by Betsy Israel
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.”
To
gether, 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 a
nd 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.
