little Artful Dodgers in and out of the crowd. Making her way slowly through this mess is a girl. The camera picks her out, follows her, and slowly irises in to frame her face. Highlighted in her cinematic bubble, our girl twists a thinning gray scarf around her neck. Her face is chalky pale. Kohl liner has smudged to form half moons beneath her eyes. She looks ready to faint.

Back in the full shot that is her world, she limps along, past the garbage and the gangs of rude, hissing boys, and stops at last outside a windowless structure. Cut to the crumbly interior. The exhausted girl enters, then does what she’s supposed to do and faints. Plaster drops like snow onto her face. Cue the villain.

Most likely she knows him, this man now staring down at her, assessing his options. (Clearly going for help will not be one of them.) He shakes her, slaps her a few times, then with a quick look around props her up against a wall and lifts her skirts. The rest we don’t see, but we know that whatever went on it was her fault, for she lives a depraved unnatural female life in a harsh, cold world that has depleted whatever slight moral fiber she had to start with.

At about the time our spinster was canonized as an unfortunate social specimen, there appeared on the female landscape an even more unsettling single girl: the “factory maid” and her salacious cousin “the Bowery gal.” These new single icons were identified and dissected in the penny press. They later became the heroines of cheap novels, live points of interest in city guidebooks as well as characters in early vaudeville. This depraved and unnatural female, the poor thing preyed on by horny landlords, would become a staple of the new aesthetic form known as melodrama. She was born to fade to black.

The Bowery and factory gals were immigrants, part of the European exodus that had begun during the 1820s and increased radically every fifteen years thereafter. (In 1830, for example, there were an estimated 18,000 new Americans—Germans, Italians, Poles, Scots, Irish, Greeks. By 1845, the number stood at roughly 250,000.) As one commentator put it, Europe had “vomited.”

And it spit up increasingly undesirable transplants, meaning eastern European Jews and unwed women.* Like many middle-class spinsters, these women were often dangerously poor and thought to have psychological problems stemming from their presumed unwanted status. That was about all they had in common with the average spinster. According to all reports and dramatizations, foreign girls were crude, illiterate, and extremely rude in what accented English they possessed. They spoke back to men. They walked the streets as they chose, unescorted and, as we shall see, improperly dressed. In the views of one nineteenth-century British visitor, the American working girl presented a moral calamity that, considering the temptations of New York, could prove even more disastrous than the English model. As he wrote in 1870, “They are neither fitted for wives by a due regard for the feelings and wishes of their husbands, nor a knowledge of the simple rudiments of housekeeping…one of their common remarks to each other when speaking of [men]…is that they would like to see a man who would [not] boss them.”

That, at least, was the communal fantasy. In truth, many of these girls, especially the newly arrived, lived quietly with their families. The emphasis was on work, usually “out work,” freelance piece sewing that brought in pennies—if the sewn pieces fit those in some unseen larger batch; if the home workers were not undercut by aggressive family groups equipped with sewing machines; and if everyone stayed healthy and could switch off during the night to meet deadlines.

By 1860, single working women formed one quarter of the total U.S. workforce and not only in home-based seamstressing. When they’d been around a while, girls fourteen years and up might find work in factories; others—usually the Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians—worked as maids. Whatever they did, they returned home after twelve-hour workdays, to a series of mandatory female chores. At the end of the week these girls were further expected to turn over all outside earnings to parents, pay envelope unopened. (The practice was never enforced among boys.) Worse—although girls argued the point—was getting by on your own.

For her book City of Women, scholar and urban detective Christine Stansell studied the New York City census for 1855 and found that of 400 single women surveyed, 224 lived on their own, somehow stretching three to four dollars per week to finance a tiny space in a boardinghouse or a bed in a dorm or, worse, an almshouse, what would look to us like a homeless shelter. In that same year it was estimated that close to 500 single women and young girls arrived in New York City every week, not only Europeans but Asians and “country girls” who’d run off from Upstate New York or Pennsylvania farms.

Alone, unsure what to do, some became “learners,” a misleading term for slavelike seamstresses who worked fifteen hours a day, six days a week, receiving in exchange only meals on the days they worked. To pay rent somewhere and to feed themselves on Sundays, learners had no choice but to double as prostitutes. Others were able to bypass “learning” and work for a few dollars a week in sweatshops, small makeshift factories hidden within tenement houses, but very few got by without occasional hooking. Others made their way up to the big shops—the factories, where they worked as bookbinders, fancy-hat or artificial-flower makers (good jobs, relatively speaking), or as inside seamstresses, cigar makers, shoe manufacturers, button or box makers.

Like the tenement sweatshop, the factory was a workplace nightmare, only bigger. In a space the size of a gymnasium, hundreds of women crowded almost on top of one another around tables or hulking machinery. They worked at their manual tasks for hours with only minutes-long breaks. The air seemed to be clotted, and the noise—like that of an indoor construction site—routinely led to partial hearing loss within a year. Many workers had scars on their hands and faces and permanent dye stain on their fingers.

One Christian organization published an end-of-the-year volume on women in the city, 1877. In language that had clearly been translated by an editor into readable English, one girl described her first view of the factory: “I felt within me a deep and dark revulsion at the grim brick walls and the innumerable dirty windows and rusted fire escapes. It looked a ruin. The impulse I had was to run away, but there was a fascination with it, too.”

For a glimpse inside, let’s look at the once scandalous and banned novel Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900). Here we follow Carrie on her first day of work as an ill-equipped new factory operative in Chicago:

Carrie got so [anxious]…that she could scarcely sit still. Her legs began to tire and she felt as if she would give anything to stand up and stretch. Would noon never come? It seemed as if she had worked an entire day already. She was not hungry at all, but weak, and her eyes were tired straining at…one small point…her hands began to ache at the wrists and then in the fingers, and toward the last she seemed a mass of dull complaining muscles, fixed in an eternal position and performing a single mechanical movement which became more and more distasteful until at last it became absolutely nauseating.

Women staged “sit-downs” and actually went on strike—for better pay, windows, some form of toilet facilities, regular breaks—as early as 1825, but with little success. The only organized labor power lay in the male unions, and these groups, run like fraternal orders, excluded females. In the idealized social scheme, women were supposed to quit their paid jobs and go back to the home, resurrecting some shred of the former preindustrial order. (In fact, the only union discussions of working women early on concerned prostitution.) Working women knew where they stood—and that was alone. During their first major strikes leaders declined all advice offered by men.

But as much as the factories were filthy and dangerous, they offered girls something unavailable anywhere else, and that was companionship, the social connections that might lead to some small life beyond the family or the tiny room. On many floors in the needle trades, in the book binderies and cigar lofts, girls sang as they worked (a favorite: “The Fatal Wedding”). They shouted the latest gossip above the noise. A heavily grease-stained volume, The Lucky Dreambook, made its way around and girls recorded their wishes. And many read, or learned to read, from “yellowbacks,” early romance novels with titles like Woven on Fate’s Loom or Lost in a Fearful Fate’s Abyss.

The factory served as an unintentional means of assimilation. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Hungarian, Greek girls—well, some of them, anyway—learned to work together, the older girls offering linguistic corrections and lessons in the sartorial tricks that could make one look like an American. Ignoring management, girls ran secret contests and lotteries and held parties on their breaks for almost every occasion. The last survivor of the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire in 1911 recalled recently that when the fire broke out on floor six, the girls there had just lit the candles on a cake—a coworker was getting engaged! Quickly they scattered; the survivor, who’d somehow make her way to a staircase, looked around for her engaged friend and saw her standing by a window. When she looked away and then back, the girl was gone; like hundreds of others, she had jumped.

There was only one decent thing to be said for factory life: There were set hours. The workday started, you rang in (“punched in”), and you rang out. You were, in the words of one domestic who knew no such luck, an “independent.” Life for the domestic, usually an Irish girl—74 percent of all Irish girls in 1855 and an even higher percentage in 1870 worked as maids—was erratic. Their lists of tasks were long and often incomprehensible, involving both heavy labor and the care of clocks and Victorian music boxes and sculptures and various other precious objects they’d never before even seen. Newly stamped with her True Woman status, the wife, said one laboring girl, seemed never “to know what she wants done and how does she want it done? So she changes it ’round all the time and it’s you who gets the shriek, like a bloody animal, if you’re wrong in figuring what she wanted.”

Added another girl, nineteen: “I would always rather work with a man. They know what they want done and you do it.”

Yet the True Woman had a hard time comprehending why such a girl, known among employers as a “Bridget,” would not be grateful. As Catherine Beecher herself wrote: “We are continually harrowed with tales of the sufferings of distressed needlewomen and yet women will encounter these chances of ruin and starvation rather than make up their mind to permanent domestic service. Now what is the matter with domestic service?”

One Bridget explained: “Your life is not your own unless she says it is. She will always think of some other trifle task.”

This barely concealed hostility made wives suspicious of their Bridgets and far more likely to watch them closely for any change in attitude and appearance. Even observers like Catherine Beecher picked up on the growing tendency of maids to leave work in fancy clothes. And reports filtered back that such and such a girl had been seen down the street with a man. In England there had been a brief fad among newly prosperous matrons to have their servants look prosperous, too. But here, in the States, newly monied women were often insecure; a servant who put on airs was likely to be disciplined. No fancy clothes. Not a hint of cosmetics. No men picking her up from the kitchen door. “Hah!” one girl told a female reformer: “She is daft. What man would I want to have come to pick me up here anyways? Why would I want to have him see me here? To think that the best I can do is work in someone’s kitchen?”

Employers complained about the “servant problem” and the girls quit and went looking for a better place, but the situation never seemed to improve. In 1863 reformer Virginia Penny published the first edition of Employments of Women, for decades the most detailed listing of every job available to women, complete with technical workplace advice. (For example, in factories, “women should not wear hoops, as they check the progress of all whom they meet, in narrow passes and between machinery.”) About “serving girls” she agreed, they are “generally and unhesitatingly denounced, even in their presence, as pests and curses.”

For the average working girl, the logical conclusion to life was still in marriage, usually arranged or at least encouraged by the available relatives. If there was no immediate male candidate, elders of the community turned to the “homeland” or “exile” organizations that helped with the perplexing details of American life, including housing protocol, insurance, written English, and various legal matters. Quickly, however, many girls came to view the community’s Landsmanshaft balls, with their predictable collection of boys, or the yearly Oktoberfest outing the way an American mall rat might react to sitting through a four-hour plenary session of the Kiwanis Club. Once a girl had “got out” a bit, seen even a tiny slice of the city, its elaborate, romantic store windows, the neat pretty clothes on the shop girls, once she had read the sexy novels at work, sung the songs, she felt like doing something…new. One Grand Street sign put it this way:

WOMEN, WANT! PLEASE, PLEASE WANT—BEGIN TO WANT!

ALL THE NEWS THAT FIT HER (AND SOME THAT DIDN’T)

The early New York press concerned itself largely with business. Editors and publishers were there to cover an international seaport, a vast manufacturing sector, the hub of the nation’s transportation systems and its highest financial institutions. The papers they put out reflected that solemn responsibility: The Commercial Advertiser, Mercantile Adviser, and, among many others, The Journal of Commerce. Other less illustrious papers covered topics of more general interest: riots, fires, strikes, sex scandals, murders in seafront “bawdy houses,” and the discoveries of badly mutilated dead prostitutes.

There were hundreds of papers in any given year, including by the mid-nineteenth century the New York Times and the New York Post. But for the purpose of identifying, covering, and ultimately mythologizing the single working girl, there was the penny press.

The term penny press suggests the kind of tabloid many of us try very hard not to read while standing in line at the supermarket. But these were in many instances full, well-edited papers best known for introducing and developing the urban sketch—that unlikely slice-of-life adventure that would much later come to be known as the human interest story. In these personal, chatty communiqués, writers acting as cultural explorers and translators introduced the latest in unfamiliar city types—single working girls, for example—to a curious and nervous public.

The penny press dates to 1833, when Benjamin Day bought the New York Sun and put in place an iron-cast steam-powered press so fast and so cheap to run that he upped his print run by 100 percent and cut his price to a penny. He also hired newsboys, like those in England, to hawk papers on the street—shrieking and badgering passersby, as if the Messiah had arrived (or a beautiful lone girl had been murdered) and only the Sun had the story.

The penny daily came into its own a few years later with the launch of the New York Tribune, a daily (including a more in-depth weekly version) that was founded and edited by Horace Greeley. Greeley was in all respects a public figure: a genuine intellectual, a sometime politician, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, a vehement abolitionist, and a man with an interest in just about everything from single women and their economic lives (feminist writer Margaret Fuller was a Boston correspondent) to world politics (Karl Marx covered London). He refused to run sensational police news or “objectionable medical advice,” and he introduced by-lines for reporters. He shared the journalistic spotlight with James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, a second-generation journalist with the sensibilities of a P. T. Barnum. He personally financed Henry Morton Stanley’s trip to Africa to find the lost missionary Dr. Livingstone and introduced polo as a sport to the United States, doing most of this while running the newspaper from abroad in Paris.

But the two men at least had one idea in common: Take the urban sketch—the man-about-town exposés, the true tales of low life, the unknown lone girl included—and make it into a regular news beat. As writer Hutchins Hapgood had noted sardonically just years before, “…the curiosity of well-to-do and so-called respectable people leads them to [under]go any physical, esthetic or moral discomfort in the search for truth and human nature…[especially] ‘low life.’”

Here was the first mass-media presentation of the single woman. There were many unexpected correspondents out in the field.

In every newspaper office, hundreds of “true-and-shocking-tales” flew, uninvited, over the transom. Many of these unsolicited works came from middle-class wives who, quoting one, “have taken it upon ourselves to go out upon visits [to the poor] and to be of good use in recording what we have found.” What they found were women of the tenements boiling potatoes and cabbage (our brave visitors swooned but did not, we are assured, faint from the stench). They typically encountered half-dressed children, husbands who read or drank without speaking, and seated off to the side, the infamous lone girl sewing and accidentally, repeatedly, stabbing herself with the needle.

Along with the wives there were many church ladies out on the beat, assisting the poor and in the process seeking conversions to their faiths. In their missives, the air is always damp, vaporous, and reeking of “imminent death.” There is a lot of coughing. Swearing. Children shriek. The self-styled missionaries worry that the lone girl, seventeen, a seamstress, a factory lass, will not be able to manage the children once the woman on the bed has converted to the faith and died, coughing. William Dean Howells satirizes the dramatic pretense of these reports in his novel The Minister’s Charge (1902). Here the niece of a devoted visiting woman tells a friend of her aunt’s good works. Every day, it seems, this aunt “carries bouquets of flowers to the deserving poor.” “Why?” asks the friend. Says the niece, “They prevent crime.”

Other chronicles arrived from the young male aristocrats who invented American “slumming”—drinking, smoking opium, and mixing with prostitutes whenever possible. Such dissolute rich boys were not likely to become reporters, in the sense that they were not likely to sit at a desk every day and crank out copy. But some wrote up their experiences in conversational essays; real reporters borrowed from them.

Many reporters, all of them men, did not regard themselves as permanent, serious journalists. Like “actor,” “journalist” was not yet deemed quite a respectable profession. Despite the influence of mighty editors like Horace Greeley, staff reporters imagined that they were on the job to get in shape for writing their future books. Articles were like warmups, a means by which to hone one’s talent at crafting vignettes or eliciting (or inventing) the biting quote. And it was handy to have so much material to draw on: these fussy Christian women tracking seamstresses and factory waifs; the uptown cavaliers frequenting the top-notch whorehouses and concert saloons. On daily deadlines, one had so little time to get out and just look; here was a way to collect exotic mise-en-scènes and enhance dull and ordinary reportage writing.

The frequent subject of these hybrid narratives was the lone girl, preferably in the form of the beautiful, suffering young worker—the industrial-era Sleeping Beauty. In story after story, writers played out the tragic prophesy of her life, whether or not they’d ever actually met her. Here is a prime example from one Edgar J. Fawcett, “faithful correspondent,” writing beneath his beefy photo in an 1869 issue of Arena magazine:

What wonder…beneath the onus of her torments…that their morals, like their clothes and fingers, are sadly stained? Haggard and jaded, they are…robbed of even the physical chance to seek ease through sin…[desirable only to] a Quasimodo of the slums. How should it concern You, Mrs. Fine Lady, to care that girls of the same age of your Carrie and Fannie are starving…walking miles to work in direst weather in thinnest tattered shawls.”

That’s not to suggest that all stories on the working girl were moralistic or sex-drenched inventions. The major penny presses ran many serious exposés of factory and immigrant life, and a young woman’s unsteady, often terrorizing, experiences within. The author was usually George G. Foster, the so-called Dickens of New York City and the Tribune’s onetime “city items editor.” A self-styled urban ethnographer, he’d written a small library of hidden New York titles including New York by Gaslight and New York Naked. He’d written a novel, New York Above Ground and Underground, and he’d collected his works under the title New York in Slices. His following was huge and included many men who used his books as clandestine guides to the whorish New York. But his editors recognized in him a real reporter.

In one long 1845 series, “Labor in New York,” he found young female cigar makers who worked twelve-hour shifts standing, passing the time by singing “ribald drinking tunes,” each “courteous” to the others “when it came time for her to try for a harmony.” He contributed to investigative series, including the famed “Dens of Death,” a three-month extravaganza in 1850, and proposed or influenced many others, such as “Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York” by Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor. Not that this was an agricultural story, per se. The corn girls, many about fourteen, many black, were street vendors who sold roasted corncobs, as popular then as Italian ices and huge pretzels are now. Their famed cry—“Hot corn, hot corn, here’s your lily white hot corn, hot corn all hot, just come out of the boiling pot”—was believed to be less a fast-food pitch than a sexual come-on. (Perhaps that’s why the ubiquitous “corn girl” vanished in film to be replaced by a pure and virginal Lillian Gish type selling pencils, apples, or matches, none of which make a big appearance in the records.) Like Foster, Robinson later extended his piece into a popular book and Hot Corn even now stands as a compendium of eccentric lone-female types in old New York City. (Its subtitle: Including the Story of Little Katy, Madalina, the Rag Picker’s Daughter, Wild Maggie &c.)

Its success—two thousand copies sold in 1854—encouraged penny-press lords to recognize a reader who had even more interest in this female figure than the average male reader. That was the female figure herself.

IN WHICH THE TIRED HUDDLED MASSES FIX THEIR HAIR

The average immigrant working girl lived in two distinct worlds—the world outside and the unavoidable one inside. Reconciling the two demanded a huge amount of mental energy. Girls were under the strictest family scrutiny. And even those who lived in boardinghouses confronted questions: Where had she been and with whom had she spoken? Just who was that man walking up and back across the way? What girls did she know at work, and “what” were they? (German? Jew? Irish? Swede? Slut?)

Anzia Yezierska, a Polish immigrant who wrote stories in Yiddish about ghetto life, focused much of her fiction on the tension between frightened, old-world parents and their newly American daughters. In The Bread Givers, a novel subtitled “A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New,” young women argue repeatedly with their fathers about the right to leave the house on their own. “Don’t you know what’s out there?” one typically bellows. “HOW can I know anything?” replies the girl. In “Fat of the Land,” a short story, a young woman laments the embarrassment she feels when with her mother: “God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I’m done for.”

Yezierska, who’d gone to Hollywood to work as scenarist on the film version of her story collection Hungry Hearts, was known as “the queen of the ghetto” or “the immigrant Cinderella.” She always returned to the Lower East Side and somehow managed to live there in a way unimaginable for most immigrant women. She married twice and had a child, but unable to live a constricted wife’s life, she left the child with her husband and lived alone.

Her gift lay in detailing the generational assimilationist battle but also in revealing the underlying ambivalence felt on all sides. It was never as simple as girls begging to leave and frightened parents shrieking NO! While most immigrant parents feared America and what was “out there,” they also wanted their children to fit in, to make a good life, to marry, and, while keeping the faith and traditions, to do what was needed to thrive. Many new arrivals were urged to bury the wigs, lose the cloggish thicklaced shoes, the shawls and kerchiefs, plus any other article of clothing that reeked of the homeland. One man, age thirty, wrote to a late-arriving cousin, then seventeen: “Don’t take your dresses. Just one to wear…. Ifyou try to wear them here, we will not let you wear them.”

Ultimately, however, it was not that difficult for the young single girl to balance out these demands. That’s because it was impossible to ignore what one called “the Americanist way.” Whatever their inherited ambivalence, young women learned to “want.” They wanted to “put on style,” and they were willing to spend money earmarked for their families to do so. Wrote one factory girl in 1906, “Some of the women blame me very much because I spend so much money on clothes…. but a girl must have clothes if she is to go into society at Ulmer Park or Coney Island or the theater.”

One Sophie Abrams recalls her first real day in America as the day her aunt took her shopping: “She bought me a shirtwaist…a shirt, a blue print with red buttons and a hat like I never seen. I took my old brown dress and shawl and threw them away! I know it sounds foolish, we being so poor, but I didn’t care…. when I looked in the mirror, I said, ‘Boy, Sophie, look at you now…just like an American.’”

The daily press continued to cover the working girl as the terrorized figure at the heart of melodramatic sex plots and/or the victim of workplace or street abuse. But from time to time editors addressed single women as readers with questions. Following the example set by the new women’s magazines, papers launched personal-advice columns. By 1900, even the Jewish Daily Forward ran a Q-and-A called the Bintel Brief. Some sample questions: “Is it a sin to wear facial powder?” (answer unrecorded) and “Does facial hair make a bad impression?” (It does.) And over and over one read, “IS there anything I can do to hide the marks on my forehead?”

To look an absolute American was not solely a matter of dress. As many a heart-sinking magazine piece declared, fair, untainted skin alone identified the native girl. And many, many immigrants had arrived with noticeable blemishes. Often these were smallpox scars or acne caused by poor diet, stress, delayed adolescence. Whatever the cause, facial blemishes were widely attributed to syphilis, a disease often diagnosed by the appearance of red splotches. Dermatology did not exist yet as a medical specialty, and so a girl looking to have her skin healed had to wait to see the doctors on duty at the syphilis clinic. And any female seen entering or leaving a syphilis clinic was presumed to be a whore.

Some refused the humiliation and tried to treat themselves. (Not that so many who saw VD doctors got “well.”) It was on matters just like these that young women turned en masse to the advice columns. They learned, in this case, that the “fairest skin belongs to people in the earliest stages of consumption or [to] those of a scrofulous nature,” though there were ways to emulate a native glow. According to one story, the most efficient means was to starve oneself, thus “securing the purity of the blood.” Rest was important, cold breezes, running quickly around, then sitting and breathing until one felt dizzy. If none of that worked, girls were advised to track down a massive beauty volume called The Ugly Girl Papers by Susan C. Power (1875), a dense collection of beauty advice that had a small-type table of contents four pages long.

From this a girl learned that even “the worst face may be softened by wearing a mask of quilted cotton wet in cold water at night. Distilled water.” If that was not possible, there was advice on the clever usage of “carbonate of Ammonia and powdered charcoal…lettuce as a cosmetic…the secretive ways of arsenic,” and, should such materials prove difficult to obtain, a reader could still study “how to acquire sloping shoulders…how to use red hair…[and] the means to imitate the serpentine glide of the Creole.”

The average girl, the one who barely spoke English, might have sought out the less exotic but no less precise Young Ladies’ Counsellor: On the Outlines and Illustrations of the Sphere, Duties and Proper Appearance of the Young Woman. Others experimented.

One of their best experiments was in “banging,” a style that caught on like the shag. “One of the first things we learned,” wrote an anonymous woman “of business,” “was our way in the art of banging. We let our hair cover our foreheads in a small quick cut that would of necessity keep hid any flaring.” Once a girl was banged, all the sashes and ribbons and other fancy accouterments made better sense. Wrote one memoirist years later, banging was “the second best” thing that one could get to “a nose job.”

Whatever they tried, girls had to be clever and stylish on a pittance, and from the extant illustrations it seems a few at least succeeded. Anzia Yezierska made this point in The Bread Givers: “It took ten cents worth of pink paper roses purchased from a pushcart on Hester Street to…look like a lady from Fifth Ave.”

THE BOWERY BABE

Before we meet this uniquely decked-out single archetype, a few words about the world she inhabited. Historian Kathy Peiss has called the early industrial era the cultural age of “commercial leisure.” Huge public entertainment venues—Coney Island, dance halls, theaters—opened to the working classes at just the moment the working classes were discovering the concept of “fun.”

Everyone secretly longed to see what was out there. Many girls had spent their childhoods walking the neighborhood, peeking out at the world from behind packages and bundles of fabric they were bringing home for their mothers. At seventeen or at twenty-one, they were ready to go out. One young girl, nineteen, told the Herald: “All the waiting to go out and see people, to be brave enough to do it, to walk outside. Yes, we all heard about it; I don’t think any of us even imagined we would do it—go to a dance with two girls from the floor?…It was a very long time to tell mother. Mother did not have many pleasures in her life…. I was very worried of how I would dress.”

The only drawback was that these adventures and outings cost money. Girls never had enough. They didn’t make it, and what they made they “handed over.” Boys had the cash, and the crude equation came down to this: Girls who wanted to go out, who finally got up the nerve, understood that they’d be “treated.” The boy would pay her way. If this was not the first “treat”—if she’d walked out with him before, accepted ice cream or drinks, or gone with him to a park or a play—he’d expect some form of sex in return. And often he just took it. The girl who experienced these pleasures, this slight sense of freedom, also ran the risk of the murky occurrence now known as date rape.

The most infamous “treating” episode concerned Lanah Sawyer, a young woman who accepted the offer of treats—ice cream and a walk around the Battery—from a refined professional man who called himself “lawyer Smith.” His name was in fact Harry Bedlow, widely known to others as a “rascal” and “rake.” Afterward, he offered to walk Sawyer home and lured her instead into a bawdy house, where he raped her. At his trial, Bedlow was found not guilty in fifteen minutes. Despite the minor riot that followed—and some of the rioters were working-class men—the general consensus was that both had played their parts in the script. He had taken her out, treated her, bought her trifles, then taken what he deserved in return. In the “commercial culture of leisure” rape (and acquittal) would become a recurrent motif.

In the “old” countries, girls had moved seamlessly from the father’s house, perhaps briefly to an employer’s, and then to the husband’s. Usually the family knew the fiancé and his parents; marriages were often arranged. In the new world, and in its odd new single sector, girls would soon wander off in gangs to the Bowery, to the crowds and dance halls, so that their families could not possibly oversee whom they met or what they did. And men in New York City seemed less reliable than they had back home; they moved on—to other women, to other jobs outside the city.

As Christine Stansell wrote, in City of Women, “As people moved around…from the Old World to the New…and from country to city…and [amidst] the mobile and anonymous circumstances of the city…methods of ensuring male responsibility weakened.”

The most extreme example of this breakdown was the Alma Sands case. Sands was a Quaker girl who lived with her parents and took an interest in the family’s boarder, one Eli Weeks. The two slept together—not unusual in certain Old Country courtship systems; in fact, it was viewed as a sign of the couple’s seriousness and especially the commitment of the prospective bridegroom. Then, on the night before she was supposed to marry Eli Weeks, Alma Sands turned up dead. After weeks of wild public speculation, a jury indicted Weeks, describing him as a man who understood the depth of his commitment—an engagement—and in “fury” at “his unbearable promises” took unique, punishing measures to break free.

The Sands murder evoked a response similar to the hysteria surrounding the 1969 Manson murders. Everyone talked about it in gory detail and traded in rumors about witchcraft and satanic practices. Hundreds lined up to see the house where it occurred and, later, to see the girl’s shrouded body. Mothers, in particular, dragged their daughters to make a point that was sadly never less than confusing: Know and trust the man, my dear, although it’s hard now to ever know or trust the man. In cartoons a joking case was made for marrying one’s brother. Although who was to say how city life had changed one’s brother?

In the early days of working-girl life, most avoided the Bowery and instead gathered in groups of four or five and, arms linked, headed to Broadway. In an 1863 guidebook, Miller’s New York as It Is, or a Stranger’s Guidebook, the authors made the distinction: “To denizens of New York, society is usually known under the generic divisions of Broadway and the Bowery.” Broadway was the street—the golden thoroughfare of theaters and their wealthy clientele in furs and silks. For a working girl, there was little else to do but look. To hook up, to have a real time out, meant turning around and heading back to the Bowery, and this did not seem—not at first, anyway—to be an option.

We hear the word Bowery—a long two-way boulevard running from Manhattan’s East Village into Chinatown—and light on phrases such as “skid row” or perhaps “junkie bum.” But back then it was a scene. At sundown every day, this hub of the butcher’s trade became the site of a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream, and the concert saloons (saloon was a takeoff on the word salon); these were for men only. In the average concert saloon, “waiter girls” were often topless and there were bedrooms at the back.

Reigning over it all was a bunch of Irish boys, former gang members or pals who’d once worked together on the city’s famed volunteer fire crews. Now they worked mostly as journeymen and laborers. At least during the daylight hours. At night they came out dressed to rule. This was hostile male turf; girls were never entirely safe, but to some extent Bowery boys viewed the single girl as a compatriot—usually Irish and always working-class—and as such entitled to some brotherly protection. (Again, not that she was immune from brotherly advance and, sometimes, attack.) Raconteur and socialite Abram Dayton, a scion of the elite Knickerbocker clan, recalled that he’d gone down to the Bowery and easily slummed his way into numerous quick-sex encounters. But after the rise of the factory culture, with its rituals of the Friday-night stroll, he warned that “the Broadway exquisite who ventured ‘within the pale,’ was compelled to be…guarded in his advances…any approach…wither by work or look was certain to be visited by instant punishment.”

The Bowery boys, known in their self-created legend as “the b’hoys” (thus making the girls they kept around “the g’hals”), may be viewed as a first modern peer group. It was a time of union instability, so they were not organized as fellow laborers. They had no other political or religious affiliations. But they were linked, generally speaking, as ethnic laborers, an underclass only too aware of the distinctions between Broadway and the Bowery. If they shared no political or union line, they had a sensibility, a posture, a distinct manner of speech and a unique form of dress that marked them as members of an unofficial social club.

The b’hoy, from what’s described, wore his hair in a high combination of pompadour and ducktail. Abram Dayton recalled seeing “black straight broad-brimmed hat[s]…worn with a pitch forward…large shirt collar[s] turned down and loosely fastened…so as to expose the full proportions of a thick, brawny neck; a black frock coat…a flashy satin or velvet vest…pantaloons,” all worn with a lot of jewelry. The final image suggests fifties hoods dressed in drag. Low-life chroniclers characterized the b’hoys as a tough and defensive lot; still, they were so devoted to their “airs,” to their internal code of politesse, that they seemed posed there on the street kind of gallant.

The girls thought so.

As I’ve said, few girls made their way to the Bowery—not at first. (Even the ones who went to gape at Broadway were usually home by eight, telling wholesome lies to parents who could not begin to understand this new scheme.) The bold ones who “walked out” were usually, like the b’hoys, transplanted Irish—tough, independent, a bit hotheaded. An estimated eight out of ten young Irish girls had come, some alone, to the United States as family scouts. They sent for their relatives, as many as they could, using the pay they made as domestics.

Friday nights were a release, and all over the “east end” one might view “a continuous procession,” as George G. Foster wrote, “which loses itself gradually in the innumerable side streets leading…into the unknown regions of Proletarianism.” The girls busily losing themselves had dressed ecstatically. Using magazine illustrations, inexpensive patterns, or improvisation, the Bowery gals put their seamstressing skills to work and made dresses that paid homage to uptown fashions. Then, as if the dress was a cake, they decorated it. They loved notions: fancy buttons, lots of lace, ribbons, bows, fake-silk sashes, any small inexpensive item they could afford. One observer reported that these had no “particular degree of correspondence or relationship in color—indeed [it was common to] see…startling contrasts…a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon.”

The Bowery girl declared her independence from proper female decorum by appearing in public without a hat. All good women wore hats. The only exceptions were prostitutes, who needed open faces to make eye contact with prospective johns. Proper women went further and trimmed their expensive hats with veils and, below, wore heavy clothing to cover every imaginable body part. Skirts were worn so long for a while that it was a class marker, a sign of breeding, to have a strip of mud on one’s hem. (It meant that one had been out, appropriately dressed, promenading, stepping into and out of a coach.)

Excluding the reform set, the suffragists, the bohemians, and the “aberrant” (for example, the Lucy Stoners, women who fought to keep their names after marriage), prominent women went out for walks, or promenades, at appointed hours. They shopped, had their lunches and tea dates, then, as if returning from an afternoon shore leave, scurried home quickly with muddy hems. (That is, unless they had a planned assignation; certain madams in the best, least suspicious of brownstones catered exclusively to upper-class women and their lovers.) Occasionally, through the veil of her hat, a woman caught a glimpse of a g’hal, known to her as a servant, wearing…the Lord knew what.

As one remarked, “The washerwoman’s…attire is now like that of the merchant’s wife…and the blackboot’s daughter wears a bonnet made like that of the empress of the French.”

The true Bowery g’hal liked to look at least as outlandish as her evening’s companion, the b’hoy, who had a very clear idea of how his date should appear. Those in the Bowery fraternity, it may fairly be said, worshipped themselves. They spent much of their time watching plays and theatricals devoted to their own exploits as firefighting heroes and rulers supreme of the boulevard. Many of these lengthy epics, performed at the Bowery Theater, concerned a legendary firefighting hero called Mose, a John Henry/Paul Bunyan type who could walk through flames and had with him at all times his proportionately sized woman, Lize. Every Bowery girl wanted to be a beloved, tough-looking Lize. Every “reporter” out on the Bowery hoped to find one.

“Her very walk has a swing of mischief and defiance in it,” wrote George G. Foster of the Bowery girl; Abram Dayton noted, “Her gait and swing were studied imitations of her lord and master, and she trips by the side of her beau ideal with an air which plainly says, ‘I know no fear and I ask no favor.’”

One less sympathetic writer characterized the g’hal’s this way: “The Bowery Girl, the ‘cruiser,’…is taught early on that ‘the world is graft.’…She knows that she must take care of herself…she must be shrewd and rely upon herself alone. She drinks very little, saves her money for clothes. Then, when she is gaily attired, she goes…and ‘grafts’ in various ways.”

GETTING HOOKED

No matter how comfortable she felt out promenading, the Bowery girl, like any woman on the streets, was likely to be viewed as a “vagabond,” a potential prostitute dressed not for an evening out but for work. The associations between prostitution and lone women were so deeply embedded in the culture that women themselves often assumed that their peers, other gals they happened to pass on the street, were on the make. Even a girl stuck at home, guarded by a tyrannical father, could easily adopt that view based on the stories she read. Novels and magazines were filled with tales of prostitutional woe; periodicals seemed to run entire tales-of-woe sections. Here, from a newspaper account, is the testimony of one landlady who’d lost a tenant to the streets:

I seen her. ’A tiltin’ off her head, to sees up and back on the street…this girl, ’corse, she’d ’a lived in my old house. I felt turrible about her leaving…a house that she know’d was decent and where she could manage to live within her means…she was good when she came to this house. When I seen her that day I tried to get her to come. Coffee. She looked almost grateful…but she saw a man…and turned on me and raced to do what she would.

In fact, it was extremely difficult to assess who was a real sex professional. During the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth, prostitution fell under the criminal heading of “vagrancy.” Vagrancy, as then defined, meant loitering—standing or else walking up and back along a stretch of sidewalk. (Mothers, waiting to cross streets, were anxious to keep their girls moving lest they seem “loitery.”) Vagrancy arrests more than doubled between 1850 and 1860, but how many of these related to prostitution and how many were the result of more girls simply out on the street, it’s hard to say.

Like other cities, New York had a long tradition of hysterical estimates. In 1832 the evangelical Magdalene Society wrote in its annual report: “We have satisfactorily ascertained the fact that the numbers of females in this city, who abandon themselves to prostitution is not less than 10,000!” Throughout the mid-nineteenth century the Ladies’ Industrial Association, an early union, with almost all the city papers concurring, would claim that poor girls were turning in desperation to the street or low houses at rates approaching, roughly, 50,000 to 100,000 per year. The Justice Department predicted that by 1910 the figures would rise to 200,000 nationwide, and New York City, of course, would hold its own.

The obvious fact was that no one could live on two dollars a week—the typical salary—or even on a generous raise to four dollars or, if she was very lucky, seven. In 1870 the Herald estimated that 5 to 10 percent of all young working women made extra money by hooking, treating it as an adjunct to their jobs, although most sources, the Herald included, believed that the majority did not take it up as a career. But so hopeful a conclusion was open to ongoing debate.

In The Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City (1870, “with numerous engravings”), George Ellington, wealthy man-about-town and writer, told the whole story, cold. In a chapter entitled “Women of Pleasure,” he ran through what a girl could earn for sex in all kinds of situations. On the street, if she survived, she could make per session what a factory girl made during a week, roughly three to four dollars. In the “disorderly” houses, usually down by the seaport, arrangements were made on the spot, while at the merely down-at-the-heels parlor houses, pay ran at ten dollars a week and at the cleaner ones reached twenty to twenty-five. More respectable parlor houses paid live-in girls up to seventy dollars a week. At the elite houses the women—white women, usually actresses, showgirls, other out-of-work performers—started at two hundred per week and were known in some cases to marry their clients.

Prostitution was a major slice of the underground economy, a fact well known to politicians and the police, who accepted regular payoffs. Many landlords preferred hookers over working-class tenants because they obviously made much more money. (And under common law, owners were not regarded as accessories to a criminal act that happened to take place on their properties.) For a percentage, theater owners allowed prostitutes to see clients in the third-tier balcony. Several of the city’s most exclusive bordellos were run out of luxurious brownstones owned by the Catholic church.

As hierarchical, almost organized as this sounds, there was a randomness to sex work. Women never knew exactly when they’d need to go out there, and many were so terrified by the prospect that they postponed it as long as possible. Here is a recounting of a first time out, an act of enormous desperation, taken from a novel called The G’Hals of New York by Ned Buntline (1850). The story: Mary and Susan, the oldest of several orphaned sisters, are broke and about to be evicted. As a last resort, Mary has miserably agreed to an assignation. It’s dusk when she leaves. Susan waits. And waits.

The wind swept hoarsely, in loud wild wailings, up against the windows, as if they were moaning over the sacrifice her sister had that night made…to shield her sisters from absolute want and death…Mary, out on such a cold and fearful night on such a horrid mission…[Susan’s] dreamy fantasies ran…the body of a girl, half naked, stark and cold…A girl who had gone forth from that very house on Essex Street…. the clock struck four and Susan’s heart began to throb heavily and painfully…. Mary had not come home…. [but] the door swung back and Mary, herface flushed and haggard, her eyes fearfully wild and brilliant, and half-glaring like a maniac’s came whirling into the chamber—stretching out her right hand in which she clutched a number of bank notes [and] muttered in a hoarse deep toned voice: “’Tis here, the price of infamy—money! Money! We’ll gorge on’t. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

ONE VERY LONG DAY

There are few extant records of the working girl’s life, whether she spent it working in a brothel, a factory, or both. Because of language barriers, illiteracy, or all-out exhaustion, very few of the earliest single girls took many notes.

It’s a real discovery, then, to come across The Long Day (1905), a vivid diary reworked in prose form by a young woman named Dorothy Richardson. Her story begins on a train as she travels from rural Pennsylvania to New York City, where she arrives “an unskilled, friendless, almost penniless girl of 18…a stranger in a strange city.” There is but one thought in her head, which she repeats like a mantra: “work or starve, work or starve.”

Some selections:

DAY ONE, 6 A.M.: I had written the YWCA some weeks before as to respectable cheap boarding houses…. Was this it?…I jumped out of bed…there was a little puddle of water in the middle of the floor under the skylight, and the drip had brushed against…my shirtwaist and soaked into the soles of my only pair of shoes.

MEET THE NEIGHBORS: Breakfast consisted of heterogeneous little dabs of things…[I turned] my observations…to the people at my table…an old woman [who had] difficulty in making food reach the mouth…a little fidgety stupid-looking and very ugly woman…and a young girl who seemed to be dancing in her seat beside me.

HAVE YE WORK?: Advertisements for cigar and cigarette workers were numerous, accordingly I applied to the foreman of a factory at Avenue A who wanted “bunch makers.” He cut me off, asking to see my working card; when I looked at him blankly, he strode away in disgust. Nothing daunted me for I meant to be very energetic and brave…. I went to the next factory. They wanted labelers…this sounded easy…I approached the foreman…. He asked for my experience. “Sorry we’re not running a Kindergarten here.”

DAY TWO: “Girls wanted to learn binding and folding—paid while learning!” The address took me to Brooklyn Bridge and down a strange dark thoroughfare…zigzag alleys wrigg[ling] through a great bridge arch into a world of book-binderies…. Supervisor civil. He did not need girls until Monday, but he told me to come back then and bring a bone paper cutter. Might find something better.

DAY THREE: I found it! Salesladies—experience not necessary—Brooklyn. Lindbloom’s. After much dickering, Mr. L. and wife decided I’d do on $3 a week—working from seven until nine in the evening, Saturdays until midnight…if I must Work and Starve, I should not do it in Lindbloom’s.”

In the meantime—day four—the landlady has revealed herself as a religious nut, spying on girls, entering and searching rooms. Our protagonist flees.

TOO DEAD TIRED TO MIND: I had a chance with the janitress of a fourteenth street lodging house. She had a cleft palate, and all I could understand was [it would cost] one dollar a week with light housekeeping…bedtime arrived. I moved closer to the most…mutilated cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a…“light housekeeper.”…Its little body [was] cracked and rust-eaten—a bright merry little cripple of a stove…. On its front…in broken letters [it said] “Little Lottie.”…Straightaway, Little Lottie gave me an inspiring example of courage and fortitude. Still precaution prompted me…to drag my mother’s trunk against the door…this was the first journey it had made since it carried her bridal finery to and from the Philadelphia Centennial.

NEW MANTRA: How different it all was in reality from what I had imagined it would be!

BOXED IN: The office of E. Springer & Co. was in pleasant contrast…A portly young man who sat behind a glass partition acknowledged my entrance by glancing up…. The man opened the glass door…. Possibly he had seen my chin quiver…and knew that I was ready to cry…. The foreman sent word that No. 105 had not rung up that morning, and that I could have her key. The pay was $3 a week to learners, but Miss Price, the superintendent, thought I could learn in a week’s time…the portly gentleman gave me the key, showed me how to “ring up,” in the register…. henceforth I should be known as “105.”

FIRST DAY OF WORK: Sickly gas jet, and in its flicker a horde of loud-mouthed girls were making frantic efforts to insert their keys into the time-register…. Everyone was late…. I was pushed and punched unmercifully by the crowding elbows, until I found myself squeezed tight against the wall…thread[ing] a narrow passageway in and out the stamping, throbbing machinery…. By the light that filtered through the grimy windows, I got vague confused glimpses of girl faces shining like stars out of this dark, fearful chaos of revolving belts and wheels…through the ramparts of machinery, we entered…Phoebe, a tall girl in tortoise earrings and curl papers, was assigned to “learn” me.

WHAT PHOEBE SAYS: “No apron!…Turn your skirt! The ladies I’m used to working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no difference what they’re like other times.”

WHAT PHOEBE SAYS TO ANY REMARK, MADE BY ANYONE: “HOT A-I-R!”

WHAT THEY DO:…paste slippery strips of muslin over the corners of the rough brown boxes that were piled high about us in frail, tottering towers reaching to the ceiling.

AFTER DOING IT FIVE MINUTES: shoving and shifting and lifting. In order that we not be walled in completely by our cumbersome materials, every few minutes we bore tottering piles across the floor to the “strippers.”

TEN HOURS LATER: Dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat [and] foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable.

NUMBER 105 ARRIVES HOME: I stopped myself dead. An older woman said, “Youse didn’t live there, too?” I stood before the mass of red embers…dazed…stupefied…and watched the firemen pour their quenching streams upon the ashes of my lodging house…. Nobody knew anything definite. “Five, ten dead.”

IN A WOMEN’S SHELTER: Whatever is going to become of me? Why in the name of all common sense, had I ever come to New York City? Why was I not content to remain a country school-m’am?

Henrietta, a religious, industrious coworker, hears the story and offers our girl a room. Other workers advise against it; they say Henrietta is strange, not as she seems. But our heroine decides that they, as lazy dopey girls, resent Henrietta for her excellent work habits. Later, walking “home,” our girl begins to suspect that Henrietta does indeed have things to hide. Her house, far to the other side of town, is a squalid firetrap. And there’s a man waiting for them in the room. A religious friend, says Henrietta, though the pious man is…drinking. Our heroine feels as if she’s wandered into an opium den and, terrified, finds that she can barely speak. Henrietta and the pious drinking man go out on an “errand,” leaving our nervous heroine alone to look under the bed, in the closet—where she finds liquor—and finally out the window, where she sees Henrietta walking back now with two men.

Panicked, she flees and in her rush trips over an old woman lying half asleep on the stairs. The woman says she lives there (on the stairs, at least) and sympathizes with the story. In her view, Henrietta is indeed a drunk, a religious nut, and a whore. The old woman and our heroine, “two strange compatriots,” decide to leave the building in search of food, shelter, anything more comforting than where they are. For hours they wander the city, at last reaching Bleecker Street, where they find an all-night cafeteria willing to accept such shabby females. Our heroine uneasily spies a mirror.

THE GIRL AND THE LOOKING GLASS: Truly I was a sorry-looking object. Had not been well washed or combed since the last morning…I had forgotten my gloves, a brand-new pair, too; my handkerchief, and most needful of all else, my ribbon stock collar, without which my neck rose horribly long and thin above my dusty jacket…. I began to feel for the first time what was for meat least the quintessence of poverty—the absolute impossibility of personal cleanliness and of decent raiment…. I was combing my heavy hair using a small side comb I wore to keep it up.

Soon after publishing The Long Day, Dorothy Richardson was revealed to have worked six years as a reporter and freelancer for the Herald, which had serialized her book. But she defended herself. As she publicly explained, she had indeed come to New York years before and, for years after, had worked in factories, laundries, and as she put it, “worse by far.” She worked her way out, thanks to a friend she’d met in a boardinghouse. With this woman’s help, Richardson got a job in a store and worked her way up to the near-exalted position of coffee-machine demonstrator.

She liked writing and sent in stories about her life to magazines and papers; eventually she landed a job writing society announcements at the Herald. She took on the massive task of “writing my life” without a firm assignment. On her own time, she went back to the factories, undercover, revisiting and “bringing more up to date” the scenes she had witnessed years before. Her story was part autobiography, part investigative reporting, and the end result, she believed, a truthful portrait.

Not everyone believed her story—not the train ride or the crummy houses and the fire, which was in particular an obvious plot point in melodramatic narratives. As additional evidence of deceit, many cited her middle-class disdain for factory colleagues. As she wrote, “Most girls could not work properly. They did not know how to work…there was something imbecilic in them…. They were female creatures doomed from their mothers’ wombs. Physically, mentally, morally doomed.” She further noted an excess of bulging foreheads, eyes placed too close together, outsized noses, and as “kind words butter no parsnips,” she was quick to point out how many seemed headed for the Tenderloin, an area west of Sixth Avenue stretching up to Thirty-fourth Street and rapidly becoming the city’s hub of prostitution.

In 1900, one in five American women worked, together accounting for 18 percent of the country’s labor force. (It’s unclear if that figure included underaged workers; another common statistic claimed that 40 percent of all unwed daughters fourteen or older worked outside the home.) In 1910, in New York City alone, 34 percent of all women went to work every day. And many worked in the way Dorothy Richardson described. Regardless of how she collected her data—and I believe her explanation—her account stands among the most vivid and chilling records we have of the single-girl working life.

THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER

During the mid-nineteenth century, Arena magazine published one of many stories extolling the miracles of the Boston factory system and its 60,000 inhabitants, with special emphasis on the famed “Lowell girls.” Compared with the 600,000 slaves of the disparate, confused New York system, the Lowell enterprise sounded like girls’ camp. The girls had their own dorms or cabins. They took classes, and they were so grateful, so content, that they published a newspaper, the Lowell Offering, filled with essays, poems, and songs. Of course the most memorable Lowell anthem was the one girls enthusiastically performed when on strike. Dressed in white muslins and boaters, they’d walk hours singing, “Oh, isn’t it a shame…that such a pretty girl as I, should be locked inside a factory and left alone to die! Oh, I will not be a slave! I will not be a slave!”

It was clear that management had never spent much time on “the campus.” Lowell dorms held ten or twelve girls to a small room, three or four sharing beds. The so-called classes met sporadically and covered rote topics of etiquette. But the details didn’t matter. The owners had found a way to keep their business and their employees locked in one place—a feat impossible to accomplish in New York City.

Getting to the point, however, the Arena author noted that New York did indeed have its advantages. “With fewer class markers,” he wrote, New Yorkers were “sometime[s] likely to strike ‘a middle ground’…create…a class between…. Not the wretches of factories and sweatshops…nor the poor but morally upstanding widow. We shall see if this new type—the girl of the great shops—fares better than her predecessors.”

A new type, perhaps an entire social class, of working woman! They quickly became known as Shop Girls, or Shoppies: young, white, usually American-born, and thus ideal candidates to stand behind a counter and sell dry goods, which meant, for a female employee, to fetch them and show them to wealthy customers. In exchange for these efforts, the shop girl received little more than her factory cousins. But the view from her place at the counter was a world away from Ludlow and Grand and Delancey Streets.

The mid-to-late nineteenth century stands out as the World’s Fair age of high-end retailing. Palatial stores, among them Siegel-Cooper, A. T. Stewart, Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, and Arnold Constable, sold extensive merchandise from around the globe in settings that might have vied for the title Most Exotic and Most Bizarre. Every store had live orchestras, waterfalls, a Persian-or Japanese-or Dutch-themed tearoom, and alternating special attractions—tableaux vivants, ice-skating rinks, carousels. Sometimes there was a stocked pond and, in more than one establishment, live strolling peacocks. The King’s Handbook of New York, 1893, asked, “What are the Parisian Boulevards or even Regent Street to this magnificent panorama of mercantile display?” My favorite description comes from the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who called the department store “both a landscape and a room.”

Together, these grand department stores formed “Ladies’ Mile,” a stretch of Broadway and Sixth Avenue, beginning at Ninth Street with Stewart’s and ending at Twenty-third Street with Stern Brothers. The ladies themselves arrived in shifts. The morning crew, usually with maids in tow, came determined to shop. They stayed on and were joined by hundreds of others for lunch, some of whom might stay around for the elaborate late-afternoon tea service. The daily promenade had expanded to fill all the time available.

For the girls who staffed the enterprise, however, life was far from glamorous. The standard-issue shop uniform—a bust-hugging shirtwaist and a long cinched skirt—was so tight that even standing still in it required effort. And salesgirls often stood in the same place for six hours at a stretch without moving. For this they earned between five and seven dollars a week, depending on how long they’d been there and how good a record they’d kept (attitude, neatness, sales). Less visible—and less well paid at three dollars per week—were the wrappers and stock girls who moved on ladders for hour upon hour at the back. Cash girls, or runners, most of them very young, received two dollars a week. In all jobs, but especially those at the counter, girls were instructed to control their facial expressions. There was a point in a transaction at which she smiled; at other times, she was impassive.

This seeming robotic quality led customers to believe that sales staff, like factory workers, were inherently dumb. If not, so the reasoning went, why would they be standing there in the first place? The answer was that they’d be standing there, or standing someplace else, but that they would, given the situation, have to stand somewhere, doing something they did not want to do. As the reformist Clara E. Laughlin wrote in a fascinating book, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (1913): “The average girl has no idea what she wants to do…except that she wants to…and must…earn money…the majority of girls drift in[to] this or that because they have a friend…the notion of the number and variety of possible employments is usually limited by what they know of the occupations of their acquaintances.”

That was true. And friends who got there first put it bluntly: Find a tolerable place, and please, don’t ask us what we really think or what we’ve already begun to figure out. For example, veteran shop girls knew that ten years before, men alone had done their jobs. Sales positions opened to women only as companies had grown, departments had spidered, and men had moved into the new managerial jobs. And they also knew that when men held the sales jobs, the work itself had been more interesting. As sales clerks, men had aggressively sold and developed relationships with customers; women, forbidden these exchanges, took a first step into what we’d call “the pink-collar ghetto.” As one manager explained, “Female salespersons do not urge the customer to buy…they simply ask the customer what he or she wants, and make a record of the sale.”

As she did this, bosses and floorwalkers, that is, male department managers, watched and judged her constantly. Had she made any slips? Was there a hint of rudeness in the voice, self-defense or disagreement? Had she been deliberately slow? Was her posture “slagging,” and did she seem evidently tired or exasperated when a customer asked to see that fifteenth variation on a scarf?

One shop girl, nineteen, described her practiced stoicism to a social worker:

Sometime I do admit I would like nothing more than to leap across my counter and topple on that girl, no older than me…smack her face the way it never smiles and demands you show it this and this. It’s not right. One day a girl came in. She had a feather in her hat and a fur, a little thing who told me I had better accustom me t’a call her “m’am,” and I thought, I will jump across and I will break her face up, smug pup’s nose…. [still] I was always smiling, smiling, yes, yes.

But she had problems far worse than uppity customers. By as late as 1890, some stores still provided no benches or perhaps had just one (hard, small) bench for girls to sit on during breaks, that is, if breaks had been established as a custom. Many girls ate their lunches—pickles, rolls, and tea—standing up. Much worse, many of the best stores had no employee bathrooms (workers were encouraged to take care of personal maintenance matters before leaving home in the morning; it was “their business”). Mary Gay Humphreys, a journalist and reformer who took the working girl as her subject, regularly escorted small parades of girls to her apartment house to “use facilities.”

Humphreys combined a reformer’s intensity with genuine skill as a journalist. She listened and reported as opposed to moralizing or operatically exaggerating the gal’s life. She banished the slangy linguistic back bends that made the working type, especially the factory girl, seem so alien. It was common to read about girls who, asked about, say, a boyfriend, replied: “He’s ’n me ’a go ’a wooken a bit—not w-h-a-t you say?” These pidgin dialects, whether Irish-Yiddish or Italian-Scottish, made the girl seem not only alien but mentally feeble. Humphreys’s pieces, printed in a variety of newspapers and magazines, were so immediate that it’s easy even now to imagine standing there, five hours into the workday and desperate to pee but unable, according to store policy, to move an inch. As she wrote: “Because the immediate surroundings are…hospitable, there is little comprehension of what a girl must get through on the average day, standing behind a counter for hours, back aching, waiting on rude bargain-hunting women…. and then the management…”

Humphreys was the first journalist to record the practice of “treating” as it occurred in the store. In one story, she quotes a young woman who’d been drawn into conversation with her boss. Between puffs on a cigar, he told her, “You got the look, get a man, go out with him and let him pay. Don’t wear this shirt again. It is filthy, a disgrace.” (No surprise, as it was likely her only one.) After similar encounters, many girls walked into the back—provided there was no one to see—and started crying. As one of them told Humphreys, she understood the barter concept but the terms of this one “startled” her. “If they expect this or that for an ice cream, what can they want for a hand-stitched shirt?” Some took the boss’s advice and attempted to find male help they could emotionally afford. Others didn’t think about it in such specific terms and just went out.

This was the age of the great “rackets,” huge public balls that had started as a youthful response to the dull extended-family dance. Anyone could go—invitations replicated like chain mail throughout the factories and stores—and as George G. Foster wrote, everyone went, “the folding girls and seamstresses, the milliner’s apprentices, the shopgirls…all unmarried womanhood.” Sometimes there were six balls on one night for them to choose from and a selection of venues. By 1890, thousands of dance halls stretched south from Houston to Canal Street and across the city from the Hudson River to Avenue B.

Shoppies traveled in groups—“lady friends” they called one another—and they were said to like the wild dancing or “rubbering.” Some of them even “spieled,” a notorious dance in which a couple twirled or whipped their way across the floor until someone either fainted or fell. (No one said it outright, but dancers were thought to faint or fall at the point of orgasm. It was perhaps this bit of gossip that inspired one senator to proclaim, “Rome’s downfall was due in part to the degenerate nature of its dances, and I only hope that we will not suffer the same result.”) Some, however, found the smoke and the sweat too much after a long day spent saying “Yes, ma’am.” They were happier heading back to their rooms for quiet dinners, reading, and, as always on so minuscule a weekly budget, the mending. (There were other means for attaining new shirtwaists: making a new one, or cleverly reinvigorating the sagging gray one using bleach.)

Some nights after curfew—and all rooming houses had 9 or 10 P.M. curfews—three or four girls would crawl through the dark to an appointed room. Someone brought chocolate to melt on the hot plate, someone brought a robe to stuff beneath the door to block the smell. Settled in, they reviewed the current themes: How much longer can we stand working at Stewart’s? Waitressing, do you get wages and a tip? And—the eternal question—whom should I marry and how soon? According to the few diary entries on such secret soirées, the conversation often centered on whom not to marry. Or on why to marry at all. The papers were filled with murderous stories straight out of the courts. In City of Women, Christine Stansell dug up many disturbing examples, ones any working girl might have read for herself: “Mrs. Towney met her death over a turkey. Incensed about the way she had prepared the fowl as about the money she had spent on it, her husband set about beating her, interspersing his blows with sarcastic reproaches ‘you made great preparations, didn’t you?’”

Another man murdered his wife for taking four shillings out of his pocket. As he explained: “I will serve blows to any damn whore who dares rob me.”

But enough of that. The conversation took a turn to cosmetics (eyebrows and how to make two out of what was often the one) and, more significant, clothing. Shoppies did not share the usual sartorial goals of the working class: urging wide feet into slim American slippers and attempting to master the impossible corset. They had other concerns. A working shop girl typically traveled some distance to and from work, in all kinds of weather, then spent an average of ten to twelve hours on her feet. From all descriptions, her uniform by day’s end was like a straightjacket. Many otherwise apolitical girls became adherents of dress reform.

The ideal, as one sympathetic writer explained, was to design for girls “a loosely arrayed garment that allows for easy movement but does not in any way excite the male libido.” There were all sorts of proposals. Many called for a kind of loose-fitting long-sleeved overall that would come with an attachable skirt to hide the pants and, sometimes, a “bodice vest” to hide the upper portion, or bib, of the overall. And there were plans for jumpers, long or short, to be worn with “broadened,” meaning wider, less constricting, shirtwaists. There’s no record detailing whether or not anyone actually executed these designs, if anyone ever wore them, or if anyone was bodily removed from a store as a result.

Rather, it seems, there were scattered instances of rebellion. In 1907 four hundred New York shop girls signed up for the Rainy Day Club, a citywide movement of working women who demanded the right to wear shorter skirts, raincoats, and rubber boots to and from work when it rained. The idea dated to the Civil War, when women had replaced men in many difficult jobs and found themselves essentially disabled inside their clothes. They had admired the nurses they saw out around the city; they dressed so sensibly—rain boots in bad weather and, always, shorter hems. (Nurses, like shop girls, could not afford the status symbol of the muddy hem.) The Rainy Day Clubs published pamphlets advising girls to shorten hems by four inches and to wear galoshes when it rained.

Official reactions varied. Some stores forbade all galoshes or demanded that on wet days girls arrive very early, long before any customers, so that they could remove their galoshes in the entryway and walk on store floors in workplace shoes. Some store managers let it filter down through the floorwalkers and buyers that these shoes—especially if skirts were an inch or two higher—would have to be “decent.” Most took no official position on the skirts, considering that most girls remained half visible behind a counter and rarely ventured onto the floors.

The nasty response came in the press. By demanding certain rights, shoppies were said to have put on “ludicrous airs,” to loudly have proclaimed themselves a “better class of girl deserving of higher things,” when in fact they were mere “independent strutting figments that wither[ed]” as they arrived back at their “shabby” homes. While playing the role of fine shop girl, such deluded female creatures were unbearable. “The American woman is vulgar,” wrote Hutchins Hapgood, in Types from City Streets. “[and] some of our most vulgar women are our salesladies…. They demand what is their ‘due.’…They read the society columns and [the magazine] The Smart Set.”

Others accused the girl of acting up like her lewd cousin, the factory gal. Shoppies were frequently said to dance on their breaks and, according to many magazine reports, were “known to sing at any opportunity.” A twelve-paragraph letter in Harper’s magazine added to the indictment. “She sings, it is true, and she may also be found casually…strutting—talking out of turn—flirting, singing, dancing in the streets…I have heard the most vile language tossed between them…such that would make me…run in shame.”

Employers complained of “blue Mondays,” hangover days when the girl who’d been out “rubbering” could be observed leaning as opposed to standing. If blue Mondays became widespread, management deployed the store detectives to gather intelligence about the offenders. (Chances were that management had already gathered basic family information on its girls; they kept track not only of a girl’s “books,” or sales records, but of her outside reputation.) As long as a girl kept up her “books,” much of what she did outside could be overlooked, provided she brought no “ill-repute” to the store or began to look “mangy.” Borderline girls, those with good but occasionally erratic books, might be permitted a blue Monday or two. But they would not receive raises and they might suddenly be transferred to less desirable counters, and they would know exactly why. Nonperformers who “rubbered” too intensely and rolled in Mondays looking “shot” would be fired. As one girl told Hutchins Hapgood: “I do my work, they know that. When I no longer can ‘deliver the goods,’ they will fire me, of course. That’s my risk. In the mean time, however, I can do whatever I please, and they won’t say a word.”

The fact was, after all, that they were girls—85 percent of the store populations, circa 1900, were single, and most were under twenty-one. They were less faux ladies or incipient radicals than they were ordinary late adolescents. They liked to dance, whether on the streets, out at rackets, or in the store salons management eventually opened for the “tired, deserving female employee” on her breaks. In almost all photos of these salons—and there were numerous for release to the press—we see crowds of long-skirted girls waltzing with one another to a gramophone.

In secret they fashioned a subterranean girl culture within the store. Twice a month word went out through all departments that it was “fairy day.” On fairy day, two girls were chosen as the fairy queens and endowed with the right to “perform all mischief,” while their colleagues covered up their every act. Typical fairy business included sending unsigned mash notes to bosses and surrounding male floorwalkers in a flirtatious group while the fairy attached a silly tag to his back. By the greatest of horrific mistakes, a fairy queen might spray a parfum français into the face of an obnoxious client. Regular store social life, however, took the more traditional form of a club.

Almost every department had a club running its own special activities, from dances and parties to what we’d call self-help groups. One store had a very active “foot mould social club” and, on a different floor, a “fine linens sistership and social organization.” Mostly, the clubs tried to alleviate the dreariness of store life. Every member, for example, had, in addition to a fairy day, an “un-birthday.” On this day, the anointed gathered with her pals to slice up what was called a “Halloween cake,” a mountainous lopsided confection that had baked within it two tiny objects: a ring that signified marriage and a thimble forecasting spinsterhood. The results, turned up in slices, were published in the club’s private newsletter and sometimes in the larger storewide newsletters shop-girl clubs put out each month.

At Siegel-Cooper the house organ was called Thought and Work, a compendium of intrastore courtships, marriages, makeup tips, and celebrations of various departments within the store. Say the subject was leading salesladies. Twenty or so girls would be featured, as if in a theater program, delicate wreaths etched in around their faces, their area of expertise (“fine linens,” “ladies’ shoes,” “artificial flowers”) spelled below the photograph in fancy script. Eventually management decided that Thought and Workcontained too little about work—and, for that matter, no thought at all—and discontinued it.

Occasionally the clubs exhibited nascent hints of feminism, or at least signs of independent thinking. In 1910, for example, the Siegel-Cooper Bachelor Girl Social Club organized a celebration of Washington’s Birthday “without even inviting men.” Instantly they were denounced by male employees as man haters. Replied the bachelor girls: “No, we are not married, neither are we men haters, but we believe in women’s rights and we enjoy our independence and our freedom. Notwithstanding that if a fair offer came our way we might not [sic] consider it.”

Wealthy matrons found such beings coarse and undesirable in all ways, but their daughters were often intrigued. Trapped in a life of calling cards, formal teas, and chaperoned balls, young society girls craved some small measure of freedom before the inevitable wedding. Not that one would be so low as to actually work, but they had heard of these dances—the rackets—and there was something, why, it went without saying, monstrous in it all, yet still compelling.

“Slumming” even then had its magnetic lure, but it was rare to stumble upon the ideal circumstances for actually doing it. Rackets presented the perfect opportunity to anonymously and briefly indulge in—or at least watch—rowdy downtown behavior. Of course the girls under investigation were very “low,” headed for a life one could not begin to contemplate. Yet in the heat of a spiel, they seemed powerful—daring girls, brave, and perhaps even the tiniest bit enviable. Some of these same well-bred young ladies felt a secret fascination with stage stars. They would not, even for a laugh, stand among the “matinee girls,” the back-door fixtures who waited every day for their current idols to exit. But they were drawn to actresses, who throughout the nineteenth century had set the leading fashion trends. (Serious dramatic actresses were expected to supply their own costumes, and part of the thrill of theatergoing lay in the anticipation of seeing what they wore.) Actresses were also considered somewhat disreputable.

Out on her own, slumming with her beaux, the upper-class girl went to the shows. Actresses were interesting, but more immediately thrilling were the sequined chorus girls and the showgirls, curvaceous balletic things who appeared entr’acte to show new fashions. And everyone had a secret fascination with the Ziegfeld Follies girls and, most important, with Ziegfeld’s famed Floradora sextette. All six of these special stars, supermodels of their day, would marry millionaires.

In part, the allure of the working girl—like that of a low actress—derived from how much the mere idea of such a person upset one’s mother. Whether a shop girl or a showgirl, she was the exemplar of everything a daughter should not be—and should not even be exposed to. A great many mothers found these young working women personally threatening. If factory girls were thought to be whores with day jobs, then shoppies were believed to be mistresses in waiting. They spent their days surrounded by beautiful things and were encouraged to have men buy them clothes. If the girl was pretty, smart, and ambitious, she might walk out after work with a man, a husband, she’d sold a hat to. They would very likely “treat” each other in all sorts of ways.

One of the era’s most popular plays was called Only a Shopgirl (1902) by Claire Wellesley Sterling. Posters show a wealthy fur-clad wife bursting into a dim boardinghouse room. She points one manicured finger at a shirtwaisted girl named Hulda. Hulda stares back defiantly, her smaller siblings gathered around her in terror. “YOU,” shouts the woman, “are nothing but a low shop girl!” Says Hulda: “Better a low shop girl than a fashionable idler as heaven is above hell!” The play was produced throughout the teens and the themes reworked in several silent films until its class love triangle gradually entered the standard melodramatic lexicon.

For all their efforts, the fairy days, dances, and clubs, shop girls were unable to resolve their most basic problem: They were shop girls. And no matter what they did on weekends, the workdays were still long and depressing, and once or twice a month they took department inventory, at no extra pay. One plant observer, or investigator, captured the unavoidable results during a 1909 study of twenty stores. Here is his report on one set of counter girls:

I have been watching three misses…for three days now. The first is most instructive…. she wears a fixed smile on her made-up-face, and it never varies, no matter to whom she speaks…[First] she is either frowning or her face, like that of the others, is devoid of any expression. When a customer approaches, she immediately assumes her hard forced smile…. As they leave, it amazes how quickly it departs…I’ve never seen such calculation given to the timing of a smile…. The others make less drastic of an effort….

I have had the impression that one or both is lost in thought or asleep while standing.

But occasionally one read of a shoppie who, despite the physical rigors of work, the snotty clients, the pimpish bosses, seems to have done more than plot fantastic diversions; she’d made for herself a good life. One 1905 magazine story, “After Shop Hours—What?” follows “Bess,” an admirable, organized shop girl, as she describes what she does with her free time, each activity accompanied by small, if unfortunately blurry, engravings. As Bess was only too happy to explain:

MONDAY: Dine out or have chafing dish supper with one of the girls. To bed at 9:30.

TUESDAY: Read with one of my men friends (in parlour), novel or any book we choose. I do my week’s mending or fancy work while he reads. Sometimes we sing duets. To bed at 9:30.

WEDNESDAY: Dancing class. To bed at 10.

THURSDAY: Have someone to dinner. Sew or read or play games. To bed at 9:30.

FRIDAY: Two of my girlfriends and I have our fairy tale readings for settlement children every other Friday. Other Fridays we go out to a lecture or to something of the sort. To bed at 10.

SATURDAY: To theater or opera or dance and to bed any old time.

SUNDAY: Sleep. Every other Sunday is the Good Time Friendly Club. We have cake and tea and a sociable time. Others, I go for a walk with some of the men and the girls. To bed early.

The editors of this story made it clear that Bess was lucky. Most working girls were so anxious or so tired they did not get much from their time off, not even much-needed sleep. As more young women took jobs—nearly 60 percent of all New York City women, aged sixteen to twenty, worked during the early 1900s—a new set of reformers stepped in to help the workplace advocates. If Mary Gay Humphreys was concerned with underage cash runners, rest facilities, and horny floorwalkers, others now wondered how this girl might organize a “meaningful well thought out and rounded” life.

These were the words of Grace Dodge, a wealthy, socially conscious woman who “for them alone” opened the first YWCA, on Fifteenth Street. (She meant well, but given the time and place, “them” meant only white non-Jewish women with references and provably good reputations.) She also inaugurated a more inclusive network of clubs meant, and I quote from the cover of her popular book, A Bundle of Letters to Busy Girls (1887): “[to help] those girls who have not time or inclination to think and study about the many important things which make up life and living.” Dodge feared girls “had not time for the higher things.” She seems also to have believed they had not time for lower things. At weekly meetings, many held in her downtown apartment, she covered everything, for example: attending work with one’s menstrual period and “the disposal of rags.” Another: the importance of bowel movements and whether it was acceptable to move one’s bowels at work. She discussed clothing, hair, correspondence, and she expressed her belief that far more enjoyable than a racket, a wild dance, was a pleasant tea or reading party. Not all present agreed.

In fact, her “girls” increasingly agreed about very little. And the conflicts among club members became harder for Dodge and the growing number of her imitators to ignore. The better-attired, better-spoken women resented the presence of the immigrant girls Dodge had deliberately sought out and invited. Periodic attempts at unification ended in mild chaos, chair rattling, factions marching out as the “other side” spoke. One famous mêlée broke out over Dodge’s suggestion that club members wear badges. One young woman is reported to have shouted above the others: “Why should we want to tell everyone who rides in the streetcar with us that we are nothing more than ragged working girls who spend their entire evenings in a club hearing a lecture that is good for us?…Is it necessary to…advertise our status as working girls when that status…is as quickly recognized as that of the wealthy one?”

The clubs split up, despite Dodge’s insistence that girls, together, had so much to learn! Factory girls increasingly had their own very serious concerns—unionization, strike coordination, and the ongoing campaigns for workplace improvements. Shop girls continued, in the words of Mary Gay Humphreys, to “come in at night, nervous and tired, to be confronted by the problem of food, clothes, rent…of forever providing for bare material necessities.” But the shop girls, better dressed, more articulate, had at least a few options.

Store life was not as it would be in the movies: a fun, ducky universe populated by adorable girls like Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, whose signature film, It (1927), among many others, was set in a big store (a fishbowl universe perfect for the stationary camera). But real-life shoppies, like their movieland counterparts, had a pretty good chance of finding the exit. That most often meant marriage—but not always. Many girls, supporting themselves, sending money home, would continue to work and live singly. And the more intelligent and ambitious among them might land a very different kind of job.

Some of these young women, often much to their surprise, became teachers. Public education had been compulsory since the 1860s, and as urban life overtook rural, more families, less in need of farmhands, complied with the law. At the turn of the century there were more schools than ever before, more students, and a constant demand for young teachers. Although very few young working women had secondary degrees, many had high school diplomas. (In fact, 60 percent of all high school graduates in 1880 were women.) Because they’d finished high school, and because teaching was associated with child care, many who’d never even contemplated teaching got the job. As early as 1910, 98 percent of all teachers, at all levels of the public-school system, were women.

But many, many more headed into what was known, with a slight hint of exotica, as “the world of business.”

True, there was never the slightest trace of exotica once you got there. But it was better. Better pay. Better people to mix it up with. “Aren’t we all women in business now and more of us as the years pass?” asked film star Mary Pickford in a 1911 movie magazine. Without mentioning her salary, she exulted, “We are all working girls, and I am ever so proud to be among you!”

I AM A TYPEWRITER

In the original single work schematic, office work was about as good as it got. The pay could start as high as ten dollars per week. The work did not require hours of militaristic standing, and the men did not seem as ungentlemanly as they had back in ladies’ shoes. Even the jobs themselves sounded better: sorting “clerk” or file “chief,” positions requiring some rushing around, some work seated at one’s own desk. There was the “typewriter,” the original name for both the machine and its operator. Above them all, to be had through promotion, was the secretary, and best of all, the personal secretary. The boss chose her above all others, allowing her to move freely within the inner sanctum of the business (except at luncheons), and trusting her to be highly skilled and discreet in all matters, including who it was the boss actually took to lunch.

As newly self-defined professionals, young women worked to master their jobs, and worked, too, to overlook the feeling that these tasks were as tiresome as the ones they’d performed in stores. Typewriters began their day by grooming their machines, a process that, in photos, suggests a row of well-dressed young women picking inky nits off large black armadillos. Others ran letter presses, primitive copying devices that required inking and hand pressing and left copiers weak-wristed, while the all-purpose clerks had to manipulate tall ladders that slid on tracks. The hours were long, the “lounge” facilities minimal. As one worker told Collier’s magazine: “Your chair is given as your chair and there isn’t much point in asking for one that fits beneath the desk or anything else that does not fit.”

Of course, to keep up a steady supply of applicants, employers portrayed office girls as superbly competent and attractive, the kind of young professional any girl would want to become. Even department stores started playing similar word games. Their new breed of “lady bookkeeper” was, like her office sister, exceptionally crafty, smart, and unusually honest. As one manager stated: “Lady bookkeepers [are] not so likely to appropriate money that don’t belong to them!” Office workers understood that they were supposed to feel lucky—they were, after all, Women of Business—but it was a feeling that one could sustain on most days about as long as it took to reach one’s desk.

By 1910, so many women had arrived in offices with so many questions and complaints—Is this “good” job as bad as it seems? Where can I go after this if I have to?—that new advice guides appeared monthly. Among the most popular, and most serious, was an epistolary volume entitled Letters to a Business Girl: The Personal Letters of a Business Woman to Her Daughter, Replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems…By One Who Knows the Inside Facts of Business and the Office Routine and the Relations of Employer to Employee (1906).

In this book Florence Wenderoth Saunders reveals more about office life and the inherent struggles of office girls than just about any other advice guide, newspaper series, or any realist novel by Sinclair Lewis. Saunders was a middle-aged woman who had worked with great pride in an early office environment, married the boss, then moved with him to the country, where she helped him to run a farm. After his death, she kept at the farm until business plunged—so deeply that she had to send her oldest daughter, just eighteen, off to the city. This was a common enough decision, though still controversial. As Mother writes early on: “I have been severely censured since you left, because I allowed you to leave my protection and care and face the dangers of a business life, particularly in the city.”

Readers skimmed Mother’s tales of her own heroic stoicism, for example, once walking from Delancey Street up to Thirty-fifth, wearing a cloth coat, in a blizzard, all to save ten cents in trolley fare that she badly needed for something else. Beyond the dire autobiography, young female readers found unusually blunt and specific remarks:

You’ll probably hear yourself referred to as a “poor creature” and “the downtrodden working girl” and, even as we used to hear it ourselves, “poor things.” Whatever it is there is a lot of “poor” attached to it…necessarily the girl who is employed has to give up many things…but she gains a far broader knowledge of life than…her sisters of leisure…. The girl who has once earnedher own living knows that if necessary she can earn it again.

And the author had strong views on how that girl, member of an elite female working corps, should conduct herself.

I never saw a businessman’s desk that was loaded with the trifles that some of the girls in my office used to have on theirs; photographs, flowers…like knickknacks they kept because they were cute…. Remember, men have the advantage in business; they have been accustomed to work for generations…if [a girl] expects to take her place by [his] side and eventually command the same salary, she must profit from his example…keep [your] desk cleared of every article which is not absolutely essential in the performance of your work.

The office girl needed a firm, stalwart supporter. Not only was she underpaid and often bored, she also became from time to time a target for paranoid commentators. She had emerged as a new working type just as concern about so-called political and social deviants—suffrage supporters, free-lovers, childless women, Bolsheviks, anarchist bombers—had reached a new high. The unavoidable movement of young women, troops of them, heading off to jobs seemed increasingly suspect. In the minds of certain commentators, a working single woman was by nature uncooperative, potentially radical, and un-American. Why wasn’t she at home having babies? Because office girls seemed more serious, more professional, the most hysterical queries were often tossed their way. Was the average typist now spending lunch enmeshed in the works of Hegel, Marx, and Susan B. Anthony? Did she read “lurid fiction”?

Certainly some working girls had read poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, or at least had heard of her. There were probably some who’d seen a copy of The Masses or been taken on an edifying date to some kind of socialist or literary lecture. But the average girl was not trying to reshape the world according to socialist or any other precepts; she was trying, for the time being, to advance in the office and earn more money. And that meant one thing: stenography. Only with this skill might she move her way through the rows of hulking typewriters into the semiprivate outer office of the boss. All she had to do was raise the money for night school. Then she’d add the three hours in classes onto her workday. Then she’d survive it.

Most of what we know about early “business” school—life inside the dry overheated rooms eight flights up—derives from characters like Kitty Foyle, heroine of the eponymous novel by Christopher Morley (1939) and later a film starring Ginger Rogers. Like Tess McGill, the baby-voiced secretary who brilliantly outmaneuvered her corrupt boss in Working Girl (1988), Kitty is perceived by the world as all…wrong. Wrong address. Wrong accent. Wrong clothes. Wrong man.

In Kitty’s case, that’s the beautiful son of an old-line WASP family. He sees in Kitty what others are blind to: sharp, sardonic intellect; kindness; and genuine bravery. And not only because she has tolerated the snubs of his family. Despite their involvement, Kitty moves alone to New York City, in order to better support her widowed father. After many visits back and forth, she concludes sadly that she cannot live in his world, nor he in hers, and breaks it off. Soon after, the boy’s parents force him into marriage with a suitable girl; Kitty reads about it in the society columns on the same day she has aborted his baby. (Not something that made it into the 1940 Ginger Rogers movie.)

Hoping to move on and to make a better life, Kitty enrolls in night school. “We were pretty serious about it all,” she says. “Also pretty damned discouraged by the time we got to diphthongs and disjointed suffixes. That’s when you find yourself dreaming shorthand and wake up figuring out the symbol for Indianapolis or San Francisco.” The girls in her class form a kind of sorority, pooling resources, going out to movies and occasional dinners and treating themselves to their favorite team drink. (“Every way of life seems to have its own drink,” she says; “our shorthand squad specialized on black-and-white sodas.”) Together they hunt for jobs, celebrate, and try to assuage their disappointment when shorthand doesn’t prove to be the answer to even one or two of life’s great difficulties.

Business school works for Kitty Foyle. She “makes her way,” gets a better job, and meets a man who, like her employers, finds her personal qualities, not to mention her shorthand skills, truly impressive. For some women, however, business school was not a chance to advance, if slightly, in the world but a means to retreat. It was the place you went when you did not get married. This sad conclusion is best evoked in another novel, Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington (1921), the story of an awkward, groping young woman, played in the 1935 film version by a young Katharine Hepburn. Alice is single and poor but nonetheless a determined society aspirant out to “win” a local rich guy played in the film by Fred MacMurray. She attempts this feat by cornering the man on the street, in stores, at parties she wasn’t invited to, then maneuvering him out onto a balcony and chattering nervously. In the novel it doesn’t work, and with no money and no marital prospects, Alice is last seen climbing the wooden steps of her local business school, up “into the smoky darkness,” as if trudging to the guillotine.

As she views her “ominous” prospects: “Pretty girls turn…into old maids ‘taking dictation’—old maids of a dozen different types, yet all looking a little like herself.” (In the movie adaptation Alice triumphs, becoming a wife despite her social gaffes, thus narrowly avoiding slow clerical death.) Florence Wenderoth Saunders would have shaken her head in disgust. As she’d written:

So many girls look upon their business experiences merely as unpleasant incidents in their lives; to be gotten through, with as little exertion to themselves, and with as great haste as possible…. They wed the first man that asks them, for fear that another chance might not come along; whether they love him or not, or whether his salary can be stretched to meet the requirements of two people, are questions that do not trouble them, all they want is to get away from the office, store or factory and stop working.

For all of Saunders’s enthusiasm—her pride in watching her daughter accept a big new job in Washington, D.C.—it’s easy to understand how tired and betrayed office workers felt. Far from advancing beyond “shop girl,” they had landed in a parallel universe. And one with its own publicity mill. As late as 1935, Fortune was still extolling the modern office as a kind of female paradise. As one executive rhapsodized: “…the competent woman at the other end of the buzzer…the four girls pecking out the boss’s initials with pink fingernails on the keyboards of four voluble machines, the half dozen assorted skirts whisking through the filing cases of correspondence, and the elegant miss in the reception room….”

That may have been visual bliss for the men. The “assorted skirts” had their own views. Like the smarter shop girl, the office worker came to understand that “women’s” jobs meant those that men had done until they’d moved into a new managerial class. In 1870, less than 1 percent of all clerical workers were women. By 1900, tallying figures received from a thousand or more national employment agencies, the Labor Department estimated that more than 100,000 women worked as stenographers, typists, and secretaries. By 1920, more than 25 percent of all secretaries were women, and by 1965, the figure was 92 percent.* As sociologist C. Wright Mills would later famously state, offices had become “modern nunneries.”

Still, like all working single women, the office gal had to make the most of her situation, and enjoy what small amount of time she spent away from her job. Many reported having little energy for rackets and other noisy parties. The time between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. was on most days devoted to hanging about with roommates or friends from the office and then to sleep. Kitty Foyle, though an invention, provides us with an excellent single-girl scenario:

Molly and Pat and me had so much fun together evenings, going over the day’s roughage, we wouldn’t even mind we couldn’t afford to go out often. Sometimes we had dinner at the wop joint in the yard…the one who ate the meatballs slept on the davenport. Then if she wakes at two a.m…. she can sit on the edge of the bed and smoke a cigarette without disturbing the others.

In the best cases, an office girl overlooked the obvious, somewhat pathetic obstacles and learned to hustle. Strategize. She looked for the breaks. That meant seeking out a boss she could influence, pushing for overtime pay and promotions, keeping a running tab of better jobs elsewhere, and, of course, considering seriously all marriage proposals.

Kitty Foyle, who’d go on to become a cosmetics-industry executive, agreed that the business girl had to play all the angles. And that strategy was often a more complicated, exhausting business than the business itself. As she says offhandedly, “Lots of career girls have got raises for their ambition that was really Benzedrine sulphate.”

LUST FOR A LATCHKEY

All early working girls, regardless of what they did or where they did it, had similar problems. And the greatest of all could be summarized in three words: where to live. The fantasy solution could be summed up in one word: latchkey.

The latchkey, a four-or five-inch-long skeleton key, served for tired, exasperated girls as an amulet, a totem, an admission ticket inside. A key signaled the vanquishing of all boardinghouse breakfasts, the Y, and the landlady, her lieutenants and spies. In 1910 there were an estimated fifteen thousand boarding and furnished rooming houses, where girls were not so much chaperoned but placed on a permanent parole. Wrote one linen saleswoman in The Independent: “A [boarding] house like that should be a strictly hotel basis, no Christian stuff, sign this, sign here, be quiet, no guests—oh God, we just want a nice place to live like anybody and not answer questions—where have we been and with who…. How is it their business to know?”

Mary Gay Humphreys reported that sixty-eight thousand of the girls who boarded worked as salesladies (their updated term) and hoped to find a place where they might be free of all inquisition. As one male journalist wrote in their defense: “What right has the world to decide that working women must be treated as déclassé until they prove themselves otherwise?”

The working girl understood that like car keys in the 1920s—or car keys now for that matter—the latchkey would guarantee some measure of freedom. But it seemed all apartment keys had been reserved for men. Until the early twentieth century there were no apartments for women. They didn’t exist.

There had been interim solutions. The most famous was perhaps the large ocean liner the Jacob A. Stamler, owned by businessman John Arbuckle, which had docked for few months, 1907–8, at a Twenty-third Street pier. The offer was to let all rooms on board cheaply and without serious restrictions to “self-respecting girls who’d behave with honor.” This lasted a few happy months until the city needed the pier space and the ship moved on; one newspaper printed an etching of tired-looking girls in dark dresses and hats, standing clustered like mourners, watching it go.

No single woman, working or not, had ever been presumed trustworthy, economically solid, or discreet enough to make a desirable tenant. These qualities, if she learned them at all, she would presumably learn from her husband. And she was always suspected of prostitution. But given the statistics, the sheer visual evidence of girls out there, some builders and owners drew up plans for small hotels and apartment houses. Almost every plan, however, was scrapped in the discussion phase; no girl could afford such amenities, and who’d invest?

So it was big news, covered everywhere, when in 1910 the Trowmart Inn, looking for “self-supporting girls tired of the tawdry lodging room and sick of the miserable little rookery,” opened its doors. The Trowmart, brainchild of a successful New York merchant, welcomed young women who could prove they held a job earning no more than fifteen dollars per week. They also had to be provably under the age of thirty-five (meaning they were not likely to become indigent spinsters and never leave). A bed inside one of the 228 dormlike rooms cost fifty cents per week. To live with just several others in more private rooms cost $4.50, and for a dollar more per week, a working woman could have a room all to herself. No one had to give references unless she planned to live there permanently. And with no marriage prospects and the age “thirty-five” years away, well, it didn’t sound all that bad. The Trowmart served food described as “reasonable” and “pleasant.” It was renowned for its “well-appointed” bathrooms. (More expensive rooms had the bathrooms in the room itself!) It had laundry facilities.

The latchkey at last.

Some girls wore their spindly keys on long chains that dangled, while others hid theirs inside a boot or a shoe and stood on it all day to be sure it was safe. It was not an engagement ring, but in its way it symbolized a rite of passage; single female life had at last been deemed a grown-up life. In his 1992 film Singles, Cameron Crowe captures the same sort of exultation on the face of Kyra Sedgwick as she holds up her newly acquired garage-door opener. (It’s meaningful, really, because it is her own garage, and that garage is just below her own very first ever condo!)

And once the key, one’s own private space, had been secured? Then came relief, excitement, and a swiftly spreading sense of disappointment. Girls called the arrangements “better,” “more free”—they loved having unsupervised parlor time—but they also used phrases such as “in the overall, small in feeling.” One twenty-one-year-old office clerk told Munsey’s Magazine that the Trowmart and its few imitators had “narrow rooms” with bad lighting and “mincy wardrobes.” Many residents took to the parlors, although these filled up rapidly, and so in all kinds of weather packs of girls were out on walks. Out wandering—swiftly wandering so as not to seem vagrant or “loitery”—they often met equally claustrophobic friends, and had marathon teas. A bit later on they escaped to nickelodeons, neighborhood theaters consisting of a small homemade screen and wooden chairs.

There is no document of daily life at the Trowmart Inn. But we can imagine it based on the descriptions of comparable hotels, both the real, for example, the Barbizon—subject of numerous Sunday-magazine features during the 1950s and ’60s—and the fictional. There’s a great section of Kitty Foyle in which she describes her life at the fictitious Pocahontas Residence for Women, a dwelling obviously based on the Barbizon. As always, Kitty narrates in a tart but sympathetic manner:

A neurosis to every room. I can see them yet in the dining room, poor souls with the twice a week chicken croquettes and those rocking little peas, sort of crimped so they wouldn’t skid…. They called them bachelor girls, but a bachelor is that way on purpose. One evening one of them must have gone haywire [because] she yelled out into the courtyard, “there’s a Man in my room!…Now, everybody, they had seen the sinister fellow…but he was nowhere…only…a pale phantom of desire.”

THE BACHELOR GIRL AND THE BOHEMIAN

By the turn of the twentieth century, so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them. (And arranging single girls into identifiable groupings was a necessity not only among editors, writers, and retail merchandisers. State and U.S. government officials frequently organized mass prostitution raids. An increasingly diverse single population made the task much more difficult. At urban rackets and in the newer Broadway cabarets, government agents became famous for “getting the wrong girl wrong,” accusing a shop girl of being a hooker, and “getting whonked for their mistakes,” meaning kicked in the ankle.)

One magazine columnist, writing in 1907, put it this way: “In the great cities, thousands of our young women” live in a “swarm of singularity.”

But there was an identifiable strain of “new girl” who appeared at the turn of the century, an intense, dramatic type who’d consistently reappear in years to come: the bohemian. Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or something new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry. One twenty-year-old told the Saturday Evening Post in 1905, “It is wonderful to be able to walk along the street, singing…. There are men who admire that impulsive daring.”

The bohemian had a less deeply poetic, slightly less intense, kind of younger cousin. That was the Bachelor Girl. “The B.G.,” as she was known, had come to the city not so much to escape, but to work and send money home. Which she did. But she also developed a taste for rushing after work or whenever possible to Greenwich Village, at that time the city’s premiere “artistically inclined place of residence.” (I quote from “Why I Am a Bachelor Girl,” The Independent, 1908.)

By 1910, the Village had settled as an Italian and German enclave, surrounded by the baronial brownstones of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue and pockets of very poor blacks and Irish. For the committed or aspiring bohemian, the setting was perfect—filled with cafés, tearooms, spaghetti parlors, and the unlikeliest and therefore the most interesting people in New York just lounging about. It was still almost a secret. Before 1918, no subway stops connected Greenwich Village to the rest of the city, and one had to practice at navigating its tiny disjointed streets. Many houses, painted pink or blue, had no numbers. Asking directions was useless. Most inhabitants couldn’t quite explain it. Didn’t know. Didn’t feel like it. They spoke, one visitor told the New York Times, “in an iambic pentameter, as a bad word play or joke.”

Wandering the Village, bohemian and bachelor girls could, to borrow from their own overly dramatic phrasebook, create themselves anew. Margaret Ferguson, of Ruth Suckow’s 1934 novel, The Folks, makes a wonderful case study of this transformation. We meet her as a girl, the older, misunderstood “dark” daughter of a prosperous Iowa farm family. Not as pretty as her sister, often overlooked, she comes to believe there is “a wonderful shining special fate for her” and that she will find it in New York City. If she didn’t take the dare and leave, she would likely wander into a more ordinary female fate, “getting older and older, a spinster daughter like Fannie Allison, who had taught the third grade every year since anyone could remember…and lived with her brother and his wife and took care of his children.”

Margaret moves to the Village and takes a candlelit cellar apartment that has a green door. At a party a few nights later a strange man sprinkles a few drops of gin on her forehead and she is rechristened Margot.

For real characters, there were many similar declarations of freedom. Taking a walk without interrogation or scrutiny. Entering a restaurant, sitting down, and not feeling the urge to rush out. One might sit for hours in a teahouse, one of those dimly lit and narrow rooms that were always decorated with mismatched furniture and too many dark oil paintings. One might even talk to a man seated nearby and not, for the moment, think: What would Mother say?

Of course, one knew what Mother would say. In the age of the bachelor girls and, worse, bohemians, distraught mothers quickly became as acute a national stereotype, appearing in cartoons and illustrations holding another sibling back from the door, or bent over war-room tables covered with maps of Greenwich Village. This was the start of a war, all right, a protracted generation conflict that would grow more serious and heartbreaking as years passed. In the meantime, there were others more immediately upset by these unnerving young women.

As working gals had inspired absurd terror theories—Will she forgo having children and become a slut?—so these newest strays attracted fresh, outrageous condemnation. Much of this criticism was aimed at upper-class feminist or “womanist” types, but it trickled down to the bachelor girl. In his tirades against “race suicide,” Teddy Roosevelt now looked directly at the unmarried white woman, even if she was only eighteen, and called her trouble. There were more immigrants. There were more inexplicably single women—bohemians—and so, as he saw it, more than mere laws were in order. (There had already been plenty of legal assistance. Contraception and abortion had been outlawed and between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws.) White women of all sorts would have to cooperate!

The true bohemian, like the radical spinster before her, ignored the fuss. The bachelor girl, however, paid attention. There are guilty acknowledgments of this “race suicide” concept throughout my collection of press clippings “re: Bachelor Girl, c. 1908–1914.” In stories such as “The Lives and Loves of a Bachelor Miss,” “Date with a Bachelor Girl,” and “Today’s Modern Bachelor Girl—Her Hopes, Dreams, Her Chances in Life,” we hear about one’s “essential responsibilities,” about the “sacred” duties ahead, and more than once about knowing “when the party is over.” In the articles “The Bachelor Girl, As Told by One Who Knows,” “Bachelor Girls of Today and Yesterday,” and “I Am a Bachelor Girl,” the phrases “later on in my life, proper,” and “when I am settled down,” appear three times. Five times in all we hear the phrase “when I am the mother of” followed by the phrase “sweet babes” or “tender babes” or “six or seven babes.”

But no matter how often she pledged to defend her future fertility, the bachelor/working/single girl was just as likely to take delight in describing her life as it was at the moment—and especially as the terms “bohemian” (serious, artistic) and “bachelor girl” (worker bee out for fun) began slowly to blur.

We’ll call them, along with everyone else, B-girls.

Many wore their hair short, after the girl/boy heroine of Trilby, George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel. Virginia Woolf called the type “cropheads,” the name she’d given Dora Carrington after the young artist chopped off and banged her hair. Some girls went in for a Chinese plait, but the primary fashion influence was Trilby. Trilby had inspired an early rush of icon merchandising (Trilby hats, dresses, waffles), and everyone knew her story: Parisian orphan who boarded with a ragpicker and his wife and lived la vie bohèmewithout affectation. She dressed in burlap sacks, and wore sandals on what were, by any standard, huge female feet. (She also had a large, pliable mouth.) For money, she ironed clothing and modeled nude for male artists without a hint of shame. At night she smoked, dressed like a man, and paraded the Quartier Latin, where she was queen of the cancan. (Of course she’s taken down—made to feel guilty about her “ways” by the respectable man she deeply loves. He drops her straight into a bog of depression and self-hatred that makes her perfect fodder for the devil, presented here in the form of a music teacher named Svengali.)

Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original Life, the B-girls at times “unconsciously interpret[ed]…the eating rituals of [one]…tribe of Southern Africa…this conclusion is further supported by the post-prandial decision to paint their bodies with white and blue stripes and then to dance.” (The context of this short piece, wedged between two popular-science stories, makes it hard to say whether the speaker was joking.)

Reporters were out in full on the B-girl beat—the preflapper demimonde that stood to sink our great civilization. One cigarette-holding girl flung open the door (there apparently was a door) and met the press by exclaiming, “Welcome to liberty hall! Here we do exactly as we please!” She told all about her purple robe—no lilac for her but a purple pure. She spoke vaguely about a Communist lecture and then asked everyone to please take off their shoes.

“[Their] room[s],” noted one disgusted male correspondent, “[are] a mass of delightful contrivances whereby her gown inhabits the window seat and her frying pan the bookcase…. They eat off the ironing board, roaring with laughter about having only cheese to feast upon.” More serious stories tried to see past the “nursery antics” and into the inevitable repercussions.

Let’s consider the arguments of one Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, who like many writers on the somber subject of race suicide and later, “sexology,” used three names in her byline. (It informed the reader that the author was married but independent minded; it further indicated that she had a “career,” not a job.) In Why Women Don’t Marry (1907), she tries to categorize for the reader every possible explanation, outside of sheer perversity, for failing to wed.

Sometimes they are young women of means, who find complete satisfaction in dogs and horses, or in travels and learning or bridge or nature-study. But more often you will find that they are workers…earnest young social workers…editors…energetic souls…[many] living in an eight-by-ten room, cooking [their] own chocolate over the gas, and studying avidly…full of pity for the shut-in woman…. And they are very happy in the middle twenties…with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew one dull highway.

Others pointed out how many female characters in novels killed themselves rather than admit to failure at bohemian life, that is, the failure of all that presumed artistic talent or any men whatsoever to emerge. They were only bachelor girls, after all. Wrote a male reporter in Munsey’s (1906):

The plain fact is that the bachelor and…bohemian girl [are] merely single women of small means living in the city in order that [they] may work…. As for her chances [with men] she may become a little harder to suit, but, on the whole, even that is doubtful. That she stays in her single state is largely due to the fact that possible men are just as scarce in the domain of the bachelor girl as in the life of the domestic.

But as bachelor girl Olga Stanley wrote back in 1896: “Probably the thing which first appeals to us is our absolute freedom, the ability to plan our time as we will…bound by no restrictions, except those imposed upon us by a due regard for proprieties.” As for those who called “her existence ‘pathetic,’” what was more pathetic than waiting to find out whether “Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever he may be turns out to be a good husband?” Of course she’d take a husband, “forego the delights of female bachelorhood,” if an excellent opportunity arose. Until then, however, she and her many unwed sisters would emit “a sigh of thankfulness…and draw nearer the fire, and resting our toes on the fender, lean back in our easy chair and congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.”