by Gail Collins
Theaters, once the preserve of rowdy young men and hardworking prostitutes, began to covet the family trade. In the 1870s, Broadway impresario Tony Pastor—the man who discovered Lillian Russell—sponsored “Ladies Night” when women got in free, and he offered door prizes he thought would appeal to housewives, such as dress patterns, coal, and flour. Amusement parks were a prime destination for city dwellers. In New York, one Coney Island attraction, Dream Land, bent so far over backward in search of a respectable audience that it included elevating exhibits such as “The End of the Earth,” where patrons could see a vain young girl grabbed by two demons and thrown into a fiery pit. Dream Land, however, was never as popular as Steeplechase, featuring rides like the Barrel of Love and the parachute jump, which always seemed to either throw couples together or blow up the women’s skirts.
The single most important new public amenity for women was the department store. A. T. Stewart led the way in 1862 when he opened his big emporium on the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street in Manhattan. It was five stories tall, with hydraulic elevators for ladies who wanted to avoid climbing the grand staircase. A rotunda soared from the first floor to the roof, and shoppers on the upper floors could peer down onto the action below. “Door boys” opened the heavy doors for customers from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. and checked the patrons’ umbrellas in stormy weather. The wide aisles were the promenades where women could shop and meet with friends, the ladies’ room on the second floor a place for rest and refreshment. Outside of hotels, Stewart’s rest room was one of the first acknowledgments that respectable women could be away from home long enough to need to go to the bathroom.
The department store was a revolution. Everything was on display, and there was no pressure to buy. The prices were fixed and the quality was standardized, reducing the risk in making a purchase. The department stores also imposed a new, very American kind of democracy, in which everyone was equal as long as they had the money to pay. (Marshall Field instructed his clerks to call all customers “ladies,” no matter what their dress or manners.) Even poor women enjoyed the stores’ big, carefully decorated windows, with displays that changed regularly. Mary Antin, a young immigrant girl, recalled Saturday nights in 1898 spent with her girlfriends, marching down Broadway “till all hours” looking at the windows and mentally taking “possession of all we saw.” The department store was one of the signs that American women were beginning to develop the power of the prime family purchaser. Nathaniel Fowler, a pioneer in the advertising industry, advised his clients to target all their ads to women, even those for men’s clothing. “Woman buys, or directs the buying, of everything from shoes to shingles,” he decreed.
“QUALITIES WHICH ALL SOUND-HEARTED MEN
AND WOMEN ADMIRE”
The Gilded Age celebrated the outrageous, the splashy, and the outspoken. Women—at least some of them—were allowed to attract attention, and they were rewarded if they did so with the proper panache. In the 1880s, Nellie Bly, a reporter for the New York World, was on the front page regularly with what the papers then called “stunt” journalism, an infant version of investigative reporting. Bly got herself committed to an insane asylum, posed as a homeless woman, and inserted herself into the New York demimonde as a way of exposing conditions in the city’s jails and hospitals. In 1888, she became an international celebrity when she announced that she intended to become the first person to actually go around the world in eighty days. (Jules Verne, the futurist writer, had written a popular novel in which the male hero did just that.) Bly set off, carrying only one small bag crammed with underwear, writing equipment, and a large jar of cold cream. She sailed for England, raced through Europe, jumped off to Yemen, ricocheted through Hong Kong, and returned to San Francisco, where she was greeted like a conquering heroine before embarking on her cross-country train trip home. She arrived back at her starting point in seventy-eight days to hysterical acclaim, which the World decreed was a tribute to her “combination of superb qualities which all sound-hearted men and women admire.” Nobody mentioned motherhood.
Women were also showing up at the workplace in less glamorous jobs than actress or journalist. These were not, for the most part, the professions pioneers like Elizabeth Blackwell and Antoinette Brown had been struggling so hard to break into before the Civil War. In 1870, the country had only five female lawyers, and Myra Bradwell, the founder and publisher of the extremely influential Chicago Legal News, was denied admission to the bar because she was a married woman. Out of 63,000 physicians, only 525 were women, and as the profession became more prestigious, men became even more resistant to letting them in. In 1869, a few women who had wrangled their way into the clinical lectures at Pennsylvania Hospital entered the amphitheater to hisses, yowls, mock applause, and “offensive remarks upon personal appearance.” During the final hour of the lecture, a Philadelphia paper reported, “missiles of tinfoil…were thrown upon the ladies while some of the men defiled the dresses of the ladies near them with tobacco juice.”
Thanks in large part to those department stores, 142,000 female salesclerks were hired before the end of the century—Lillian Russell’s mother, in the days before her marriage, made news as the first female clerk in Buffalo. Clerking was more respectable than factory or domestic work, but it was still difficult. Department store saleswomen worked up to sixteen hours a day in the busy season, and although the stores made sure their patrons had comfortable rest rooms, the staff accommodations were dirty and depressing. Although they seldom got paid vacations, clerks were often required to go on unpaid leaves during slow seasons. Fines for lateness or infraction of other rules further reduced their pay. Some female department store workers actually rose to high positions, but most of the managerial jobs, including floorwalker, were reserved for men.
The work was hard but not necessarily grim. An in-house newspaper written by the workers at the Seigel-Cooper department store was crammed with stories about who was dating whom and comments on other workers’ hairstyles and clothing, dancing ability, and general popularity. The men in the mail-order department accused the members of the Bachelor Girls Social Club of being “man haters,” a charge the Bachelor Girls took up with umbrage. “No we are not married, neither are we man haters, but we believe in woman’s rights, and we enjoy our independence and freedom notwithstanding the fact that if a fair offer came our way we might…consider it.”
As the federal bureaucracy grew, it also found more openings for women, who occupied a third of all government jobs by 1900. The infant telephone industry decided that women were natural switchboard operators as soon as it discovered that men tended to talk back to the customers. Women were making rapid inroads into library work, where they were praised at the 1876 American Library Association meeting for being “the best of listeners.” In 1891, the Library Journal published the first general discussion of women’s place in library work. The author, Caroline Hewlins, estimated that women who worked as library assistants should expect to make $300 to $900 a year—about half of what men made—and be able to write steadily for six or seven hours a day. They should know half a dozen languages, Hewlins said, “understand the relation of all arts and sciences to each other and must have…a minute acquaintance with geography, history, art and literature.” Women who aspired to be head librarians should expect to work ten hours a day, she continued, but “those who are paid the highest salaries give up all their evenings” as well. She added, perhaps unnecessarily, that librarians and their assistants “sometimes break down from overwork.”
American business offices had always been relatively small and populated by men, but after the Civil War, the booming economy needed an army of clerical workers to process the paperwork. These were dead-end, relatively low-paying jobs that required a facility for spelling and grammar, good handwriting, and, later, skill with typewriters. Whenever there was a sudden demand for literate workers at low pay, women were usually the answer. The typewriter was a new invention in the 1880s, and it was quickly dec
ided that women, with their smaller hands and nimble fingers, were particularly well suited to use it. The New York YWCA offered extremely popular typing courses in 1881, and generations of girls learned to type by practicing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,” the slogan for the 1872 Republican presidential campaign. By 1880, 40 percent of the stenographers and typists were women, and by 1900, it was three-quarters. “Some females are doing more and better work for $900 per annum than many male clerks who were paid double that amount,” enthused a government official in 1869. An ad in the Nation for Remington typewriters suggested that they made excellent Christmas gifts for ambitious young girls because “no invention has opened for women so broad and easy an avenue to profitable and suitable employment.”
The first typists used the hunt-and-peck system, and when Mrs. L. V. Longley of Cincinnati, a teacher of secretarial skills, proposed that it might be more efficient to use all the fingers, a typing trade magazine declared that “the best operators we know of use only the first two fingers of each hand.” Only trained pianists, the magazine opined, should be expected to use more. A court stenographer from Salt Lake City invented the touch typing system and won a race against a two-finger opponent that set off a fad for typing speed contests that lasted through the Gilded Age.
The sexual revolution at the office went surprisingly peacefully, although some social commentators expressed concern that women’s much-worried-about “nerves” could not stand the strain of pounding on the typewriter, and others claimed women weren’t suited to such serious work. Marion Harland, in an essay called “The Incapacity of Business Women,” compared the diligent office boy with a female typist or stenographer who “giggles” or has “tiffs” with the “old-maid” bookkeeper. Harland’s essay inspired a rejoinder by Clara Lanza, who reported that she had interviewed the head of a large publishing house, who felt women clerical workers were “capable and industrious” while their male peers were “troublesome” and given to taking too many days off. As the need for women in office jobs increased, opinion makers inevitably started concluding that some experience in the business world would actually prepare women to be better wives and mothers.
If the first female office workers faced any problems, it was probably a Victorian version of sexual harassment. At the turn of the century, Typewriter Trade Journal reported that nine of ten employers wanted female secretaries and that requests were phrased in “most peculiar language,” such as “a pretty blonde.” In 1904, the organizer of the first secretarial union, Elise Diehl, said that “one of the main matters” her organization would undertake was to make clear that secretaries were offering “professional services, instead of ‘companionship’ in business offices.”
Most female workers were single girls. Only in the African American community was it acceptable for a married woman to have a job, and in 1890, only 3 percent of white married women worked. But for the many women who had fallen through the cracks of the old Victorian theories about their proper role in life—abandoned wives, widowed mothers, single women on their own, or women whose husbands were unable to support their families—the change in opportunity was enormous. The old triumvirate of employment options—factories, teaching, and domestic work—had been cracked open.
“WE HAD A LOVELY PICTURE OF HER
WE GOT WITH COFFEE WRAPPERS”
The growth in the entertainment industry and the huge expansion in the number of popular newspapers created the nation’s first celebrity culture, and whether or not it was respectable for a lady to have her name in the paper, the nation was learning that it certainly could be profitable. Nellie Bly had fame, success, and a popular board game that re-created her journey around the world. Lillian Russell was chosen to be the first person to use Alexander Graham Bell’s new long-distance telephone service in 1890. She sang from her dressing room in New York to President Grover Cleveland in Washington.
The American public fell madly in love with Mrs. Cleveland, the beautiful twenty-one-year-old Frances Folsom, who married the forty-nine-year-old bachelor president in the White House in 1886. The idea of a glamorous First Lady was a new one for Americans—most presidents’ wives, like most presidents, were middle-aged and dignified. Every time she appeared in public, Frances Cleveland caused riots of “Frankie-worshippers,” even though she behaved like a decorous Victorian wife and never gave an interview or spoke to a reporter. Still, she could not have been a bigger celebrity if she had hired a press agent. Americans hung her pictures on their walls and pasted them among the actresses in their parlor albums. To the horror of the very traditional (and much less popular) president, advertisers shamelessly used Mrs. Cleveland’s image to sell everything from soap to perfume to underwear. Women copied her hairstyle, and when two bored reporters made up a story that she had given up the bustle, it immediately went out of style. Far away in Colorado, young Anne Ellis wrote that she “practiced being a lady” by imagining how Frances Cleveland would behave: “We had a lovely picture of her we got with coffee wrappers.”
“LURED WOMEN FROM THEIR DUTIES
AS HOMEMAKERS”
Most women stayed out of the newspapers and devoted themselves to their families. But they were also reaching for something beyond the household. In an apparently spontaneous movement, women’s study clubs started popping up all over the country. In cities, small towns, and even remote rural areas, middle-class housewives organized themselves into groups to study current affairs, world history, or English literature. By the turn of the century there were 5,000 local organizations in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and that was only a tiny fraction of the total number of groups that were scattered around the United States. It was a sort of informal, do-it-yourself junior college system. The idea of doing something unrelated to their families was an enormous breakthrough for many members. Harriet Robinson, who joined the New England Women’s Club in 1869, noted in her diary that the first meeting she attended was the first evening she had spent away from her husband in twenty years.
The first woman’s club was probably Sorosis, which was organized in New York City in 1868 by Jane Cunningham Croly, a journalist who had been offended when she was excluded from an all-male New York Press Club dinner honoring Charles Dickens. Sorosis emphasized current events and had a membership list full of poets, artists, and educators; but most of the study clubs involved women who were not employed outside the home. They prepared and read papers and held group discussions. Charles Dickens was probably the favorite subject, followed by Shakespeare. Some clubs were extremely ambitious. The Lewiston Maine Reading Circle started off by reading Intellectual History of Europe. Groups tackled the Greek philosophers or began with ancient history, intent on making their way through to the modern era. Others had a tendency to skim effortlessly over vast chunks of human knowledge. They were satirized in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, when a club member asks the heroine for help in preparing her report on “the English poets.”
By the 1890s, women’s reading clubs were a respected part of community life, their meetings regular grist for the women’s pages in the local newspapers. But in the early years they were controversial. When the New England Women’s Club was founded in 1868, the Boston Transcript predicted that “Homes will be ruined, children neglected, woman is straying from her sphere.” In Greencastle, Indiana, a newspaper editorial attacked Elizabeth Ames, founder of a local women’s club, claiming she had “lured women from their duties as homemakers” to join an “unspeakable menace.” The social prejudice against “clubbers” was strongest in the South, and weakest in the West, where social divisions were vague. In Lemoore, California, where 600 residents were spread over a huge territory, humble farmers’ wives and the spouses of the wealthiest professional men all belonged to the same club, which they often attended with babies in arm, driving in wagons from their far-flung households.
Black women were enthusiastic club members—they had been organizing societies since the Revoluti
onary War era, although most were directed toward mutual aid rather than intellectual improvement. Most white clubwomen were distinctly cool, if not hostile, to the idea that they should recognize African American women as peers, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs declined to accept black women’s groups as members. In 1900, Josephine Ruffin, a prominent African American clubwoman from Massachusetts, was eligible to attend the Federation’s national convention because of her membership in an integrated group. But when she made it clear she was also representing her own all-black New Era Club, the officers refused to accept her credentials, and one woman tried to rip off her badge. “It is the ‘high-caste’ Negroes who bring about all the ill-feeling,” said a Georgia clubwoman. “The ordinary colored woman understands her position thoroughly.”
“WAS THAT CROQUET?”
Just as women were beginning to take part in urban public life, the new class of white-collar professional men began to move their families to suburbs in search of safety, quiet nights, trees, and good schools. Manhattan businessmen commuted by ferry from Brooklyn, a semibucolic place that New Yorkers called a “woman’s town” because of its lack of a red-light district. Thanks to streetcar and railway service, there were thirty-one suburban cities and towns outside of Boston by 1900. In 1883, the travel writer Willard Glazer described the suburbs of Cincinnati as a “paradise of grass, gardens, lawns and tree-shaded roads.” It was the beginning of a century of suburbanization that would offer women a trade-off of a better environment to raise children in return for isolation from the wider public world of the cities.
